Annals of Bad Ideas.

Dan Collins laments that, with Jeff Goldstein all but gone, "nobody at PJM will link to us, so pariahish have we become. What, apart from begging for links, can we do to raise the profile of the site and better serve the faithful audience?"

I have a few ideas, most of which are illegal, none of which are this funny:

...it wouldn’t take place on these pages, but if I were to offer a course on Shakespearean metapoetics (how Shakespeare inscribes his theory of language into his plays), would there be any interest among readers for such a course? Last semester I was overemployed, and this I’m underemployed, so this would be a paying proposition, though I’d try to keep the price reasonable. I think Jeff might be well served doing something similar, but we don’t communicate much these days, and I don’t want to bother him. We’d do Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth (buy it used), Shapiro’s 1599, Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices, and David Quint’s Epic and Empire as background reading to the Arden editions of Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, before turning to Othello and Hamlet. We’ll consider the nature of pre-lexicographical English, punning, censorship and interpretation, the legitimacy of reading playtexts as written texts, and the theoretics of what I like to call “hallucidation.” I think I would need a minimum of 6 interested people to offer the course.

Let me know what you think.

Oy. Collins and Darleen have really sunk PW, so it's a small blessing that Jeff pops up in comments to say not-nice things about Bedwetter Media and Patrick Bateman.