If it's all the same to you...

I'd rather stab a rusty fork into my eyes 2,583,921 times than ever read a passage like this again:

Greil Marcus’s achievement in “The Doors” is to isolate and resurrect this band’s best music and set it adrift in a swirling and literate cultural context.

Isolate!

Resurrect!!

Set adrift!!!

And the cultural context swirls literately!

Now, you know that I am unfailingly generous and kindhearted. C'mon, you know that. So, sez I to myself, that's just some editor having funsies on the introductory Books page at the Times.

Then I swirl myself into the full book review. My heart, resurrected just moments before (that blurb was like unto an iron fist launched at my chest with the force of a 15,000-member zombie army, stopping my heart like a cheap watch stomped underfoot by a crazed "culture" correspondent at, say, the Times), stops again. Except for "Mr." replacing "Greil" as the opening word, the entire sentence appears verfuckingbatim in Dwight Garner's review.

Oh, yes, I read the full review. The book is "acute and ardent." Marcus "quotes others shrewdly." He also "dilates." At length. Finally, as my gnarled, trembling fingers close around the fork, I read Garner's concluding sentence:

As Jim Morrison said in a 1967 interview, in a line Mr. Marcus happily reprints, “Critical essays are really where it’s at.”

Critical essays -- including certain book reviews, as I'm sure Garner would dilate, as he happily repeats the line.

I can see the crooked, self-satisfied, little-boy grin begin to poke at the corners of Garner's mouth, as the warm snot and drool drip off his chin and puddle on his laptop.

Leave me to my goddamned fork.