An academic parlor game.

The lengthy essays I've been writing lately put me in a position to learn how to introduce "keep reading" breaks into my main feed, which of course couldn't be called "keep reading »" or "read more »"—no, my friends, I'm chased by this need to be clever as ever was Orpheus chased with snakes and torches. But to the point, my insipid chalkboard humor brought me to think about the doctrine of the lectio difficilior and, predictably, realize that I know nothing at all about textual criticism.

Here though, I have a game you can play while knocking back your gin and water. You'll need at least two people of perverse disposition, a third who's painfully literal-minded—ferret out a philologist, it shouldn't be hard—and at least two copies of a short poem, perhaps twelve lines, the more modernist the better. Give these to your incorrigibles.

The rules: make a glorious mockery of lectio difficilior potior and brevior potior too, if you have enough liquor. Your text should be counterintuitive enough to begin with; exploit that. Make strange words stranger. Strain English syntax with gleeful brutality. Propose lacunae after you've secretly manufactured some of your own. Pervert the allusions, and do it convincingly. But it's an absolute statute that whatever you produce should be probable, even if it's confounding; your heterodox text should crumble, not rot.

Now the fun begins! Destroy the originals utterly. Your poor scribbler of dissertations should be by this point both impatient and curious (in that pedestrian way he has), so hand him the copies—all the better if they're inscrutably handwritten; and lo, the scholars shall say, nay, but there shall be a redactor over us; that we may also be like all the philologists, and that our redactor may judge us, and apply cruxes for us, and edit our texts. (This is part of the rules.) Of course he shouldn't be familiar with the poem, so make sure you've picked something obscure in provenance as well as in the ordinary ways.

For extra fun, offer him gradually diminishing prizes according to his final accuracy in comparison to the ur-Texte. Finally finish the game by subjecting the redacted text to close reading, carried out with utmost moral seriousness, then defend the redacted text against the original: reveal to the historiographer that the "original" has been purposefully and badly mangled just for this exercise and that he is frightfully intelligent to have untangled so much depravity so well; continue dissimulating in this manner until everyone is too sauced for further pretense.

Well! I seem to be expiring from surfeit of leisure, which at any rate has given me the pleasure of celebrating Housman's deathless odium philologicum in the shape of his essay "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism." In seriousness, does anyone know of a good introduction to the subject, especially for English texts?