Question: Why Does Anyone Pay for This Drivel?

My title owes a thanks to richard40, a commenter on a post titled Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years, by Mary Grabar, found at Books, Inq. titled Rhetoric as performance. Here’s the first paragraph:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested  in teaching students to write and communicate clearly.  The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against marginalized groups and restrict self-expression.

It gets worse. Read the whole piece plus the comments; and here’s Dr. Grabar’s last sentence:

That administrators and paying customers  at respectable colleges and universities continue to support such daffy activities should be the subject of some real “critical thought.”

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10 Most Technophobic Novels of All Time

I find the title, taken directly from the link, a rather subjective notion—that questions about technology involve a phobia. Nonetheless, the books listed fit the description; they take their ideas about advanced technology to their logical and terrifying conclusions.

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Anne Sexton—Poetry & Suicide

From Today in Literature:

Sexton began to write poetry in 1957 after watching a half-hour show on educational television entitled “How to Write a Sonnet.” Her first encouragements came from her psychiatrist — Sexton had just made another of her many suicide attempts — and from Robert Lowell, who taught both her and Sylvia Plath in his Boston University poetry workshop. Sexton and Plath would often discuss the ideal suicide — when Plath took her life in 1963 Sexton complained to her psychiatrist, “That death was mine!” — and her “Wanting to Die,” from the 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Live or Die, is among many which attempt to puzzle out the obsession.

Does one have to be unbalanced, suicidal and in need of psychiatrists to write poetry? I doubt it. I know people who write poetry that are clearly healthy personalities, but the art does seem to attract its share of neurotic persons.

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The Gatsby house has been demolished

The 1902 house in Sands Point, New York that apparently inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel, The Great Gatsby, has seen its last days. Pictures of the once great house, its demolition, and the story—at the Los Angeles Times.

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