Drupal

Blackfeminism.org is a community blog about race and gender issues, which looks to be powered by Drupal. It's very new and smart, and I hope they get a lot of uptake. I look forward to the possibility that there will be some good discussion of race online; I've had a post gestating in my mind about race and blogging for a couple of days now, but I'm still working out what I want to say. I had a gobsmacking epiphany after reading Ann DuCille's article "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies" for the second time for the paper I recently wrote for my Women's Studies class, and now race is going to figure into my dissertation project a lot more than I previously thought, as well it should.

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.

Holy crap! I was just doing a little research for my dissertation (I'm interested in looking at blogs by mothers) and ended up at the site for the Hip Mama (a magazine, in case you didn't know). I hadn't been to the site in a while, and I'm pleasantly surprised that they are now running on Drupal. It looks like they aren't running version 4.4, though, since my hub username and password didn't work when I tried to login. They hope that the site will have more of a community feel now. 8)

The journal Computers and Composition now has a blog! They're even using Drupal, which is now in its third year. I don't intend for this post to be so cheerleader-y; I'm not simply saying, "They have a blog! Yay!" I'm serious here: If this blog is updated often, linked to, and posted to by all the other rhetoricians and compositionists who blog or have more static web sites, that might take us closer to a new model of scholarly publishing--a true knowledge community, without the considerable lag time involved in most scholarly publishing. Peer review will still take place, of course, but it won't be blind (we'll see more accountability, and the notion of ethos will become more significant, I think), it will be more interactive, and we'll see ideas as they form and are refined by communal criticism.

In addition...I can't be the only one who's amused by the irony that C&C is published by Elsevier, yet they went open-source for their blog. A harbinger if I ever saw one--but I don't want to jinx it. :-)

Hey, you can now create an account on my site, which means you can post comments that aren't anonymous. Let me know if you have any problems with registering!

I love her even more now. Ivins responds to this Talking Points Memo post in her latest column. Josh Marshall argues that William Safire's writing about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the rewriting of recent history is the most Orwellian of the hawk rhetoric. Ivins comes up with several more shining examples:

That's good, but not as good as my old favorites at the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Their June 1 editorial "Weapons of Mass Distortion" is a masterpiece. In this version, those who ask the WMD question are attempting "to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters."

"But who's trying to deceive whom here?" thunders the Journal. "That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war." So there! And why did everyone assume it? Either because we were lied to or because there was a massive intelligence failure. To get off Orwell and back to the facts here, we were told we were going to war because Iraq had 5,000 gallons of anthrax, several tons of VX nerve gas, between 100 tons and 500 tons of other toxins, including botulinin, mustard gas, ricin and Sarin, 15 to 20 Scud missiles, drones fitted with poison sprays and mobile chemical laboratories.

[...]

Also contending for the Orwell award is White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. In response to questions about
that rather expensive photo-op aboard the USS Lincoln (between $800,000 and $1 million just for delaying the
aircraft carrier a day), Fleischer said, "It does a disservice to the men and women in our military" to suggest that the president "or the manner in which the president visited the military would be anything other than the exact appropriate thing to do." Everything the president does is the exact appropriate thing to do, and anyone who says otherwise is doing a disservice to the troops. Amazing.

Molly Ivins=National Treasure.