Bocce Balling on the West Coast Variorum

My college did not require a thesis.  Instead I took a senior seminar class with six other students and wrote a 25-page paper on a subject explored in the seminar.  My class was called "Authors and Scribblers of the 18th Century" and I wrote about Pope's annotated reissue of his classic critique on the founding of London's publishing industry The Dunciad.  In the 21st Century the "authors" would be an upper crust of letters from literary scholars to Jonathan Franzen to NPR contributors.   People who write blogs or books, or both, about cooking, pop culture, travel, bocce, etc. would be scribblers, contributors to an expanding mass of questionably publishable rabble that separate and distract us from worthwhile, meaningful prose.  The Variorum edition of The Dunciad satirizes the attacks on the first work, dismissing them as poorly worded voicings of frustration, beneath meaningful discourse; Bocce Balling on the West Coast Variorum describes the failed book tour/second trip that occurred exactly one year after the first trip in approximated re-enactments of the previous years events.  I am more tempted to title the reworked second edition Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce Harder as the book purposely tries to dismiss authorship, and to embrace its scribbled nature—it is a travel/sports memoir composed in a blog with more than one contributor.  

Should the second version include footnotes and prologues and editor's notes; or should all new writing just be placed at the end?  The initial organization principle was, naturally, a game of bocce.  Texts are bocce balls that come barrelling into the middle of a formally-conceived-to-be complete narrative, settles near it, in it, or knocks another out of it, replacing it.  So why couldn't a new text, still part of the same game, roll into the frame, sit next to or unsettle the previously published, static result?  The events of January 7, 2012 drop in on 1/7/11 and "January 7" reaches a different result, takes on a different character, like a story with a new detail, a fortune told with a different casting of yarrow stick, a horoscope with a new astrological alignment, a game of bocce with a game-changing roll.  How this is going to happen is still up in the air.  Thoughts?