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There was an interesting review by John Banville of a new Rilke biography somewhat recently, in which Banville comes very close to stating (or conceding?) that Rilke /had/ to be an awful person, a real abuser of humanity as it manifests in actual, living human beings, in order to write his poems--not in order to be an artist generally but in order to write those precise, aesthetically & spiritually & psychologically inimitable works that he did. Banville so very nearly says this! And does not.

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To once again, ignore the body and focus on a footnote, I have basically the same stance on Chu, although I appreciate Smith’s repeated assertion that she’s not a representative specimen of transfemininity. There’s definitely a place for what she does, for the telling the embarrassing truths that we shield from outsiders, and I do think you probably need to leaven that stuff with a bit of irony and humor, I just think there’s a bit too much trolling and bad faith in her work for me.

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