By now regular visitors to the blog should be aware of my twice a year sojourn to Cornell University to introduce a fairly good number of Cornell students to the art of rhetoric. Of course since they are alive human beings in their 20s who are in college they have been practicing rhetoric for quite some time and quite successfully. But naming a thing is often a transformative moment.

It’s become a pretty fun and cool ceremony for me of all people to return to the site of Herb Wicheln’s career and introduce a bunch of people to the formal theory and study of rhetoric. It’s odd that nothing of his legacy survives there outside of some archive which I suspect doesn’t get called on much. One day I’ll have to go take a look.

I always try to account for and capture these talks as I’m interested in how they vary. YouTube has a good number of the one’s I’ve recorded. Here’s the most recent one, delivered February 15th, and it’s not really edited that much. I took out some of the sidebars and other random conversation during the class break and stuff like that. I tried to preserve the conversation as it was, both the mistakes I make in the talk and the discussion afterwards. It’s audio only, but everything is here. I wonder if people prefer the audio to the video. It seems an audio lecture is easier to take in than a video one sometimes (plus we are all burned out on video chats).

Thoughts and comments welcome!