"Against this craft [that of certain Troubadour poets] I put, with quite definite intention, the syncopation or the counterpoint of the Syrian Greek Death of Adonis, with, shall we say, Bion's jazz beat running cross-wise."

From Pound's "ABC of Reading."

This is perhaps the earliest mention of jazz rhythm in relation to poetry (by a white poet). The idea of hearing poetic rhythms as syncopated.

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I founded a new discipline yesterday called "Mediocrity Studies." It is the study of stable, self-perpetuating, but ultimately pointless systems of thought. For example, the idea of paraphrasing the novels of Faulkner in a Lacanian meta-language. The dullness of such a method is not an accidental by-product, or the result of incompetence, but the deliberate result of a particular academic mind-set.

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Bright undergraduate students, humanities majors, are not capable of reading and understanding a critical article. I'm not talking about Derrida or Foucault, but of a fairly lucidly written critical article by, say, Lawrence Venuti on translation.