Kill Fee

Upon reading about Maud Newton’s thwarted attempt to finish Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, I promptly ordered the book online. And as soon as it arrived, I plunged in, plunged into the narrator’s incredibly funny, rueful, bitter, baffled, and somehow hopeful voice, and I read at high speed, or really, I suppose, the whole thing simply whirred along of its own accord. […]

This has been circulating for a while, but I’m only now seeing it.

Kiki and Herb, Total Eclipse of the Heart, video by Victoria Leacock

Could’ve been the train delays or the general late-night stupor, but it wasn’t long before I swore I could see the screaming pope in the water stains above the Brooklyn-bound F platform at the Broadway-Lafayette station.

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon