"When Beatrice Wood first met Marcel Duchamp at Edgard Varèse’s bedside, a fly flew into her mouth. Unsure of the proper etiquette in this kind of situation, she swallowed it."

"A man behind her, whose presence she had been unaware of, laughed. She turned and saw a 'delicate, chiseled face and penetrating blue eyes.' It was fate: 'At that moment,' she later wrote, 'we were lovers.'" 

So reads the screwy first paragraph of "Reimagining Art, One Threesome at a Time" by Lauren Elkin (reviewing "Spellbound by Marcel Duchamp, Love, and Art" by Ruth Brandon)(NYT).

I say screwy because the man with the chiseled face was Marcel Duchamp, so, contrary to impression given by the phrase that precedes "a fly flew into her mouth," Wood only met Duchamp after she'd swallowed the fly, and because, if Duchamp was "behind her," what was he laughing about? He doesn't seem to have been in any position to see the Varèse-honoring fly-swallowing.

There's also this: "It is questionable whether we really need the pages and pages devoted to ferreting out whether or not Wood actually had penetrative sex with her various lovers, or stray anecdotes like the one in which Roché asks Wood to describe her husband’s penis (referring hilariously, in his diary, to his own as 'God')."

Well, we don't really need any of this, but as unnecessary things go, why the hell not?