I notice that Camille Paglia has recently returned to blogging on Salon with her usual acerbic take on modern culture. Paglia was absent from Salon for a while due to the demands of working on her recent best-seller, Break, Blow, Burn, where she presented selected poetry along with commentary. Imagine. A book of poetry criticism a best seller!
I suggest that Paglia consider a sequel to her best seller that would focus exclusively on my unpublished body of work, to be titled "Break, Blow, Burn - A New Hope." My oeuvre, which might be classified pre-apocalyptic media ecology, merges the sensitivity of traditional poetics with the sensibility of the modern technorati. Among the unpublished masterpieces to be considered are:
Ode to the Medium of a Grecian Urn
(In which I contemplate the relationship between the figures on the outside of the urn with the ground grain on the inside. This figure/ground dichotomy leads me to conclude that, to the ancient Greek, the content of the urn was of more importance than the urn itself. In fact, all Grecian urns have been shown using x-ray technology to have the words "su ejpaggeliva autou" underneath the erotic or Homeric or homoerotic etchings, which translates roughly as "your ad here.")
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—Burma Shave.
Lacan and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still,
and all of western literature lies helpless at his feet.
IM to His Coy Mistress
Hd we bt wrld enuff, & IM,
This cynss, ldy, wre n crm.
The Vast Wasteland
May Sweeps are the cruelest month,
breeding Idol clones out of the dead land.
......
I had not thought death had uncouched so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man's eyes fixed on the screen before his feet.
In a more popular vein:
Don't Think Twice, It's Derrida
It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter any how.
Also included will be my continuation and completion of John Milton's planned McLuhanesque tetrology, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with:
Paradise Enhanced
(Satan decides that serving in Heaven isn't such a bad deal after all.)
Paradise Reversed
(Unintended consequences occur when Satan develops time shares in heaven for souls who would not normally be able to get in. Complications ensue when Hitler and Mussolini move in next door.)
Media Ecology Shakespearian Series:
Is This a Daguerre I see before me?
To Be or Not to Be: It depends on your abstraction level
I ask Paglia no fee or royalty for the use of these and other works, but reserve the right to place advertising, where appropriate, in the new volume.
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