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Last night Sarah and I went to see Joanna Newsom at the 6th and I Historic Synagogue. Whenever I see an interesting-seeming performer I imagine meeting them later in some neutral space, hitting it off, and becoming their cool DC friend. (Having this thought probably negates any possibility of me being anyone’s cool friend.) The other thing I like to imagine while killing time in any sort of high-ceilinged theatrical space: Lightsaber duels.

While I was unemployed last year I read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which I’d read in college as part of a survey course on literature of the Jazz Age. I liked it! Rereading it last year, I spent some time with hypertext versions of The Waste Land on the internet.

I have mixed feelings about the hypertexts. On the one hand, The Waste Land is allusion-dense and impossible to understand without having read everything that has ever been written. On the other hand, the existing hypertexts fall victim to an inviolable law of the internet, which is that the internet makes everything ugly. Links, frames, sidebars, ads for teeth and weight-loss pills. I could go on. In The Waste Land, the hypertexts take a wonderful poem and replace it with a hyperlinked monstrosity, information-dense but aesthetically damaged.

Maybe this only bothers me but bother me it does. It’s a poem, poems are pretty, The Waste Land should be pretty as heck. So last April I started working on a stripped-down hypertext. Then I got a job and had less time to work on insane, time-consuming projects, so I just got around to posting the sort-of-finished product. It includes footnotes, a map, and a list of references with links to full texts, where available. In theory it looks nice on mobile devices; in practice I’ve only tested it on an iPod touch.