Monday, March 21, 2005

Lost in the Funhouse

Which is the title of a book by the novelist John Barth, who was teaching at Penn State when he wrote it, by the way. Much of Barth's work, according to the Lit professor I had a crush on back then (ah, Ginny Smyth, you feminist temptress you) can be described as self-reflexive, which means that it's writing about the act of writing. Put it this way--if I wrote a blog entry titled "Writing a Blog Entry", and I described the process of writing a blog entry, this would be self-reflexive. In a totally unsubtle frying-pan-across-the-face sort of way.

I was reminded of this as I looked for some poker images to put across the title bar of my blog. I'm not too swift, so it took me some time before I tried Googling "poker images", and when I did I found a site called, believe it or not, Pokerimages.com. The site is full of outstanding poker photos, pictures of players from today and yesterday, action shots, pictures of cards and chips and casinos--lots of great stuff to look at.

The pictures aren't free--the owners operate under the quaint notion that they should be "compensated" for their "work". But you can check them out, and I spent a happy few minutes mooning over the half-dozen pictures of Isabelle Mercier they have. Just lots and lots and lots of interesting photos.

They were at all the European Poker Tour events, and as I perused I came across a picture that naturally caught my attention. It was of a guy sitting at a laptop typing away. Yes, they had pictures of Otis earning the daily envelope as he covered the EPT. Here's where the self-reflexive nonsense comes into play. I'm writing a blog post, about a photgraph, showing Otis writing a blog post. Maybe this amuses only me, and maybe that would be a good thing.

What would be really cool would be if some musician read this, had a flash of inspiration, and sat down to compose The European Poker Tour Concertos in D-Minor. You know, a piece of music about a blog post about a photo of a blog post...I've killed the joke, haven't I?

posted by Gene @ 3:56 PM   |