Joseph Duemer, a professor of humanities at Clarkson University, is dispirited by his introductory-creative-writing students.

“It is the end of the semester & they are still unable to eliminate or transform clichés in their own work or identify them in the work of others,” he writes. “They are for the most part unable to describe the tone of a poem or story or to conceptualize & express the basic situations & speakers of poems & stories either professional or by their classmates. But the very worst is that they snicker at passion. They are sarcastic without the least sense of irony.”

For passion and irony, sympathy and wit, he turns to the band the Fountains of Wayne.