Blogs

Just for kicks, I've changed my picture again. This is what I look like right after I work out. Speaking of which, I'm disturbed by how weak my chest muscles are compared to the rest of my body. I did the chest press and could only lift two of the plates, and when I did the fly, I could only lift one. :o

Edited to add, as I wind down for the night...I am feeling the strain from the lateral pulldowns. I need a massage.

I just got a message from a guy on Orkut who, inspired by Poem in Your Pocket Day, suggests that we blog about our favorite poems. So here's mine: Spelling by Margaret Atwood. Once, in a Modern Poetry class in college, we had to write a paper in which we did a close reading of a poem. I chose this one, and the more I read it and thought about it, the more it affected me. It's the only poem that has ever made me cry. Parsley by Rita Dove has come close, too.

You might have noticed that I've added a link at the top of the site to my essays, research, and conference notes. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time now; I was thinking that if anyone came here only wanting to see my essays and representations of my research interests, a portal to those would be in order so that sifting through everything in the Rhetoric and Feminism categories wouldn't be necessary. I've been admiring Andrew's "Recent Essays" section of his sidebar and Anne's research section for ages, and finally I've done my own. I'm still working on it; I probably need to break it down into shorter essays and longer essays in each category, and I think I'll take a cue from Anne and include an abstract (or annotation for the shorter essays) of each piece. I also need to put them in some order--chronological, reverse chronological, or alphabetical. Come to think of it, this is a great opportunity for me to write a statement of my research agenda.


Edited to add: I meant for this to be a request for feedback. How do you think I should arrange the work here? Would you like to see it divided into short essays/long essays, rather than rhetoric and feminism? Reverse chronological? What?

A lot of women find this kind of thing sexy. I do not; I think it's sweet and cute, but not sexy. I guess I just don't get it. I prefer stuff like this and this. Oh, and this. :)

I got back from Fargo a couple of hours ago, and now as my eyelids droop, for some reason I'm experiencing renewed annoyance at the fact that my university does not have an electronic submission option for theses and dissertations. The University of Tennessee has had it for about five years now, and I can't tell you how satisfying it was not to have to buy all that archival cotton paper, print out my M.A. thesis, and haul it to the Office of Graduate Studies. Instead, I saved the file on a Zip disk and took it over for the administrative assistant to copy it onto her hard drive, got my imprimatur from the Dean, and walked away. I'm taking my prelims this summer, and as far as I know, there isn't even talk of implementing electronic submission. Perhaps Shane will know who would make that decision and would help me.

Now that I've secured approval for my technical communication theory & research reading list, I thought I'd post it. Yeah, I know the formatting's not great; I used the OpenOffice html editor, since there was no way I was going to hand-code all that. Behold, my summer:

Tomorrow I leave for the GPACW conference, and I have finally finished my presentation. This time, I used Drupal's collaborative book module, which made the whole thing much more wieldy and easier to edit. Below is the table of contents:

• Introduction: The Call for Critical Studies of Genre
• Normalization in Higher Education
• The Deployment of Disciplinary Power in The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Invisible Adjunct and Heteroglossia
• Institutional Reform
• Conclusion: Weblogs and Change
• References

I cut a lot, but I still need to cut more (for my oral presentation--the version here will remain as is). Guess I'll be doing that in the hotel tomorrow night.

The new issue of thirdspace on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities just went live, and now they're featuring PDFs of each issue; Laura Gurak has noted that we're seeing this trend of both PDF versions and html versions in electronic publishing because if it looks like print, it's better for a tenure portfolio. She chalks it up to the fact that we're in a state of transition right now in terms of academic publishing.

Another cool little thing...I received an email from the program coordinator of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society's Internet Law Program May 13-15. Apparently I am one of a group of bloggers they're inviting to the program with a tuition waiver (the tuition is $1995, but for me it technically would have been $895 since I'm a student--hey, either way it's free). I'm excited about the opportunity to learn more about internet law than I ever could have imagined. Plus, I've never been to the Boston area before, so that will be nice. I'm still pinching myself with disbelief that they would invite me to this thing. I can't imagine who would have recommended me, but I'm grateful! Part of me still thinks this is a scam, a Who's Who Among American High School Students type of scheme. At any rate, I'll definitely blog my notes from the program and make sure Drupal and the progressive IP/publishing model we're adhering to for Into the Blogosphere get some attention.