All this talk about rhetoric reminded me of my favorite mock-oration ever, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, and especially its conclusion: I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the Nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of […]
There’s been a small flurry of interesting posts about the infamous five-paragraph essay recently. Body and Soul links to a New York Times article about the low standards in Texas high schools, which begins with an anecdote about a Texas high-schooler who was "trained to write five-paragraph ‘persuasive essays’ for the state exam" and was […]
Via Maud Newton, I found the Invisible Library, "a collection of books that only appear in other books." At last there’s a library for The Murder of Gonzago (the play-within-a-play in Hamlet), the novels from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the complete monographs of Sherlock Holmes, and all the imaginary books in […]
I finished grading a round of papers only to discover a documentable plagiarism case. I hate having to deal with that kind of thing. I hate having to give the stern "You’re looking at an F on the assignment, a very unpleasant meeting with the dean of students, and academic probation" lecture. Even more than […]