Ben Wetherbee ⚓❄🐝

Still at it, @lecagle.bsky.social

💉💉

Should be this month.

An FYW student named me Dr. John Wetherbee in the corner of the paper. I wonder if this was a test to see if I even read the MLA-style corner-matter.

a man in a suit and bow tie is sitting at a desk with a national geographic poster in the background ALT: a man in a suit and bow tie is sitting at a desk with a national geographic poster in the background

Got some good news last night about an article I've been trying to publish (in some form or another) since 2018.

Definitely

But there is a more serious problem with anti-writing. This sort of prose establishes no voice, selects no audience, takes no stand, makes no commitment. It can be produced by anyone, anywhere, at any time, on demand. Neel reads the message sent by anti-writing as follows: "I am not writing. I hold no position. I have nothing at all to do with discovery, communication, or persuasion. I care nothing about the truth. What I am is an essay. I announce my beginning, my parts, my ending, and the links between them. I announce myself as sentences correctly punctuated and words correctly spelled" (85). The five-paragraph essay simply imposes itself between a writer and her text. Like a boorish guest at a party, it muscles its way into any conversation that she might want to begin.

Perhaps related. Sharon Crowley writing in 1990 about how current-traditional pedagogy does not so much teach writing but rather conformity to prescriptive essay forms.

#genai+writing #writingstudies #teamrhetoric

Trump: don’t take acepitoemponoene

RFK Jr: *moth crawls out of mouth*

A nude man is in the background, only referred to as “the colonel”

Person watching on tv: well if they say so

Just talked to an FYC student whose paper is theorizing a distinction between meaningful and meaningless "yapping."

Teaching writing rules.

Rep. Nancy Mace @RepNancyMace We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.

guys, we have a tone shift

Just for fun, I'm going to give you some clips of the hate mail I got from being placed on Kirk's TPUSA Dangerous Professor list. Buckle up:

"this silksong boss is so hard" and a pic is posted and this is the boss i see

An interesting thing about Silksong is the way that it combines elements of the classic Metroid and Castlevania games. Could this be the start of a new genre?

Poll finds bipartisan agreement on a key issue: Regulating AI Democrats and Republicans alike have concerns about AI and want to see the rapidly developing technology regulated to protect the public.

Americans across party lines want guardrails on #AI.

buff.ly/SDZ0dqY

The whole squad!

Agreed. Great taxonomy. Scientific "tRUTH" is a really interesting stylization.

It all reminds me of Vico's distinction between (1) ineffable divine wisdom and (2) worldly "poetic" wisdom, created and recreated by human production. I think people try to disguise poetic wisdom in divine garb.

"legally untested"

YouTube video by Team Cherry Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Trailer

Cancel my semester

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XGe...

Experimenting with "integrated courseware" for the first time this term, and I'm already very annoyed and teetering on the edge of "never again"

Turn off AI in search results. I just did this in Chrome and it works.
tenbluelinks.org#chrome-windows

Last Book: Tactics of Conquest by Barry Malzberg
Current Read: Gather in the Hall of the Planets by Malzberg, Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee, and Naming What We Know by Stephen Neaderheiser (ed.)
Last Added to TBR: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
Next: Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin

Been meaning to read Derek's book. Dispossessed is my fav Le Guin and probably among my top 10 sf novels. 👍

a dumb bourgeois tweet telling us what we have to read to hold conversation

Bare minimum for holding a conversation: Gorgias, Hollow Knight, Octavia Butler, A Tribe Called Quest, the Oxford comma, and RoboCop.

Props to *Weapons* for getting George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness" stuck irrevocably in my head for what I assume will be weeks. What an amazing song with inscrutably beautiful chord changes and even better lyrics.

I may take you up on that someday ... thanks!!

I'm also thinking a lot about the thickets of metaphor and essentialism that surround so-called "AI" and its concomitant language of companionship and personification ("hallucinations," etc.). I wonder how it might change perception to call ChatGPT IA: that is, intelligent artifice.

My school has asked me to sit on an interdisciplinary panel about generative AI at new faculty orientation next week, and I just want to express gratitude for @johnrgallagher.bsky.social's Substack.

Title slide for "The Human Depths: James Baldwin's Counterimage of Burkean Logology," with images of Kenneth Burke and James Baldwin

Saying rhetoricky things tomorrow about two of my favorite writers

📍ISHR 2025 in Copenhagen

My most masculine quality is how much I love little collectible lighthouse figurines

I try to live by a few straightforward principles in times of upheaval, when those in power try to confuse and daze us with endless cruelty. One of which is 擇善固執: choose what's good, and be stubborn about it.

This is a good one:

kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/r...

And this collection might be worth digging thorough:

upcolorado.com/utah-state-u...