Write five sentences rabbit

“One, two, three, four, five, six leetle rabbits!” said Mr. McGregor.

“One, two, three, four, five, six leetle fat rabbits!” repeated Mr. McGregor, counting on his fingers — “one, two, three—”

“One, two, three, four! five! six leetle rabbits!” said he as he dropped them into his sack.

“One, two — only three sentences about rabbits!” said the homework-seeker, feeling slightly cheated.

“In the sack! one, two, three, four, five, six!” replied Mr. McGregor.

[Ever since I posted a commentary on five sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Internauts searching for five sentences (that is, their homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Write five sentences rabbit is the latest such search. This post is rated “R” for rabbits. With apologies to Beatrix Potter and the Flopsy Bunnies.]

Other “five sentences” posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : The driver : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The ship : Smoking : The telephone

How to improve writing (no. 33)

In the Enfield Tennis Academy dining hall:

There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s façade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

The fairly obvious person is Avril Incandenza, Enfield Tennis Academy Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females, “the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University.” She’s a co-founder of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, “a bramble in the flank of advertisers, corporations, and all fast-and-loose-players with the integrity of public discourse.” Among the MGM’s targets: supermarkets with 10 ITEMS OR LESS signs. Avril Incandenza, endnote 260 tells us, “always grades everything in blue ink.” Note the pun on colonize.

[This post is no. 33 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is the first in which a fictional character has done the improving.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

Lines from Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911.

A related post
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar

Plagiarism in the academy

At Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, a “perfect storm of plagiarism,” as twenty-nine applicants to the MBA program plagiarize in their application essays. One of the required essay topics: “the connections between principled leadership and business.”

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

“Painters and Poets”

John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank
    O’Hara
Their names alone bring tears to my eyes

Kenneth Koch, “The Circus” (The Art of Love, 1975)

Three slideshows — from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Tibor de Nagy — for “Tibor de Nagy Painters and Poets,” an exhibition devoted to collaborations among painters and poets in post-war New York.

AOL buys Huffington Post

Read more:  15, 300, 315, America, aol, AOL, AOL Inc., Benjamins, Best Buy, Big Bucks, Bread, Cabbage, Cash, Fifteen, Greenbacks, Hamiltons, HP, Huff, Huffington, Huffington Post, HuffPo, HuffPost, Huffy Bicycles,  Jackson 5, Jacksons, Long Green, Loot, Lorne Greene, Louisiana, Marge, Marge Simpson, Merge, Merge Left, Merge Right, Merger, Merging, Michael Jackson, Million, Millions, Moolah, Online, Post, Purchase, Sawbucks, Simoleons, Spartans, Starbucks, Three-Hundred

AOL has purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million.

[The pseudo-links are sarcastic high jinks. I’ve never been impressed by HuffPo’s style of journalism.]

Snail Mail

[Click for a larger view.]

“Without ZIP CODE the growing U.S. Mail load would move at a snail’s pace — if it moved at all!”: an advertisement from Life, November 22, 1968.

Poor Mr. ZIP: he lived to see all mail become snail mail. The Oxford English Dictionary traces snail mail — “the physical delivery of mail, as by the postal service, considered as slow in comparison to electronic mail; a letter, etc., sent by post” — back to 1982. Mr. ZIP retired in 1986. He later died of a broken heart.

Another SMiLE?

Beach Boy Al Jardine tells an interviewer that a Beach Boys version of Smile (or SMiLE, the traditional spelling) is on the way:

Are there plans for a new Beach Boys archival project?

Capitol Records plans to issue a Beach Boys version of Smile sometime this summer to begin the celebration of The Beach Boys’ anniversary. Smile is the Holy Grail for Beach Boys’ fans, so it will be good.

I don’t have many details on it, although we didn’t do any new recording. I’m happy to see it finally come out. Brian’s changed his mind about releasing the material, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it?

Beach Boys versions of songs from SMiLE have been released on various LPs (beginning in 1967 with Smiley Smile). More SMiLE material appeared in 1993 in the Capitol box-set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys. And as you might guess, vast amounts of SMiLE and SMiLE-related material have become available on bootlegs. And Brian Wilson recorded and released SMiLE as a solo album in 2004. Mike Love even sued cousin Brian about it, which would seem to make it official.

A new release of Beach Boys SMiLE material (with, I trust, excellent remastering) would be a welcome thing, but it’s not as if the music is finally coming out.

[SMiLE, music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, began its legendary life in 1966. It’s a masterpiece. Surf’s up!]

Trochees

From xkcd, Trochee Fixation. And, on a similar note, Iambic Pentameter.

[Yes, my name’s made of trochees, but I try not to call attention to it.]

“Ice and Snow Blues No. 3”

Light to moderate my eye. It is really, really snowing. Only after I trudged out did I realize what a dumb thing I was doing: had I slipped, our camera would likely have been ruined.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Related posts
“Ice and Snow Blues”
“Ice and Snow Blues No. 2”