It was never clear if Bean Newton's "fragments” were intentional or not. Newton, known for embracing of postmodern pastiche, may have created these works to intentionally appear unfinished, a sort of absurdist nod to the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. It is just as likely, though, that the unfinished work is merely unfinished, Newton's life being as chaotic as it was.
The fragments presented here, at any rate, appear as they originally did, in Newton's common "list" style, from a set of notebooks retrieved from an apartment he once shared with Tess Tament, the future author of the memoir Old and New, a Reconsideration, among other works. -- E.W. Wilder
[Headline Fragments]
Cramps while swimming pose a clear danger
Presentation declares ostentation
Crimes are up; policy down
Criterion implodes; excess retaliates
Mergers require less doctrine, acetone says.
Requirements are laughed at, among the savvy set
Mythologists agree: sand saves; water kills
Winter rules the deep, ethnologists agree
Rapture has history, musicologists note
Mycological presets determine etiology
Religiousity in mice a growing threat to snack crackers, etymologists say
Redundancies abound among cloud-bound macaques
Ashcan in the dead receive cosmic rays, phonologists report
Lizards critique sand dunes, assert amused flutists
Echolalia on the rise, report forced-induction specialists