Final Exam Prep: "Hey Nostradamus!" & Blog Features

As a prepatory exercise for the Final Exam, consider the question "What formal similarities does Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! share with weblogs?" Review your lecture and study notes and post individual answers in the comments section of this post.

"All Tomorrow's Parties:" Titular Significance

The title of our final course text, William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, has its genesis in the first single by the influential 60s cult band Velvet Underground comprising Lou Reed (who wrote the song), Nico, and John Cale. Click here for the song lyrics.
There is further circularity, by the bye, in the band having taken the title of a bizarre book for their name.

"Break, Blow, Burn:" NYT on Paglia & Power of Words

[Via Arts & Letters Daily] “'The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words,' writes Camille Paglia. She can say that again, and Clive James hopes she will... more»"

Douglas Coupland & Generation Alienation

My term for one of Douglas Coupland's primary themes -- certainly his signature theme -- is generation alienation. The title of his widely successful first novel Generation X entered language and, as naming will, gave a sense of separate identity to members (the etymology of that word is important in this context) of society based on mere age. Coupland's fiction -- on the lecture thesis that it is work of true art -- does not celebrate or boost the segmentation that it identifies but rather laments in its depiction of people, born between 1960 and 1975, isolated in some sense from people around them of otherwise shared background and cultural standing.

The cross-division of a society by age began perhaps with the term "baby boomer" (children born after WWII to 1960) and was intensified by "the 60s generation" but the first is more vague and the second, in its reference to a sub-culture within an age group, narrower than Coupland's. With "Generation X" an epistemological change has reached a degree that suggests new ontology: it's identity is certainly cohesive enough create its progeny in "Generation Y," with "Generation Z" (perhaps under different nomenclature) certain to follow.

As Coupland's fiction has progressed, the scope of his canvas has broadened and details added to his portrait of a society increasingly divided to the point of fragmentation. (As detailed in lecture, it is a particular benefit for us that not only Canada but Vancouver specifically is his setting.) Coupland's perceptive readers -- some of you are counted in that number -- recognise that one active cause of the segementation is marketing: the capitalist truth that sales success increases as a market for a product is more specifically identified for targeted advertising. This practice takes heightened importance from its wholesale adaptation into party politics. In this regard, Coupland's fiction presents us with a question of whether Western society can survive the fragmentation that follows ever-increasing segregation. Coupland might conceivably find fertile material for his fiction here in academia with the curent celebration of division over unity. (As an aside, the philosophical opposition here at play is nominalism versus universalism -- link via our Library databases.)

For an intellectual underpinning to Coupland's portrait of generation alienation, I offered in lecture Dr. Bruce Alexander's theory that mass addiction is a consequence of a world-wide free-market. In his article "Finding the Roots of Addiction" (a precis of his upcoming book), Alexander uses the term "dislocation" to describe the effect that Coupland's fiction portrays: an increasingly wide breakdown of healthy "psychosocial integration." Two specific points of contact between Alexander and Coupland in their conceptions are addiction as the consequence of alienation-dislocation and Vancouver as "Terminal City" -- a place where cultural and ethnic strands are sharply terminated: neither capped nor woven together. As lecture detailed, addiction is presented with great artisitic skill in Hey Nostradamus!: it is a ubiquitous element of the story yet it never declares itself openly -- it is "hidden in plain sight;" the elephant in the living room.

I found examples of generation alienation on one of your course group blogs. In my lectures on Hey Nostradamus! I pointed out how Coupland sketches Heather's neurosis by details like her reaction to the child's play area ball-pit in McDonald's as a breeding-ground of plague. Now, my own generation -- like Coupland and his -- shared water bottles at hockey practice and drank water straight from the tap. To us, Heather's attitude is plainly neurotic. To Gen Y, however, trans-fat-aware, Heather is simply being sensible. Similarly, Gen Y is annoyed when the endless hours that students spend at university computers doing MSN Chat are euphonically represented to them by an insightful baby-boomer lecturer .... In a phrase, generation alienation in action!

Douglas Coupland: Prophet

One characteristic of fiction that attracts me powerfully is the ability of authors to seemingly prophesy. I lean presently toward the theory that the presence of prophecy in a novel correlates to the literary genius of the author. This is a quality of fiction I need to say; not of the author's personal qualities. Asked in an interview, or stated in a journal article, say, the novelist would be no more reliably prophetic than you or me. But within the true novelist's work of literature can be found a form of prophecy.

• This quality relates to my statement in lecture that the significance of the work of fiction is independent from what the author says or believes his or her work is about. It is a quality of fiction that the writing of it brings out capacities in the writer of which he is unaware -- and is incapable of summoning by an act of will.
• If I had to be academically precise in describing the nature of this prophetic quality, I would say that the true literary genius possesses an ability -- innate, trained or both -- of insight into human nature, social trends, and that dimension termed by Aristotle "theology."

The example before us is our Coupland course text, Hey Nostradamus! When it was first published, its setting of a Columbine-style shooting in a Vancouver school laid the author open to a charge of cheap sensationalism. Obviously, it is only in violent, blood-thirsty, gun-legal America that dissafected teenage boys commit random fatal violence: Canada is a pacific, tolerant, nice place where violent acts are improper.

Three years after Coupland wrote Hey Nostradamus!, here is today's headline from the Vancouver Province: "'Epidemic' of Teen Swarmings." The Vancouver Sun has this headline: "Two Males Stabbed Near Metrotown Last Evening." Again, that is just today. I presented in lecture local newspapers collected over the last two weeks which splashed across their front pages: a boy kicked into a coma by another random swarm of teenagers; yet another trial for the killer of Reena Virk; four Mounties killed by a man with guns; and a local teenager who stole twelve dollars of petrol, deliberately ran over the attendant and purposely dragged him -- screaming -- to a slow, hideous and agonising death for over five miles.

Far from cheap sensationalism, Douglas Coupland writes uncannily wise prophecy. Should his novels perhaps be mandatory Canadian reading?

God is in the ... Course Texts?

In the Thursday tutorial, Jessica commented on her perception that, while she sees how the course texts do form a chronological arc of stories which represent Vancouver as "Terminal City, she has observed a lot of God in the course texts. (The allusion in this post's title, by the bye, is to a saying of contentious attribution that "God is in the details.") Since it was I who had bespoken the course texts and from a very different set of criteria, I've had to think over Jessica's the welcome query for a time.
Having now done that, my best response is that the presence of a religious theme to the course texts and lectures is -- with the obvious exception Hey Nostradamus! -- incidental. For my own part, as a student myself of the material, here is my reading of that theme.
Of the short stories, Alice Munro's "Forgiveness in Familes" is the best in the Gerson collection, far and away. Munro to my knowledge is not considered a religious writer: but the potent fact of religion is well within her fictional purview. Innocent Traveller is Ethel Wilson's fictional narration, in the character of "Rose," of the life of her aunt Eliza ("Topaz;") neither of whom are notably religious. The elder sister and long-term matriarch -- "Annie" -- is a deeply and influentially pious character, but that was a biographical fact too strong for literary art to try to diminish.
Here is a quotation that I believe sums up the religious attitude in Innocent Traveller:

Into her majority and forever, Topaz took her three loyalties. Not religion, though she had an indigenous faith in God, for Topaz might well have been (and perhaps she had been) a heavy-footed Bacchante, a milder Maenad with satin-white skin, dancing heavily and happily, excited before the flickering shrine ...

Of John Mills' autobiography it can be said that it recounts his conversion mid-life to Christianity and that event redounds to his life's -- and autobiography's -- underlying theme: to wit, what he terms each person's "symbol at the door." Yet here again, the conversion forms a small - albeit reinforcing - part of the literary whole. The world of Jobs and the author's mother are the major content, and the antinomy of phenomenal and numenal the major theme. Which brings us to our current text, Hey Nostradamus!, where religion is front-&-centre. However, as the initial lecture on Coupland hopefully made clear, it is the sheer, even radical, unexpectedness of the religion in the book that demands our attention. In that sense, then, as far as the lectures go, God should be at least somewhat anomalous in the course texts.
Well, so much for my take. All of yours are most encouraged in seminar, in office hours, or perhaps best, in the comments section below...

Group Project: How to Promote Your Blog

This article at blogger.com has good advice and tips on ways to make your group-project blog better known.

Improved Writing is Easily Achieved: OR How to Recover from a Dumbed-Down Canadian School System

As I mentioned in lecture, your mid-term essays had an average quality for first year university students that was higher than expected. Now, the low expectation was not caused by your capacities, but rather by the deplorable -- indeed, abysmal - state of the Canadian (and American, and British) primary and secondary education system.

Not only don't High Schools teach proper grammar, but few (very few) teachers know grammar themselves. You can prove my claim by a fun test: the next time you meet a school teacher in a social setting, ask him or her to define "gerund" and to provide you with an exemplary sentence. You might also ask the teacher to take this test: it is an application exam for a school in England from 1989 for eleven year olds. (Link courtesy Lou Rockwell's blog.)

Of course, because you yourself are a product (more accurately, a victim) of this system of putative education, it is likely that you don't know what a gerund is either. However, it is your good fortune to now be in one of our admirable universities which are still faithful to the ideal and practice of high academic standards. Accordingly, you have a course instructor who here directs you to purchase The Little, Brown Handbook: an excellent Canadian reference work and self-teaching tool for English grammar. A copy is also available at the Surrey campus Library, here: as is a compact version, here.

Contrary to the impression that you were given by your school, it is a very easy matter to make significant improvement in the mastery of the fundamentals of English grammar. Simply begin at the beginning of the Little, Brown Handbook and study a section a day. A section takes about fifteen minutes, and the book can be compleated at an easy pace, review included, in a couple of months. The book is organised in a very rational way, is written in plain langauge, and combines brevity and comprehensiveness in almost artistic proportion.

The reward for those who follow this discipline is incalculable: in academic success, career progress, and in any aspect of life in which confident literacy is a boon -- which is to say, every aspect. Test this assertion for yourselves: if you start now, you might improve your mark on the (significant) essay component of our Final Exam by a good twenty per-cent.

How Important is a Bibliography? Read This...

This story from today's Toronto Globe & Mail online should frighten you into creating a complete Bibliography, or "Works Cited" list for every academic paper you submit. Scary scary ...

Mid-term Essay Re-edit

For those of you eager to revist their mid-term paper in order to improve their (admittedly already formidable) writing and literary-analytical skills, please hand me a re-edited version at the end of lecture on April 5th. Remember that the minimum standard you are aiming for is a full grade level: i.e. C+ to B+. Make sure your complete revison pays direct attention to all the professorial comments lavished with abundant precision on your paper.

Mid-Term Paper: Copy-Editing Symbols

The abundant notations made on all your mid-term papers are standard copy-editing symbols. Here is a helpful link that explains several in detail with example. As detailed in lecture, two idiosyncratic symbols I add are "hmm..." -- when the point noted is plausible but not argued to a certainty -- and "risible" -- when the statement noted is contentious to the point of inviting laughter.

I wish to compliment you all on the admirable quality of the papers that you submitted. I both enjoyed and benefited substantially from your analyses of the relevance of blogging as a dialectical complement in the scholarly study of fiction.

Husband novelist; novelist wife blogs: bizarreness ensues.

Pace the relationship between fiction and blogs, the opening to the lead article in today's salon.com certainly drew me in ....

The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about
suicide was when he checked my blog. He was in Little Rock, on the first leg of a tour
that was supposed to take him from Arkansas to Alaska, back to Denver and over
to St. Paul, Minn., a circuit more suited to a professional indoor lacrosse
league than to a literary novelist.

Significance of Fiction Titles

We have heard in lecture about the significance that titles (as well as other key markers) have in works of fiction. For Thank Your Mother for the Rabbits we discussed three allusions, One is to Mills' father: the phrase is one of the British music hall tag line he would characteristically repeat. Another is (as should be obvious) to his mother, who dominates the book -- as, we may conclude, she dominated Mills' psyche.
The third and most complex is the rabbit. This allusion involves what Mills calls "Symbols at your door" -- an element of your life which resonates powerfully, repeatedly and with meaning to you alone, (see pp 240-1.) In Mills life, a place from childhood -- a garden near Yately in southern England where he went away with, importantly, his mother & father individually -- and a particular rabbit-hutch remained with him as pure reality. (p 224.) The rabbit recurrs, flayed alive, in a scene from an American work of fiction; it blends into a crucified lamb in a drawing he made as boy; into a character of a German soldier spitted and impaled in a novel he wrote; and ultimately into a symbol of ... well, of an unbearably personal recounting of an excruciating family loss.

Note that, as a literary scholar, when you analyse the meaning of the title in a work of fiction, don't fail to look directly to the obvious. Both "mother" and "rabbits" are in the words of Mills' title, and, although the greatest titular significance is not always directly verbal, it not infrequently, as here, is.

Two Exemplary Class Presentations

At this stage of the term, I'd like to post the notes from two of the individual class presentations that I have been enjoying each week. I chose the first because, to use an anglicism, it is played with a straight bat. It is well organised, presents some captivating points, and safely meets the assignment criteria. It doesn't try to hit the assigned requirements for a six (to continue the cricket metaphor) but that is very seldom necessary. In a business milieu, this would be called a professional presentation -- safe, yes, but strong & effective. The second is a discursive type of presentation: more like an essay, more of lecture style. It takes a commendably bold position & argues it forcefully with winning touch of cheekiness.

To add a helpful note here, I'd say that, ideally, short presentations will be memorised. Not a course requirement, just a tip for career cases. By the bye, do you all know the correct -- i.e. OED -- meaning of "exemplary"?

1st Presentation

“Gin and Goldenrod” versus Gord Sellar’s Blog

BLOGLIKE:
Writer’s Motive
1. Forms of Expression
- The writings are on easily accessible media such as books and webpages.
- Writers’ motives are desires to feel heard and to let the world know what they are about.
- For ex., Malcom Lowry often include inspirations from the landscapes and nature in his writing. Sigbjorn is a representation of Lowry’s frustration regarding urbanization. “Progress was the enemy. Ruination and vulgarization had become a habit.” (58) – Narrator
2. Discoveries for New Ideas
- Writing is about transforming intangible concepts from the mind to tangible textual design.
- The process of categorizing the thoughts and organizing the ideas may open up a new way of thinking for the writer.
3. Records of the writer’s belief and perception
- Human are constantly changing themselves toward their ideal self-images.
- Writings set marks that reveal or reflect author’s values at the time.
- Helpful for retrospection.
Reader’s benefit
1. Deepen the understanding of human nature
- Read other people’s lives thoroughly, and then compare theirs to our lives.
- Experience the surroundings with another point of view, or another perspective.
2. Reading expand people’s horizon.
- Collection of information.
- Broaden our interests. Ex. I didn’t know what a goldenrod is.

NOT BLOGLIKE:

1. Not interactive between the writer and the readers
- Fiction story gives information; whereas, blog starts discussion.
- Information does not go both ways.
2. Bigger economic cost
- Create barriers to entry.
- To publish something in print, then ship it, store it, then finally sell it to consumers. The process involves an enormous cost.
- On the contrary, blog only requires a computer and an Internet connection. For its reader, blog is just few clicks away implicating smaller economic cost.

UNIQUE QUALITY OF FICTION

1. An artistic creation
- Like any other forms of art, every element within the artwork exists for a specific reason in serving the artistic whole.
- In fiction’s case, title, diction, punctuation, and syntax are those elements.
- Take an example on opening paragraph of “Gin & Goldenrod”. An descriptive exposition on settings with meaningful diction creating both literal and figurative imageries. Ex. “The bay looked like a polished metal mirror” (56). Diction often implies connotation meaning, which establish an atmosphere. Ex. “motionless”, “sunless”, “gray”, “quiet”. There is an uneasy undercurrent beneath the words. In contrast, blog’s opening is much straightforward like business letter. It introduces the beginning of situation, and develops from there; it adds no icing to the cake.

In conclusion, a unique quality of fiction is the depth of opening paragraph. Comparing the weblog, fiction opening paragraph tends be more sensory that readers can see, hear, taste etc.

2nd Presentation

Before this class I had never really looked at weblogs, at least not the diary type. Ever since I have been looking at them, solely for the purpose of this class, I have discovered that they just really annoy me. For various reasons, primarily though because I think that they are just pointless things to read and they are nowhere close to being fiction. I have to admit that I found a single blog to be disturbingly addictive to read, until I finally thought about what I was reading and it just wasn’t that interesting and I didn’t care about this person’s life. The politic blogs I can stand and enjoy, because they’re informative. As I am shocked by the number of people who don’t know who Tony Blair is.

The term fiction is so general but in terms of quality fiction, blogs don’t even compare. I am sure there are some that do, however I only found a story of one. It was called Plain Layne, aka Laine Johnson. The blog was of a “young adventurous lesbian with a past” (New York Times). It ran for three years and had thousands of readers. However, it was eventually exposed that Plain Laine was actually a product of the imagination of a 35 year old man, Odin Soli. Clearly the whole thing was fictitious, Mr. Soli refers to Miss Laine as a character; however, he did say that he was providing some “genuine emotional experience”. I never read the blog, but the readers were in an outrage when the whole thing took place. This just proves that you never know if a diary blog is real or made up but that still doesn’t mean that it’s quality fiction. It sounds as though Plain Layne easily could have been, engaging the readers with literary prose, therefore I am willing to except this as quality fiction, but for a large portion of the rest, I am not.

When I think of quality fiction, I think of Alice Munro’s Forgiveness in Families. I don’t think about these blogs where people just talk about what they did that day. In Alice Munro’s story, she teaches the readers this idea about life. Reading becomes an observation, and depending on how an idea is conveyed, it determines what benefits people may acquire form reading it. Alice Munro describes this concept about reality in such a subtle way, but by the end it seems so apparent and true about life. The remarkable bit about it, is that it is a fact about life that we often tend to forget about or just not realize when we live day to day. Through Val’s repentance, the readers are given this opportunity to step back from the story and realize how this situation is true to life. So many people try to blame their issues on others, denying reality, they don’t want to realize this horrible truth about themselves. The fact that Val does this too only makes the character more human like.

From my experience of weblogs, the bloggers are the people seeking these realizations about life that fiction provide. Also, so many of them are Vals. They claim they use their weblogs as a way to, “express their feelings” or that it’s therapeutic but it’s more often just them bitching about life.

I found this one weblogger Aaron Wall. I posted on his blog and asked him why he does it. He said that he uses his weblog to better understand his mind. I found it hilarious that his next post was him solely talking about how disgustingly fat he is (He gained 40 pounds in less than year). He was crying for, I’m not positive but most likely sympathy and understanding. (I just wanted to tell him to get up from his computer desk and take a walk, outside.) Anyhow, this is exactly similar as to how Val cried for sympathy. “I was going to school for the first time and all of the other kids had their mothers with them and where was mine? In the hospital having a baby. The embarrassment to me” (Munro 94).
Though Forgiveness in Families and diary blogs communicate the realistic trials of life, fiction contains this superlative quality: this ability to communicate an idea about life, allowing the reader’s to realize this truth. While weblogs just continue to be a form of mindless entertainment, fiction continues on to educate this realistic concept. This is what makes fiction, quality fiction.

Mid Terms Returned March 15th

Your Mid-term essays will be handed back at the close of lecture next Tuesday. Although I had entertained the idea of returning them early, I think on reflection that the standard two-week window is worth maintaining.

Undergraduate Essay Competition

FYI:
This is a reminder of approaching deadline (May 15, 2005) for the Canadian national essay contest mounted by the North American Conference on British Studies and funded by the British Council. We welcome submissions of essays by undergraduate students at any level, on any era or area of British Studies. Essays must have been completed in a Canadian university in the 2004-5 academic year, and must be submitted with a faculty letter of nomination (maximum one essay per student). Submissions must be post-marked by May 15. One hard copy, with student's address, should go to each of the three adjudicators:
Professor James Alsop, Department of History
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON L8S 4L9

Professor Sandra den Otter, Department of History
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6

Professor Lynn Wells, Department of English
University of Regina
Regina, SK S4S 0A2

Winners to be announced by Sept. 1, 2005 at www.NACBS.org
Please direct any inquiries to wellsl@uregina.ca.

New Course Group Blogs

Here are two new course blogs: one is formerly "Team Riot" latterly "EnglBlog2"; the other is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sfu_eng101/ -- [Deleted].

Drop by and say "hello" ...

Update: second link above now fixed. Use this link to jump to the list of active Group Blogs ...

From Douglas Coupland's Publisher ...

A tiny window into the life of a successful writer (& artist, in this case) in this reply to my email to Douglas Coupland's publisher, Douglas-McIntyre, offering the author opportunity to speak to us:

"Hi Stephen, thanks for your interest in Doug Coupland, and support of his books.Unfortunately he is not available to help your class. He's busy promotinghis new novel, Eleanor Rigby and is just swamped."

Lecture: March 8th

Today we closed out our study of John Mills by tying together the various strands that we have been following in lecture into one unified fabric.
The abstract concern in Thank Your Mother is with finding reality in a world of appearances. as the book progresses, Mills shows how much of the world that we take for granted is a fraud. We see Mills' adopting a fraudulent "working class" persona to win a desired woman. His friend Richmond puts on a show of being a pukkah Englishman. Institutionally education is presented as a fraudulent means for governments to reduce the unemployment statistics, both by dragging out the time taken to teach the curriculum and by widely -- indeed universally -- expanding the student population. And the profession of teaching is reduced to the duping of gullible parents by ordinary people who merely keep themselves one page ahead of their students.
In short the world of "Jobs" (in his "Book of Jobs" chapter) is mere activity, not meaningful existence -- the appearance of life rather what Mills senses is its deeper reality.
Mills calls this deeper reality the numinous [numena is the - Latin plural- antonym of phenomena] and his book relates the protagonist's slow discovery and eventual full living embrace of it. The early section "The Night of Lucia" is a microcosm of this journey: Mills and a companion come to the point of expiration in a snowstorm in the Swedish countryside [the phenomenal], when by a freak of weather they see a cottage a few hundred yards ahead. Warmed and fed, they are entertained by a young daughter of the cottage, a tiara of candles about her head, singing an ethereal hymn of that day's festival to Saint Lucia - Queen of Light [the numenal.]
Some delighting experiences of the numenal and more, depressing, experiences of the phenomenal - army service, Jobs, etc - led Mills to embrace Christianity: albeit in a robustly carnal version of charitable Anglicanism.
The eventual results of this I will leave for a seperate post, on the topic of the significance of the book's title.

Douglas Coupland: Official Site

Here is a link to the Hey Nostradamus! page on Douglas Coupland's truly magnificent official site. In my educated opinion, this is a web site done to almost perfection.

New Group Blog

Here's a late starter -- but maybe a strong closer -- in the group blog project. Well worth a look ....

Paglia warns internet: "Only Art Lasts:

Via Matt Drudge, Camille Paglia intends her new book as a pertinent warning against putting technology before art, or, put another way, against giving the transient form more importance than the permament substance.
Paglia has been and continues to be a strong booster of the internet's benefits for scholarship & effective polity, so her caution has weight.

UPDATE: Here is her advance article.

Ethel Wilson & the Nature of Time

For students who have their focus on Ethel Wilson, this article - linked today on the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily - suggests that her treatment of Time in The Innocent Traveller correlates to in a legitimate speculation in her contemporary science.

Lecture: March 3rd. Blackadder "General Hospital"

In lecture today we looked at the "General Hospital" episode of the Blackadder Goes Forth series. Note, the the bye, the title's double intention.The purpose of this was multiform. First, it was part of John Mills' pedagogy to use video to expand students' experience of the material being studied. As we know from lectures, experience is a major explanantory schema for Thank Your Mother for the Rabbits. Second, the humour in Blackadder comes from the British vaudevillian tradition from which Mills' own humour (& much more in his book, hint hint) derives. Third, the resonance of WWI for Mills' book -- that being the fictional accounting of his own life -- is deep. And fourth, the episode's military hospital setting will enliven your appreciation of the same setting in Mills, which will hopefully then help you locate the passage's fictional significance.

Significance of Mills' Book Title

The lecture today opened unexpectedly with a fake Final Exam having one question: write a two thousand word essay on the significance of John Mills' title Thank Your Mother For the Rabbits.
This is a plausible question for a real Final Exam, and the title has profound importance for a major theme of Mills' work. Indeed, it is fairly close to the surface of the text. Next Tuesday's lecture will deal directly with this topic, but you may want to consider it on your own between now and then -- in addition to continuing with your second reading of the Coupland text.

Fiction versus Lies

To help appreciate the scope of the concept of fiction, we are currently using John Mills' create autobiography to consider the intersection between -- and in this particular case, the intermingling of -- fiction and non-fiction. Add to your understanding by reading the following story from today's online version of the CBC and experience lie in its naked form. http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/03/01/sponsorship050301.html Now, textually analyse the shameless lie in the article text in comparison to the tenor of Mills' text & add your comment to this post.