I Review a Review of the Review of a Review I Wrote last month

Terence Spack, in the new magazine The American Review of Imaginary Things, has published a review of the review I wrote in September, in which I called David Trebuchet's review of Dippy Twilight's album Loving to Love the Love "another wonderful addition to Trebuchet's ouvre".

Spack's pedestrian meanderings into the world of reviewing have always been somewhat painful to read, even when one is not mentioned by name in them. For example, Spack's review from last year in which he referred to Anthony Betterbuy-Glottalstop's book 'Gender Divisions: Why Men Like Lists and Women Like Flower-Arranging and Kittens' was a terrible mish-mash of overlong sentences, wrought paragraphs and mixed metaphors. It is no surprise, therefore, that his comments about my own review are both wrong, badly-written and, I'm sad to say, a bit stinky. Like a pooey bottom. Like Spack's pooey bottom, which, I'm told, is full of poo.

Take this example: "[The Imaginary Reviewer] writes like someone who has never used a thesaurus; his prose is staid and his analogies are less apt than a grenade in a orphanage." What rubbish! My prose is fine, thank you! And a grenade could be apt in an ophanage. Did Spack ever stop and think whether the orphanage could be full of terrorists? Orphans can be terrorists too! And as for using a thesaurus, why on Earth would I need a dinosaur? Spack is obviously trying to be funny, and it isn't working.

That's not to say that Spack's review of my review of Trebuchet's review doesn't have its merits. He does mention that I have a 'nice way of using parentheses' and, in what has become his trademark, Spack has written his review in the form of an acrostic in which the first letters of all the words spell out a recipe for fried rice.

I can't recommend this review enough. Not for reading, though, but for burning! It's rubbish! Don't read it, and certainly don't read the magazine, either. Mine is much better.

The Imaginary Review apologises. He was drunk.

Music Review Review

David Trebuchet, the highly regarded music reviewer from the San Francisco Corinthian newspaper, has done it again! He recently turned his erudite pen and scathing wit upon the latest teen-marketed pop sensation, and the results are nothing short of genius.

The first sentence in his review of Dippy Twilight's forthcoming album, Loving to Love the Love, gives us a foreglimpse of the wonders to come. "Let's face it," he says, "Nobody thinking of buying this album is going to be reading this review, so why don't we have some fun?" This reviewer couldn't agree more.

Trebuchet then launches into a damning attack of the popular music scene in general. He is most famous for his cynicism in the face of manufactured pop artists, so the fact that Dippy Twilight is actually two people who were fused together by the Sony Music Group definitely angers him. "When there are so many great musicians and bands on the scene (Casket of Geese, The Spasms, Adam Youell and the Bedford Vans, for example), why would Sony need to find two vaguely attractive young women and stitch them together in order to create anodyne music?"

The reviewer is just as scathing when it comes to the songs on the album, with his dismissal of the title track being particularly amusing: "'Loving to Love the Love' sounds like a cross between a children's party being attacked by a race of helium balloons and a baboon farting in my ear. The lyrics sound like they were written by a blind epileptic in charge of a box of magnetic fridge poetry. The music is as vapid and tasteless as a Fox News diatribe."

The only flat point in Trebuchet's review is his unfair comparison between the music of Dippy Twilight and the music of Peter and the Test-Tube Babies. It's well-known at the moment that Trebuchet has co-written a Broadway musical on the career of the punk band, so his constant mentioning of the band in his reviews is an unwelcome intrusion. Otherwise, the review of 'Loving to Love the Love' is another wonderful addition to Trebuchet's ouvre.

In conclusion, I will again quote Trebuchet, this time in his discussion of Dippy Twilight's forthcoming single, 'Amy Used to eat Newspaper': "If anyone ever asks me to listen to this shit again, I'll strangle them with a barbed-wire fence."