Free Beer

(No, not this one.)

I’d like to read The Waste Land And Other Poems. The new one, that is, written by John Beer, another Chicago poet. The title poem takes a very different tack from Wendy Cope’s “Waste Land Limericks” and Ann Lauterbach‘s “Alice In The Waste Land” from Or To Begin Again, but is just as (more?) impressive.

He also has a pantoum called “Total Information Awareness” and several “Sonnets to Morpheus” here and here (that’s Morpheus the character from The Matrix), but it’s “J. Beer 1969-1969” from that last link that really gets to me. It is, appropriately, a haunting piece of work.

Waggish

I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of Waggish‘s blog entries before, but one of those I read this morning cracked me up. I wish I knew enough to take a crack at Choose Your Own Philosophical Adventure #1: Escape from the Dialectic.

ASIDE: I’m unsure why Waggish mentions Erica Weitzman there (it doesn’t seem like they’re the same person) but so far, I’m enjoying what I find online.

This includes poems and an essay about punk entitled “I Wanna Destroy: Towards an Aesthetic of Violence” (PDF). That and “No fun: aporias of pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” seem to reveal what might be Weitzman’s pattern of writing essays with punk rock allusions in their titles.

Back to Waggish: other highlights include a brief discussion on “Freud on the Uncanny/Unheimlich” and a series of pieces entitled “Thoughts on Genre.” Three entries under the latter focuses on blogs and ties in with my own attempts to figure out what’s up with this blog:

• “Blogs and Genre”
• “Blogs and Improvisation”
• “Blogs and Practice”

Editions of You “fails” on most counts.

Funtime

1. I laughed hard at Lost Comics of the Golden Age, especially when I reached the fifth page.
2. Among other fun stuff, Chad, Matt, and Rob‘s site contains interactive adventures you can play on…YouTube.
3. Potato Moon is a collaborative novel you can read online. Just to give you an idea what it’s about, the main characters are Jakob Blaq, Edwood Sullen, and a woman named Bela.
4. I had no idea Donald Barthelme wrote, much less won a prize for, a children’s book entitled…The Slightly Irregular Engine, or the Hithering Thithering Djinn!
5. Bill Kte’pi considers his story “David Bowie’s Mars Triptych“ an example of “real-person fan fiction.” That makes sense.

   And while I have no idea what’s up with the novel he was talking about, I’m pretty sure there’s a similar story in In Dreams. Maybe not Bowie though, but some other larger-than-life rock icon with multiple personae. Elvis maybe? Not Dylan, at least not yet.