Sorry for the late notice, but I’m bravely fighting off the plague and would rather not share said plague with you. So, class is cancelled today. We’ll meet again on Tuesday.

I’ve updated the Course Calendar to reflect this. You’ll see that we’ll continue our discussion of The PowerBook on Tuesday, November 10th, so bring your ethos, logos and pathos examples (2 of each) with you to Tuesday’s class.

This weekend you have the following assignment: Spend at least 45 minutes in Second Life this weekend. Your mission:

1. Develop an avatar you like.
2. Find 5 places in Second Life you think are interesting. Add them to your “picks” tab on your profile.
3. Create a second, different look for your avatar. This second look should be noticeably different. Use your inventory system to create a folder for each look. When you’re finished, you should be able to drag the folder from your inventory onto your avatar to change your avatar’s appearance all at once.

If you don’t have a computer of your own on which to run Second Life, and you can’t beg, borrow or steal a friend, roommate or family member’s computer this weekend, Professor Nancy Welch has open office hours in A206 on Thursdays from 5:30-6:45pm. Feel free to use the lab then. Just tell her that I sent you.

I hope you’re all feeling better than I am, and that you have a great weekend.

See you Tuesday.

New Scientist magazine is running a flash fiction contest — and they want YOU to enter.

The rules are simple: set your story 100 years in the future, and tell your story in no more than 350 words. Then send it to New Scientist and await your sure-to-arrive-soon fame and fortune.

And, if you need help generating ideas, David Malki has created an Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000, which is sure to provide you with winning ideas for years and years to come. (Malki is the creator of the Wondermark: An Illustrated Jocularity online comic. If you’re not reading it every week, you should be.)

Given our recent work with Aristotle’s Poetics, I have no doubt you’ll find much of interest in the E-PHG-FG2K.

(Click the image to go to Wondermark and view the E-PHG-FG2K in biggie form.)

There have been several questions now that the first assignment has come up, so here’s the definitive answer: YES! You may e-mail your work to me. The Lorax (who speaks for the trees) loves this idea, and encourages you to e-mail everything you do for this class to me.

So now you know. I’ll always take hard copies, but we all win when you use e-mail.

Welcome to the course blog for ENGS 107 — Writing Bodies: Rhetorics of the Flesh, an English seminar at the University of Vermont to be held in the Fall of 2009.  I’ll be adding the course syllabus, calendar, reources, and assignments to this blog, as well as posting items of interest to the course.

Stay tuned!