News – Page 138 – Quixotic Pedagogue

This Is Your Author on PEDs

Brian Michael Murphy positions the controversy over performance-enhancing drugs in the context of great literature:

All of my writing heroes used PEDs. I still respect them; I would still shake their hands; I would never boo them as they took the podium to read, just returned from a stint in rehab or a drunk tank. I’m thinking of Allen Ginsburg’s acid. Baudelaire’s absinthe. Alice Walker’s magic mushrooms. Graham Greene’s Benzedrine. Legend has it that Gabriel García Márquez smoked up to 10 packs of cigarettes a day while holed up in his writing room for a year and a half like José Arcadio Buendía with his astrolabe and crucible. I once read that Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee daily and died of heart failure; another account said his personal record was 200 cups in a day, and that he died of a perforated ulcer.

September 3, 2013/by dpogreba

AP Language Essay 1: Media Violence

AP Language

Our first essay for AP Language has been posted. It will be due Friday in class (or by 1:00 p.m. on Sunday if you submit using Google Drive).

The prompt is located here.

As you do your writing, you may want to review these handouts we’ve gone over in class:

September 1, 2013/by dpogreba

White Power Takeover in North Dakota

Student Blogs

The New York Times is reporting that a white supremacist named Paul Craig Cobb has been buying property in a tiny North Dakota town with the purpose of turning it into a white supremacist enclave:

Their new neighbor, they thought, was just another person looking to get closer to the lucrative oil fields in western North Dakota known as the Bakken.

But all that changed last week.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Bismarck Tribune revealed that the man, Paul Craig Cobb, 61, has been buying up property in this town of 24 people in an effort to transform it into a colony for white supremacists.

In the past two years, Mr. Cobb, a longtime proselytizer for white supremacy who is wanted in Canada on charges of promoting hatred, has bought a dozen plots of land in Leith (pronounced Leeth) and has sold or transferred ownership of some of them to a couple of like-minded white nationalists.

August 30, 2013/by dpogreba

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