paralepsis

Update: In the comments, John points out (rightly) that I've misremembered some details of the Simonides legend. Specifically, although there's a forensic aspect to the case, it's really about identifying the bodies. Thanks to John for alerting me to this. Corrections are marked below: deletions are marked by strikethrough and additions with underlining . Apologies for the long delay since the last installment. This entry, for Memorial Day, is on memory . In classical rhetoric, skill in memory was considered essential to good speaking and good citizenship. Memory is one of rhetoric's five parts or "canons" (the others being invention, style, arrangement, and delivery). Memory supplied the speaker with anecdotes, examples, and maxims that could be brought to bear in a variety of situations. It allowed the speaker to connect with his or her audience, bring forth detailed examples, and energize a dry or abstract discussion. Our current administration do...

I saw this at Talking Points Memo .

I won out over Bono To run the World Bank Then Saha she said "Oh No My job is in the tank" I placed a few quick calls To some old friends at State Diplomacy's all right Only when it gets you laid Now it's come back to bite me My bank life ends too soon Retirement's come early I'll leave the end of June I managed to hang on Just long enough to lance The boil I call multi- Lateral finance I'm Mr. No Corruption Top fox in the henyard Excuse me while I play my Golden parachute last card. for Paul Wolfowitz, with apologies to Warren Zevon

Ron Silliman's blog is remarkably good. He just turned me on to the Eclipse archive, and for a lark I clicked on the archive label to see what I'd missed. Through this, I found two sites offering competing versions of UK poetry. Silliman compares as follows: Archive of the Now is, on day one, the most significant new site for poetry I’ve seen in well over a year. It is a perfect complement to the Archive of the Then , Andrew Motion’s slick gathering of so much that is kitsch, the Bathos of Britain into which he & his colleagues have dropped a few token gems to dress the dross, with its megalomaniacal “world's premier online collection” claim on its home page. Let me note that neither site contains anything by Basil Bunting , Austin Clarke , or David Jones . None of these would reasonably be expected to appear in Archive of the Now. But the Poetry Archive (Motion's site) should have all of them. Indefensible. I've long thought that these three poets ha...

I really appreciate those who have commented here and at Kos about the Rhetoric of Now series. I'm pretty jazzed about it; it seems to satisfy something at the core of me, and it's profoundly moving to have so many notes of appreciation over at the Big Orange. But there will be a brief delay; I've got to wrap up another project, and so I won't be posting a new installment until at least the middle of next week.

Via Zuska , we learn of an excellent new website for academics: the National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife . A description: Today, college and university faculty members face many challenges, including an increasingly diverse workforce and new models for career flexibility. The National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife (NCAW) provides resources to help faculty, graduate students, administrators and higher education researchers understand more about all aspects of modern academic work and related career issues, including tenure track and non tenure track appointments, benefits, climate and satisfaction, work/life balance, and policy development. An important resource, especially for young academics.

This is the third entry in "The Rhetoric of Now," my series on how we can change our current political climate by understanding and employing concepts from the rhetorical tradition. The first entry was on stasis or framing of questions; the second was on kairos or rhetorical time. This entry will be on ethos . Let's start with something George Tenet said on 60 Minutes this past weekend: You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. It's all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. And when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go. George Tenet is a Greek American. I'm not sure how these concepts -- honor, integrity, reputation -- would be expressed in modern Greek. But in ancient Greek rhetoric, they all lead toward the crucial rhetorical concept of ethos : character, reputation, trustworthiness. At some point in your education, you may have heard the term e...