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"It's a moment of peril as well as one of opportunity. I keep thinking of a phrase from Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": reception in a state of distraction. Benjamin associated this phrase with the loss of the possibility for a contemplative response to works of art. He connected that loss to the evaporation of "aura," the trace of art's religious origins that he claimed is destroyed by the reproduction of unique and stationary objects as ubiquitous, portable photographs. Distracted reception strikes me as an unavoidable consequence of the conditions under which today's poetry is produced and consumed-the general conditions of our wired lives as well as specific conditions of publication, distribution and so forth. It doesn't bode well for my commitment to poetry as a contemplative genre that I've actually been thinking of the Showcase as a chance to get up to speed with current poetry."

"The PowerPoint presentation BMJ 2007; 335 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.38994.480845.DE (Published 20 December 2007) Cite this as: BMJ 2007;335:1292 Article Related content Read responses (3) Article metrics David Isaacs, senior staff specialist1, Stephen Isaacs, consultant2, Dominic Fitzgerald, senior staff specialist3 Author Affiliations davidi@chw.edu.au The main purpose of a PowerPoint presentation is entertainment. Intellectual content is an unwarranted distraction. In preparing a PowerPoint presentation, aesthetics should transcend substance. The background colour scheme and logo for your slides should be selected for maximum emetogenic potential. The first inverse ridicule rule of PowerPoint presentation states: "The more lines of writing that can be coerced onto a slide and the smaller the font, the lower the risk of anyone criticising any data which has accidentally been included." The second rule states: "The number of slides you can show in your allotted time is inversely proportional to the number of awkward questions which can be asked at the end." PowerPoint has superseded the carousel era, when presentations were severely limited by the number of slots in the slide carousel and the risk of dropping the lot seconds before your talk. Plagiarism laws do not apply to PowerPoint, so cartoons of marginal relevance but high entertainment value can be downloaded and shown at suitable intervals to maintain audience mirth while minimising critical capacity. Research has shown that the ideal cartoon:data ratio is 5:1. The seasoned PowerPoint artist or PowerPointilliste has refined the presentation into a son-et-lumiere extravaganza, in which scattered dots and luminescent clumps of meaningless datasets hurtle on to the screen from all points of the compass, to the strident strains of Handel's Fireworks Music, building inexorably to a Fantasia-style Sorcerer's Apprentice climax. This fulfils an important s

"Before each class session, David Levy leads his students in a few minutes of meditation."