Expeditions into the Interior

Anthony Madrid comes up with a cool idea:

There should be a magazine called Expeditions into the Interior, and the way it would work would be for people to accept assignments to report on all these old books of poetry that nobody wants to read but which might have good shit in ’em. For example, Melville’s Clarel. Who’s gonna read that. Nobody. But what if I was gonna give you fifty bucks. We’ll give you fifty to read it and write about it in fluent Caveman. All you gotta do is say what you saw. Point to some good lines. That’s it. But. If you accept the assignment and you don’t write anything? Yeah, that’s a $100 penalty. This is how we’re gonna pay our responsible writers. It’s also how we’re gonna finally find out if there’s anything in John Gay’s Fables. Or in the Thebiad. Or just all that stuff.