The Sound of Two Lip Disks Clacking

Anonymous (ed.)

It is amusing, if unfortunate, that The Sound of Two Lip Disks Clacking, a very small paperback anthology from The Press of the Third Mind, will probably end up being a highly sought after collector’s item some day. (In fact, it may already be.) Once you get past the nightmare-inducing front and back cover photographs (never seen lip disks? You don’t want to, especially when they’re in...) and TPM’s longstanding obsession with publishing the complete and seemingly endless works of Bradley Lastname, one finds oneself in the presence of two acknowledged masters of their fields. The collection contains a short story by Patrick McGrath ("The Black Hand of the Raj," also collected in McGrath’s short story collection Blood and Water) and a series of related prose poems by Joanthan Levant. The work represented here is neither McGrath nor Levant’s best work; the story is shorter than most McGrath and a little on the silly side, while Levant’s prose poems smack of dashed-off-in-one-night knee-jerk leftism, a condition usually brought on by watching too many Michael Moore movies back to back.

The rest of what’s here doesn’t really bear commenting on. Suffice to say that if you’ve read anything by Bradley Lastname before, you know what to expect, and if you haven’t, you’re not missing much. Send-ups of famous works of literature with just enough postmodern conscious misspelling to be hip with the type of people who think conscious misspelling is the hip thing to do.