Online Dating II

Matthew Fouts
Online Dating II
Hello!!!!
I am glad to see your profile.
You very interesting man
and I would like to learn more about you.
You can write to me on likegentlekitty
at yahoo
I with impatience will wait for your letter.
I hope that already tomorrow I will receive it.
Baby

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Praeludium

Praeludium
I am waiting for you to come
through the door like the clouds
wait for the sunrise to throw just
enough light to trace the smooth and
supple line of your mouth, or
the curve of your waist. All morning
I have sat here and wasted my time,
until this time. Until this now
when you are about to open the door
and come [...]

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Untitled

This is the final humiliation
the clicking of your heels
in the hallway.
the razor of your shoulders,
the sharp, tight skin of your back.
Your neck and your ass,
too small, and your shoes
clicking on the hallway floor.
This is the final humilation
Your smell of jasmine
in his mouth.
His hands in your soft
panties and your arched back
and Oh god, like that
and decades [...]

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Lacrimosa

Matthew Fouts
               Lacrimosa
Where are you going in your grey jacket
        closed tight against your black shirt?
I am obsessed with the curve of your waist
        as if I could hold it and keep you here.
Where will you go tonight with your soft heart
        and your cheekbones? this night
and the next (and the next).
Where will you be [...]

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Fouts Report and Sunday Sing Along

If any of you have been reading the compendium this week, you may have noticed that it sounds all intellectual and pointy headed. The reason for this is that yesterday (saturday), I had to take the comprehensive M.A. Exam in Literature and Rhetoric, which is the test you have to take to graduate. Ya’see, NIU [...]

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“They Kill Us For Their Sport”

One thing that Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves has in common with Shakespeare’s King Lear is the idea, explored in both works, that justice is, at best, blind. On the surface, these two works would appear to have little in common. However, when examined with regard to their views on the [...]

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Ultimate Order

(introduction)
Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves and Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” both seek a similar goal, transcendence. As we shall see, they make their attempt in slightly different ways, with a varying degree of success.
When I say that these two works seek to achieve transcendence, I am speaking of the work in the same [...]

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Hypertext, Burke and Ultimate Order

 
In his book Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Jay David Bolter discusses the encyclopedia as one of man’s earliest attempts to create a hyper textual document. As a compendium of the essence of all subjects and phenomena, the encyclopedia was hypertextual in the way that a reader created the work [...]

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The New Rhetors: Erectile Dysfunction and the Hard Sciences

 
Carolyn Miller, in her essay “Learning From History: World War II and the Culture of High Technology,” attempts to summarize the changes that have been made in rhetorical situations in the second half of the twentieth century. At one point she says “The management changes [introduced by the Kennedy-Johnson administration in 1961] created new rhetors [...]

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“You’ve Gone a Short Way, Baby:” Hypertext, Sixteen Years Later

 
Given the fact that Jay David Bolter wrote Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing in nineteen-ninety-one, the first question that invariably comes to mind is how accurate were his predictions? Did computers and hypertext turn out to be everything he thought it would?
The short answer is we don’t know yet because [...]

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