Want to know what my voice sounds like? Download this mp3 and find out. It's my response to Jenny's call:

A call to y’all: your voice (and feet). My podcast piece for 4Cs–titled “On Foot Composition”–will involve a reflection on mobile writings. My hope is to assemble many voices talking about writing through and with mobility. The assemblage on assemblage, in other words.

All you have to do is record a 30-second (or shorter) description of the last time you “wrote” on foot. By this I mean the last time you puzzled something out, or figured yourself into a problem, or composed an email you would love to send, etc. Were you walking, sitting on the bus, shopping? No meta reflection necessary. Just a description. You can record this in Garage Band or any other format you’d like. Then send it my way to: edbauer [at] psu [dot] edu. No background music or anything fancy.

I put background music in my recording just for fun, but I can always re-record it if the music is disruptive in some way.

Oh yeah, and here's how I look as a Simpson (via Brendan):

Edited: This one is probably more accurate:

I'm just now reading and linking to the February edition of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the February Big Fat Carnival. It's the first-ever instantiation of both, and I hope to see many more. This is important work.

As most of you know, I'm writing a dissertation about rhetoric, gender, and blogging using where are the women? as a case study. I should say that I'm not looking at every post on the list I compiled, only the spikes of activity: August 2002, September 2002, March through August of 2004, December 2004, and February 2005. So here are the numbers:

Total number of posts: 102
Total number of comments: 2243 (not counting spam or those accidental duplicate comments)
Total number of trackbacks: 171

Total number of posts by men: 33
Total number of posts by women: 69

Total number of comments by men: 885
Total number of comments by women: 1059
Total number of comments by gender-free: 349

Total number of trackbacks by men: 60
Total number of trackbacks by women: 105
Total number of trackbacks by gender-free: 6

Total number of posts by men that allowed comments: 30
Total number of posts by women that allowed comments: 53

Total number of comments under posts by men: 1374
Total number of comments under posts by women: 869

Average number of comments readers left under a post written by a man: 46
Average number of comments readers left under a post written by a woman: 16

Now here's my problem. I think these numbers are kind of interesting -- they help provide a tie-in to findings in previous research in gender and computer-mediated communication, especially that of Susan Herring, that show that men's online postings get more replies than women's, etc. These numbers certainly corroborate that. I'm interested in the implications of the numbers: The fact, for example, that there are more than twice as many posts by women than by men speaks to how important this question is to this particular group of women. These women took the time and expended the effort to write all these posts; despite the fact that some of the posts are flippant and parodic, obviously they care about the issue. And, taking into account the context and patterns of online interaction, the numbers arguably reveal something about how heated these discussions are.

But: In my experience, when I even think about counting something, everyone giving me feedback on the given project gets a little too excited and wants me to go whole-hog to the empirical and quantitative approach. (Why don't you count the number of words per post?! Devise a coding scheme and code everything!) I'm not necessarily talking about my committee, just scholars in general. Although that's very valuable and interesting research, it's not what I'm interested in doing. I'm taking a naturalistic approach, mostly consisting of interpretive close intertextual reading. So far that's okay with my committee -- they seem fine with whatever approach I choose as long as I can define/articulate/defend it -- but I'm thinking about not even putting these numbers in my dissertation anywhere, lest they be held against me. What do the rest of you think? If you can give me some language to use to introduce and explain the numbers and my choice to include them, that would be especially helpful.

Edited to add: By "men" and "women," I mean people presenting online as men and women. For the purposes of my dissertation research, I'm thinking of gender as a rhetorical position (i.e., positioning oneself as...). This is because someone might strategically present hirself as a man or woman because ze knows that the audience will respond to hir in a certain way. In this sense I'm thinking of gender as performative.

The low tonight is -18! Who knows what it will "feel like."

Eh, who am I kidding. Of course I'm going to go outside today. It's an opportunity to experience the sublime. Plus I want to pick up a couple of copies of the paper.

Title lifted from Dean Dad. These are some items I need to mark here so that they don't keep occupying a window with 500 tabs open:

Mike Garcia's dissertation notes. It's going to rock the field of rhetoric and composition; I'm sure it's going to be one of the best critiques of assessment out there. I also like what he's doing with del.icio.us.

Some of you know that I've recently suffered a series of crushing career-related disappointments, and I want to be honest about that in this space, if vague and oblique. This has made it a lot more difficult to finish my dissertation. I'm not facing a running-out-of-funding situation, but I am still determined to be finished by this summer. So: I'm interested in inspiring stories, like this one about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and this one about several other women who accomplished so much under much more adverse circumstances than mine.

What's also helped me during this time is reading beautiful posts by outstanding, talented writers about What Really Matters, like this one from Flea:

And after his shower, he asked me, "Mommy, do you still like me?"

"Not only do I like you, I love you," I told him, towelling off his hair, "I love you more than anyone."

I felt like I had to cram six years of talking to him into this one day, because I didn't know if I'd ever have it again. I had one day to find out if he liked Tae Kwan Do, if he had any friends at school, what he did in gym class, if he was having difficulty in any area. One day to help him with reading and tying his shoes, one day to tell him how much I loved him before he disappeared back inside himself. Which he did, today. That sweet little stranger that curled up in my lap yesterday morning and sang "Rich Girl" and showed me his fancy dance moves and looked right into my face and laughed and smiled is gone today. Is that what parents of normally functioning children have every day? And, if that's what you have every day, why would there be a rush to put that kind of kid on Ritalin?

And Dooce's latest monthly newsletter:

A few moments later he returned to tell me that they had found a seat for me and that I needed to hurry, they were holding the plane. I took off flying, my suitcase turning flips behind me, and as I ran down the indoor tarmac someone suddenly called out my name. I stopped suddenly to scan the faces in the crowd only to see my mother standing twenty feet in front of me, my beautiful, perfect mother. It seems ridiculous now, but in that moment it seemed as if she had appeared out of thin air, that she had dropped out of heaven. When I saw the features in her face, the way her cheekbones meet her thin nose in symmetrical angles, her milky complexion peeking out of the black of her business suit, I realized that everything was going to be okay. That was one of the most spiritual moments of my life.

I wanted to tell you that story because that is my hope for you, that no matter how far away you go or how different we may become — I know it’s going to happen, it’s only a matter of time — that when you see my face you will find strength. Look for me.

Also, the new issue of Kairos just came out.

And to close with a few things coming up that I'm excited about: first, I'm going to do a stint of guest-blogging at The Valve soon. Second, I've been invited to participate in a meeting for the Institute for the Future of the Book. We'll be talking about digital/networked textbooks in the field of rhetoric and composition. Finally, I'm going to be interviewed for a story in The Minnesota Daily about my use of blogging in my teaching. [Edited to clarify: The story is about using blogging in teaching in general; it's not an entire story devoted to MY use of blogs in my teaching.] I'm thinking of this as an opportunity to be pushed to find something new to say about using blogging in teaching. It's tempting sometimes to make it easy and trot out the same old examples and comments.

Remember that computer I used to tinker with? Well, some months back, I tinkered with it a little too much, because it wouldn't boot up. I just started using my iBook full time, but I still had two hard drives full of files, including music, that were trapped. Finally I broke down and paid an accomplished professional to investigate it. Well, I'm sad to say the motherboard is fried, but the guy who tried to fix it burned all my files to DVDs, so at least I have everything. It's nice to have music again. In honor of my data recovery, a random list of ten:

1. Me, Myself and I (De La Soul)
2. If Anyone Falls (Stevie Nicks)
3. Second Hand Rose (Barbra Streisand)
4. Gettin' It In (Jadakiss feat. Kanye West)
5. Head Over Heels (Go-Gos)
6. I Try (Macy Gray)
7. When Doves Cry (live) (Ani DiFranco & Aimee Mann)
8. Clair de Lune (Claude Debussy)
9. (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (Carole King)
10. Talking in Your Sleep (The Romantics)

I've been tagged!

Well, let's see. It's a good thing Jonathan and I didn't meet this way, because if I were trying to impress him, the books probably would have been Jesus' Son, Imaginary Magnitude, and White Noise (or, for that third one, substitute Infinite Jest or Ficciones).

But I'd want to give these potentials an accurate sense of what they'd be getting. So if we want something that represents me, it would probably have to be something like He, She, and It by Marge Piercy, Song of Solomon, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I don't know, though; I'd also feel tempted to include a book that made a big impression on me in high school: The Awakening, The Age of Innocence, or Native Son.

I wonder, would anyone really want to date those books? I feel like they're so middlebrow. It seems like in order to maximize desirability in a literary speed-dating context, one would choose the cleverest, most difficult, sophisticated, intricate, and complex books possible, like maybe Gravity's Rainbow, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake. But I guess that's my own self-consciousness (and taste in men!) working there.

Hey, wouldn't it be fun to put together some cheesy literary speed dating clichés? For example, here are a couple of guys I'd probably politely back away from*:

1. On the Road, The Beat Reader, and Erections, Ejaculations and General Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski
2. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, The Tropic of Cancer, and The Story of O

* Not that there's anything wrong with any of these books individually, but combined, they're overkill. I accidentally typed "overkiss" there at first. That would work too.

I'm now tagging everyone who hasn't done this yet.