Scott Sultran
Intranet consultant (age 32) in Olympia, Washington, whose 246-word e-mail to his live-in girlfriend of two years, freelance outsourcing advisor Errin Schur (age 31), proclaiming his “never-ending, never-changing” love for her and “really, really, really” apologizing for having copulated with, and been defecated more or less into his mouth by, her sister, corporate financial overseer Cheryle Schur-Lanthier (age 40), eight Saturday afternoons in a row at the Glass Castle Motel, failed to prevent the demise of his relationship with Ms. Schur four days later, a demise involving screaming on her part, hyperventilating on his part, and regret on Ms. Schur-Lanthier’s part over not having had diarrhea when “feeding that shithead, get it?”
Kandi Phannenstill
Sophomore business education major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, whose final project in May 2003 for Expository Writing II, a 59-page paper titled “That Carnival of Concupiscence: The Mid-Twentieth Century Postromantic Voice in Clifford Lee Herbert’s White Line Down the Highway (A Sort of Memoir),” caused her to fail the course. She had maintained a hard-fought if tenuous C in it up until then. Her tendency to procrastinate had worsened after her lupus scare a few months earlier; as a result, she had written the paper over the two days before the due date, in a frenzy fueled by Krispy Kreme donuts, Red Bull energy drinks and generic caffeine supplements. Her instructor, Dr. Marsha Randolphs, sent her a 538-word e-mail the day she failed her, calling the paper “the ne plus ultra of academic thievery—an obvious and almost complete plagiarism of Dr. Asa Gilkerson’s well-known article of the same title in Text Internationale Quarterly, Fall 1996,” an article Ms. Phannenstill could not remember having ever read, at least on-line, where she had done all her research between chuckling over the Rate the Roadkill website. The e-mail went on to list a dozen similarities “out of countless ones” between the two sources—e.g., “Gilkerson, p. 43: ‘the underlying significance of Lorna Lou’s merkin qua narrative impetus.’ You, p. 46: ‘the underlying significance of Lorna Lou’s merkin que [sic] narrative impetus.’ ” Ms. Phannenstill left college two days later, moved back into her parents’ house in Kearney and started work as a junior executive secretary/fellator at Gelman Feed. In March 2004, her 12-page essay “Red Bull and No Bull” appeared in Generation J: Young Adults Born Again in the Midwest (Omaha: u-print.com), an essay she had intentionally plagiarized in part from Allie Duncan’s “Majoring in Sin” in Freshword: Young People Return to Christ (Lincoln: Nimbus House, 1987).
unfinished
© 2004 David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 