That last post seems an obnox­ious way to send dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion into the new year, so let’s go out on a better note. Here’s JibJab to remind you what you won’t miss about 2009:

A while back I was inter­viewed by Ron Gross­man, a reporter for the Chicago Tri­bune, for an arti­cle he was writ­ing about John Barr and the Poetry Foun­da­tion. The arti­cle came out today, and while it raises good ques­tions about Barr’s stew­ard­ship of the Foun­da­tion, I was quite unhappy to see myself mis­quoted three dif­fer­ent ways in the space of a seventeen-​word sentence.

Gross­man writes:

Robert Baird, a U. of C. grad­u­ate stu­dent and poet who has been a con­sul­tant to the foun­da­tion, heard the speech, which was reprinted in Poetry magazine.

The speech “was terrible,” said Baird, who sym­pa­thizes with Barr’s view­point but thought his style unnec­es­sar­ily provocative.

I’ve never been a “consultant” for any­thing, but I’ve done paid work for the Poetry Foun­da­tion before and can for­give the short­hand. Still, there’s not a word in that second sen­tence that should have been printed. Let’s take it point by point:

I finally caught up to William Finnegan’s excel­lent arti­cle on Hon­duras from the Nov. 30 The New Yorker. Here’s Finnegan on the fate of the agree­ment that was sup­posed to return Mel Zelaya to power:

On Octo­ber 30th, an accord was finally signed—”a his­toric agree­ment, Hillary Clin­ton said…. The Obama Admin­is­tra­tion had, it seemed, defended a crit­i­cal prin­ci­ple of a new Amer­i­can diplo­macy: coups would not stand.

…

Four days after after the accord was signed, Thomas Shan­non jolted Hon­duras, and much of Latin Amer­ica, by sug­gest­ing, on CNN en Español, that, even if Zelaya were not restored to the Pres­i­dency, the United States would rec­og­nize the results of the Novem­ber elec­tions. Two days later, Sen­a­tor Jim DeMint lifted his hold on the con­fir­ma­tion of Shan­non to become U.S. Ambas­sador to Brazil. Hillary Clin­ton, DeMint said, had assured him that the Admin­is­tra­tion would rec­og­nize the upcom­ing Hon­duras elec­tion results “regardless of whether former Pres­i­dent Manuel Zelaya is returned to office.”

The next day, Novem­ber 6th, Zelaya prou­nounced the accord “dead.” It looked as if an old-​fashioned coup could still suc­ceed in Latin Amer­ica, after all.

I’m a bit late track­ing this one, but former David Foster Wal­lace stu­dent Amy McDaniel (and, inci­den­tally, a col­lege class­mate of my own) has pub­lished a gram­mar quiz at HTML­GIANT that the late master once pre­sented to stu­dents of his cre­ative writ­ing work­shop. The quiz is titled, omi­nously (or is that humorously?):

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOL­LOW­ING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPIN­ION, THINK SERI­OUSLY ABOUT SUING SOME­BODY, PER­HAPS AS CO-​PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION