Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

I See a Tortoise Drag a Severed Head to the Radiator

Keith White

June 12, 2012

Issue no. 1

A still letter caused no bodily harm for the most part, though they dragged their feet dressed to kill, to their way of thinking. What will they think of next? Let’s face it, it’s just one of those things. You can’t have it both ways, although you can have your cake and ...

A Letter to William Wordsworth on the Occasion of Reading an Historicist Dissection of Tintern Abbey

Eric Iversen

June 11, 2012

Issue no. 1

Dear Will, Just thought I’d drop you a line and bring you up to speed on what’s been going on with writing these days. Actually, it’s kind of been getting me down lately, and I just wanted to get some of this off my chest, you know, just bitch a little. Let’s see, ...

Semiology and the Cartoon Outdoorsman

Thomas Frank,  Erik Bennett

June 10, 2012

Issue no. 1

The long-running comics-page saga of Mark Trail is certainly one of the most overlooked theoretical treasures of our age. Aside from the popular Sunday installments of this cartoon chef-d’oeuvre, Mark Trail is rarely followed and, to these critics’ knowledge, has never been ...

Chicago

Aloysius Plantageonette (pseud.)

June 09, 2012

Issue no. 3

CHICAGO (shi-ka’go) n. American city, lat. 41° 50′ N., long. 87° 38′ W. SYN: three syllables, sounds craving sense; meanings yearned for, drooled, exclaimed, hotly forged, shot and cursed—bellyup in the acres, the buoy has logged itself with sweat and ...

The Sad Edge

David Berman

May 30, 2012

Issue no. 2

He was kitchen drunk again. Times like these he liked to review his life so far. I’ve done well. Hell, I’m a millionaire in 1920 dollars. He had a low coefficient of drag, he quoted Lincoln, looked you square in the eye, had settled down with a female of his species ...

The Earl Butz Farm

Michael Martone

January 01, 1970

Issue no. 14

ALBION, INDIANA Except for the interpretive center in the trailer of a North American moving van, the Earl Butz Farm, the boyhood home of Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon, is now part of a larger, privately owned farm. The land itself, four hundred acres ...