Are the barbarians at the gate? Heavens, no. They’re already inside, sacking and looting their asses off and making a buck, or at least trying to, in the process.

I had never heard of Lauren Conrad until yesterday, when I ran across what Buzzfeed called, rightly, “the worst craft idea ever”: the Martha Stewart-wannabe published a video in which she cleverly “repurposed” books by slicing their spines off (discarding the contents, of course) and glued them onto storage boxes. A great project with too much crap to store and too little in their heads, one supposes.

I’d never heard of “eye-writing” either, until I ran across this, which I thought was a joke until I realised the woman in question, a Brooklyn hipster going by the name Polly Duff Bresnick, was entirely serious. One does not need to be a reality TV slapper, nor does one even need an exacto knife, to destroy literature, it seems:

This chapbook contains stanzas fourteen through twenty-three of the The Odyssey by Homer, mistranslated visually from the ancient Greek. Polly Duff Bresnick’s process involves looking at the foreign shapes and symbols of the Greek in search of familiar, English words. This has been termed eye-rhyming, bad lip reading, or Rorschach writing. Here, the Greek and English are placed side-by-side so that the reader can judge the visual translations.

Stanza 14 opens as one would expect, i.e., as a post-modern pile of dung that makes Jim Morrison’s poetry sound like T.S. Eliot:

The navy or, “Team Max’s Tetanus Huevos,” avoid nudes.

Totally ape water velvet mans a peak weed pow wow:

“Unite men! The menopause emory values what we pay to

look old. You yearn to talk over your involved auto’s Ayurvedic

wisdom,” Eyes yelped on: “Make pussy votes imperative views!”

“Every pog of cretin value!” oinked Nettle. Yawn packs attune me.

Vulva of hippopotamus, very omnivorous. Avenue of water

tombs. Elk pout and evaluate. Tutu me: tour a pelvis.

Some people say the bubble has burst and that liberal arts grads are doing it tough in the US. Not tough enough, if this is what they’re getting up to.