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See these instructions for making your iBook furry. I can imagine taking this approach with more than just fur to make the iBook a little more interesting.

I’m back home and even well-rested, relative to my time in San Francisco at least. Here’s a post that sort of wraps things up for me regarding the CCCCs:

• One thing I regret: I didn’t make it to the “fleshmeet” that John Lovas was going to have, though I’m not sure that actually happened anyway. See John’s blog for entries about his CCCCs experiences starting on March 15 and ending and summing up on March 19. I very much agree with John when he writes “That NCTE/CCCC still has a long way to go in supporting conference presentations with up-to-date technology. Somehow, there’s got to be a wireless solution that would put web access in every meeting room.” I do blame a lot of that on the Moscone Center; after all, the MLA in Philly was extremely WiFi friendly.
• Samantha “Dr. B” Blackmon has lots of comments from the CCCCs, ending here. My own fashion choices at the CCCCs? I wore a shirt with a collar on the day I was at the conference (I believe it was blue), and I wore a T-shirt on tourist day.
• He hasn’t posted anything about it yet, but I saw Derek “Earth Wide Moth” Mueller give a paper. I also got a chance to meet Collin Brooke at that session too.
• Nick Carbone has a couple of interesting entries about CCCCs stuff here; it looks like he might have more after this.
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff has lots of posts about the CCCCs, ending here with a not so happy story about food poisioning. Get well, Clancy.
• Mike at vitia has lots of posts on the CCCCs; this post about evaluating web sites is a good place to start, I think. I was in this session too (sorry we didn’t cross paths, Mike) and agree with him. Oh, BTW, great looking skin on your blog, Mike.

I think that’s enough to get you started with CCCCs blog reading. Anyway, a good time for one and all. Now it’s time for me to get caught up with teaching, writing, and the rest of my life.

When I was about 13 or 14, my family (parents, three younger sisters, and me) took a 3 week tour of the west. Thanks to the fact that my parents back then would gleefully drive us for eight hours at a time, we hit everything: the Grand Canyon, Vegas, LA (and assorted amusement parks), Yellowstone on the way back, etc. I think I most fondly remember two parts of that trip now: visiting “The Hearst Castle” and taking a walking tour of San Francisco. In fact, I think these two parts of the trip were the beginning of my life-long and conflicting interests in lefty/alternative politics, kitsch, material positions, money, and good food. Plus they both got me out of the car.

Anyway, I found myself once again in San Francisco for the first time in 25 years or so (this time for a conference) and I had a lot of fun. Thursday was a “work day,” and Friday was a “tourist day.” Here’s what I did:

NYC friend Annette S. (who was attending her first CCCCs) and I met up at Powell and Market and took a bus to the Haight-Ashbury area. It was unfortunately a kind of rainy and cold day, so walking there was pretty much out of the question. I guess it was too far anyway.

We just kinda strolled around and shopped a bit in the area. Annette S. spent a long time contemplating the purchase of a groovy blazer from a trendy second-hand store (she ultimately bought it). Here’s a couple of pictures:

Me standing in front of some very cool Victorians– another example of how my digital camera cannot do the scene justice.

I had heard that there is now a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury; here’s a picture of it. It looks like I’m not the only one who has remixed consumerism, kitch, and coolness.

All your Grateful Dead t-shirt needs.

After hanging out over coffee for a while, Annette S. went off toward the Castro and I went to catch a bus down to Gharadalli square, which I don’t remember as a kid. It has the look and feel of a “restored” historic area rather than an authentic one, if that makes sense. Here’s a picture of it:

I hung out there for a while– more shopping, I had a snack of Belgian style fried potatoes (essentially fancy french fries), people watching, and waiting for Steve B. to show up, who joined me for the second leg of tourist day.

Basically, we walked down the wharf, stopping first at this place called Chippino’s for a helping of one of San Francisco’s signature dishes, a seafood stew in a tomato base called, perhaps not surprisingly, chippino.

Here’s a picture– this is actually Steve B’s serving, and I’m eating in the background. Two things worth noting here: first, they brought us each what had to have been a half-gallon of this stuff; we could have EASILY split a portion and probably split this three or four ways. Second, Chippino is most definitely an “earthy” and simple dish, with mussels, clams, squid, etc., and of course crab. I guess what I’m getting at is even if I was hungry enough, I don’t think I could have eaten it all. After a while, sandy mussels and chewy squid kind of wears on you.

Anyway, mostly we just walked around the Fisherman’s Wharf area.

It rained and rained way too much, so after a while, we had had enough. It’s too bad because it would have been a lot more fun on a decent day.

Here’s a picture of Alcatraz, which is quite the tourist attraction nowadays. Boats go out there for tours, and we found out that the tours were booked until Tuesday. There were t-shirts everywhere making various jokes about one of the most notorious prisons that have ever existed, things like “Alcatraz swim team.” Ha ha.

We did manage to go inside one place called Musee Mecanique, which was a sort of “hands on” museum for antique arcade games. Remember that fortune teller thing from the movie Big? They had dozens of those in there. Along with fortune teller machines, they had old pinball machines, player pianos, those movie/picture/peep show things you look into, you name it. Follow that link for Musee Mecanique and you’ll see a bunch of them.

Here’s Steve B. looking in at one of the machines, one that depicted an opium den someplace in Asia.

We didn’t ride a cable car for a whole bunch of different reasons, including the crowds even on a rainy day, and the fact that it was raining. We did take a ride on an old streetcar on the Market Street Railway. Frankly, I think this was a better choice than the cable car because the route took us all the way down the port area by all the different wharfs and such, we saw lots and lots of cable cars right outside our hotel, and besides, it was raining.

Here’s the inside of the car we were in, which was a 1950’s era car from San Francisco or Brooklyn, I can’t remember. They had streetcars from that era from all over the US and I even saw one from Milan.

Steve B. and I got back to the hotel and chilled a while, watching a bit of basketball. We went to Chinatown for dinner, meeting up with hotel roommate/friend/fellow conference goer Bill. The night closed with beers at an Irish bar with a loud band– fun, but I could have used a quieter place.

Other than a shuttle bus ride to the Oakland airport that was a bit exciting for very early in the morning (up and down hills at an alarming speed, etc.), that pretty much was the end of my trip.

Despite the weather, I had a pretty good time. I liked my time in San Francisco, though I must say I didn’t love it the way that some people do. It struck me as a bit scruffy (though that might be the weather), too expensive, and there were way too many homeless people, and I don’t mean that relative to my quaint and simple midwestern home; I mean that relative to places like Chicago or New York, where I suppose the harsh weather makes being homeless a lot more difficult and hidden. I’m hoping to go back out there for another conference one of these days though.

I just learned (on Vh1) that The Pretenders have been inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. Since The Pretenders 1 and The Pretenders Extended Play were the first two albums I ever bought, I am now officially old.

See this bit from the Onion. Pretty funny.

I’m at a conference in San Francisco right now (if you’re curious, you can read about it on my official blog), but I’ve never been much of a green beer kind of guy anyway.

Today I’m done with the conference (I think), and I’m going to be touring about town with Steve B. and Annette S.; details later.

Thursday was my “conference day.� I didn’t manage to make it to the 8 am keynote address by Doug Hesse (a tad too early for me), and I didn’t go to every session (I gotta eat, right?) and I didn’t stay through all the presentations (sorry about that). But I did make it to a lot of sessions. Here are some thoughts:

* I went to see a panel called “Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical data to Assess Pedagogy and Student Achievement� which featured a couple bloggers I read once in a while, Derek Mueller and Dennis Jerz, along with Bradley Bleck (who I know more from tech-rhet) and Anne Jones. Good talks. I liked what Bradley had to say about how blogs bring into a different question this idea of the idea of the audience being a “fiction� because, as a result of links, trackbacks, comments, etc., a blogger’s audience isn’t much of a fiction. Derek, if you’re reading this, you should check out Nicholas Burbles’ work on the rhetoric of the link; I think it might fit in with your project.

The rest of the presenters here were reporting on one version of research or another. All interesting, and two related themes emerged for me. First, if a teacher doesn’t blog her or himself and then attempts to use blogs in their teaching, they run into some interesting problems. Second, a lot of the success and failures of student blogging revolves around self-motivation. I suppose we could say that almost anything, but, as I wrote about in my “Blogging Goes Bad� article, I think there are some ways in which this is particularly true with blogs.

Anyway, then it was lunch and a quick visit to the SFMOMA gift shop where I bought the coolest snow globe ever.

The first afternoon panel was a quasi-roundtable format called “Why Napster Matters: File Sharing, Ownership, and New Digital Ethics,� featuring Danielle DeVoss, Carrie Heeter (who, interestingly enough, teaches for Michigan State but lives in San Francisco), John Logie, Michael Moore (no, not that one, the one who teaches at Michigan Tech), and Jim Porter. John’s presentation was the one most directly about Napster, though everyone else’s talk tied into this issue of peer-to-peer sharing and copyright in different ways.

The two things that struck me: First, I had never heard of the Star Wars kid that Danielle talked about, and while I understand why she talked about this example (and it was a fascinating one, too), I have to wonder what this poor kid thinks of having literally millions of Internet folk laughing at (and, I guess, with) him and his lightsaber performance. Second, in the audience was a woman who actually used to work for Napster. She asked a good question and I thought we were going to go down that path a bit more, but she let the whole thing drop. At least she didn’t say “you people got it all wrong.�

I caught my friend and colleague Bill Hart-Davidson’s talk “Putting a CMS to Work in a Writing Program: 3 Mission Critical Applications.� I’m kind of biased about this because Bill and I (and I think Steve B.) are working on an article about this stuff, but I thought he did a good job. Essentially, he was talking about the sorts of ways in which CMS (and by “CMS,� was talking about both “course management systems� and “content management systems�) tools can work with some of the basic goals of WPA work. That’s a quick gloss; maybe I can get him to let me make a link to his power point presentation.

Somewhere in here (I’m not sure exactly where), I ran into Jeff Rice and Jenny Edbauer. I had met Jeff in person before, but not Jenny. Always nice to put a face with a name.

Then it was off to listen to Lawrence Lessing’s talk. Not surprisingly, it was about IP issues. Lessing is obviously a brilliant guy and incredibly well-published and accomplished writer, and essentially, his talk was a presentation version of his take on copyright intellectual property and so forth. Great content, but that wasn’t really what impressed me. I had to leave a bit early (see below), but I have to say it was one of the best pieces of delivery of a presentation I’ve ever seen in any format in any venue.

About a week ago, I had a post about to read or not read a conference paper, and I think what Lessing did was what one would ideally do: he performed in that he was “reading� from a script (not a paper, really), but what he was really doing was performing in the way that a stage actor performs in a play. I don’t know, maybe it’s pretty unreasonable for most academics to perform at that level, and I’ll bet that Lessing has given one version or another of this spiel 100 times in the last year. Still, it was darn impressive. And holy cow, the powerpoint (or whatever it is he used) presentation was by far the best I’ve seen, more an act of art than the usual bullet points with an MS template.

Anyway, I confess I left the Lessing panel early to go to at least a small part of the Bedford-St. Martin’s party. I could only go to a part of it because I finished the day at the CCCCs by presenting at the MFA Special Interest Group session, but I ran into colleague, friend, and St. Martin’s guy Nick Carbone and he twisted my arm. It was speed partying: got on a shuttle buss, rode out to the party, “partied� (as it were) for about a half-hour, came back to the convention center for my presentation. Though I was only there for a bit, it was well worth it. The party was on the top floor of some old bank in San Francisco, and it featured lots of good food and drink, and a jazz trio that included an upright bass, an electric guitar, and a woman playing a long-stringed Japanese instrument called a Koto.

As for my presentation? It went fine, I suppose. The MFA folks are nice and everything, though it does sometimes remind me how “distant� in a variety of different ways I am nowadays from creative writing.

So that was that. I have a few regrets of things I missed, but overall an excellent conference. I might attend a few things tomorrow late in the day, but tomorrow, I’m a tourist.

Part I (3:30-ish am)

As is my habit, I have woken up too early.

Years and years ago (at least 15 years ago now, maybe more), I was staying with a friend of mine in Washington D.C., and this friend, the type who would be late for his own funeral, got me to the airport late. I managed to check my bag, but I missed the flight. So I had to hang around Washington National Airport for 10 hours, waiting for another flight back home to Iowa, just because I (or really, my friend) couldn’t manage to get to the airport a little early.

Anyway, the result this morning is I’ve got about 10 or 20 minutes to kill, waiting for the 4:15 am cab to get me to the airport just shy of 2 hours for my 6:18 am flight. This is far too early.

In any event, I’ve heard that internet connectivity at and around the Moscone Center is kind of spotty and/or “not free,” but my plan/hope is to write a bit about the CCCCs as they happen. And for me, that includes things like this: waiting around, “unofficial” and yet “conference related” tourist adventures, etc. Expect a few pictures later on.

It’s somewhat popular nowadays to be cynical about the CCCCs, to suggest it’s just become composition and rhetoric’s own mini- (yet huge) version of the MLA. Personally, I disagree with this. I always find speakers at the CCCCs that I find interesting (though sometimes I have to look a bit), I have lots of friends and colleagues I see once or twice a year and/or who I meet for the first time at the CCCCs, and, for the most part, people attending the CCCCs are in a much better mood than people attending MLA. As they should be: the CCCCs is not a “job meat market” disguised as a conference, the CCCCs is not held during the Christmas holiday, and comp/rhet people are generally, well, “happy,” for lack of a better word.

Anyway, I just wish the cab would get here. More later.

Part II
Long story short: had a long flight, but all went well. I ran into Michael Day at the Oakland Airport, which made it easy to get downtown. Found my way to the hotel, found my way to the Moscone center, registered and such, and now getting ready for dinner and such.

The real conference activities start tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some amateurish pictures.

Here’s the room I’m sharing with Bill and Steve. Tiny, and just a bunch of beds, but a good deal.

Hey, where’s that cable car going? We’re staying on Powell, one of the spots where they turn the cable cars around.

This is a sort of weird sculpture on the walk to the Moscone Center. I don’t know if you can tell with this picture, but he has a lot of fingers on the extended hand, multiple hands, multiple feet, etc. Strange but funny.

Interestingly enough, there is another conference going on at the Moscone conference, something that appears to be about gambling. Maybe we can get these people together….

Mecca– er, I mean, a store I certainly intend to visit on this trip. Seriously, this is certainly the biggest Apple store I’ve ever seen….

A gaggle of Purdue grads looking at something– everyone but Jeff, that is….

Oh, one more thing I found amusing: the Blogger spell checker suggests “cuckoo” to replace “CCCCs.”

As I mentioned the other day, I have a fairly small speaking role this year at the CCCCs in San Francisco. I’m participating on the Creative Writing SIG and the title of my talk/presentation is “Blogs and the Writerly Life: Publishing, brainstorming, Linking, Talking.” I don’t expect to talk for much more than about five or ten minutes, but as I was putting together my handout (which I link to here), it occurred to me that I might as well write up the thinking that went into my handout and simply post those thoughts here.

It’s funny how these CCCC proposals work. A year or so ago, when I was first proposing a talk about the place of blogging in a “writerly” life, I think it was possible to find people who hadn’t heard of “web logs.” Now, not so much.

In any event, here are my thoughts (as they relate to the handout I have prepared) about how I see blogging fitting into the lives of writers and teachers.

Why Should Writers Blog? Or, perhaps more accurately, why do I blog? There are lots of good reasons, but here are four for the time being:

• To keep a notebook/journal/easy content organizing tool. The way I see it, this is the most important reason for me to keep a blog. My blog provides me a space to post links and brief commentaries about things I come across in my reading and on the web, and it makes it easy for me to find again later. For example, I put together most of this presentation by sifting through my archives to find things I linked to a while ago.
• It makes other kinds of writing “easier.” In the language of composition and rhetoric folk, blogging is a “pre-writing” tool. Well-known blogger and all-around good writer Jill Walker wrote about this back in December in an interesting post titled “Blogging makes writing easier.“
• Personally, I like the attention. And I guess I mean “attention” in two closely related ways . First, I know that I reach a lot more readers with my blog than I do with my more traditional academic or non-academic writings. This is not to say that my audience rivals that of Stephen King, but I routinely get 60 or more “hits” a day on this site. The way I figure it, if only a quarter of those visits are by people who actually read what I have to say on my blog, that means 150 or more people are reading my writing every week. That’s certainly more than the number of people who have read my print articles.

  Second, I get feedback from readers of my blog, in the form of comments here, trackback links to other blogs, and even email messages sent directly to me. I rarely get that kind of attention as the result of a piece of my writing that appears in print.

• It might help get you published in a more traditional sense. For example, see “A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)” by Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times, December 15, 2004, page E1. In this article, Kurlantzick tells several stories of writers who have signed deals for novels and non-fiction books as a result of a popular blog space.

Why Should Writers Not Blog? It’s obviously not a good forum for everyone, even for folks who identify themselves as writers. Here are three reasons to not blog (or at least three things to think about if you want to have a writerly life and a blog at the same time):

• Not everything is appropriate for a blog. This might just be obvious, but because blogs are such a public forum, they aren’t really the same thing as a more private and personal diary or journal. Yet, as obvious as this might seem, I think a lot of blog writers forget this occasionally.
• Blogging might get you fired. I covered this territory back in February with this blog entry “Is somebody trying to tell me something here?” As I said back then, I think what it boils down to is you need to think before you blog to avoid saying something really really wrong.
• Blogging is an excellent procrastination tool. I think there is a fine line between “pre-writing/brainstorming” and “procrastination/goofing off,” and too often, I think I cross that line in my own blogging. When a deadline looms, I have to make a conscious effort to leave the blog behind, and that can sometimes be difficult.

Blogs and Writing Pedagogy. This is territory that I cover all the time in this blog, so I won’t dwell on it too much here now, and I’m not sure how much detail I’ll go into during my presentation, either. I can pretty much point to just about everything I link to on my blog as a good resource for information on using blogs in teaching. But here are four links/resources I intend to mention.

• John Lovas’ “A Guided Tour to Blogging” offers very good advice to writing teachers who are interested in getting started with blogs.
• Mike Arzen’s “Pedablogue”.
• Weblogg-ed: The Read/Write Web in the Classroom. Note the “Why weblogs?” link on this page.
• Kairosnews, an excellent blog/resource about rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy.

“Literary Blogs and Their Influence” This was the title of a C-SPAN BookTV panel discussion about book related blogs and the influence on the publishing industry. Because of the nature of this SIG (“creative writing”), I suspect this will be The panelist were pretty much a “who’s who” of notable literary blogs:

• Dennis Loy Johnson (MobyLives.com)
• Maud Newton (MaudNewton.com) (This one is one of my personal favorites).
• Michael Orthofer (Complete-Review.com) (This is more a clearinghouse than a blog).
• Laila Lalami (MoorishGirl.com)
• Ron Hogan (Beatrice.com)
• George Murray (Bookninja.com)
• Blog of a Bookslut (www.bookslut.com/blog). While not included in the panel discussion, the bookslut people have a great literary blog nonetheless.

How to get started with a blog Last, but far from least, I’m going to offer these ideas on how to actually start a blog of one’s own. As I’ve written about here many times before, the clear winner to me is blogger. It’s what I use for my own blogging and it’s what I use for my teaching with blogs.

There are several different ways to support blogs. Here are four:

• Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) Advantages: Free, easy, pretty good looking blogs, good support. The gold standard of blogging software, IMO. Disadvantages: it lacks some features of fancier blogging softwares, the interface is occasionally clunkly.
• LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com) Advantages: Free, reasonably easy, easily customized. Disadvantages: Kind of unattractive blogs, a less serious interface, more popular with teenagers.
• TypePad (http://www.typepad.com) Advantages: Cool looking blogs, very good support, excellent blog features. Disadvantages: $5-$15 a month, depending on the level of support you want.
• Do it yourself CMS Products. These include MovableType, WordPress, and Drupal, along with many many others. Advantages: Free, lots of good features, you get to control everything. Disadvantages: Requires a high level of computer expertise, server space, etc.

I doubt I’ll cover all of this Thursday night, but here it is nonetheless. We’ll see how it goes.

They brought in two different candidates for the president’s job at EMU last weekend, and it looks like they are going to pick John Fallon, who is currently president of SUNY Potsdam. I don’t know a whole lot about him, but based on what I’ve read this morning, here’s what I think:

• According to the biography I link to above, Fallon has done good things for SUNY Potsdam. Or let me put it this way: the google search “”John Fallon” “SUNY Potsdam” controversy” yeilded no results.
• For one reason or another, Fallon seems to really be ready to move beyond SUNY Potsdam. He was also in the running for the prez job at Radford University.
• Fallon has a lot of Michigan connections, so it makes a certain amount of sense that he wants to come back here.

Anyway, let’s keep an open mind and see what happens. We know it ain’t gonna get worse….

Last night, I was minding my own business, when the phone rings. “Does the person of the house who is over 18 years of age have time to take a survey?” Annette was out, and Will and I were watching Will’s favorite show on the Food Network, Unwrapped. (Yes, my seven year-old has a favorite show on the Food Network; he takes after his old man.) “Sure,” I say.

The poll starts out normal enough, and I figure out quickly that the general focus of the poll is politics in Michigan. Then it starts to get a bit more specific in talking about Debbie Stabenow, who is the junior Senator for Michigan. I don’t know a whole lot about Stabenow; she’s a Democrat, she hasn’t done anything bad enough to show up in the newspaper, but I can’t name anything that she’s done to distinguish herself, either. Anyway, they were asking me if I supported her or not (I do), and if I would vote for one of three different types of Republican candidates who are (apparently) gearing up for a run against her in 2006 (I would not).

Then it took kind of a weird turn. The pollster said something like “I’m going to tell you about a series of issues and Senator Stabenow’s position on them. For each item, I’d like you to give me a rating of 0 to 10, where 0 means the issue would strongly consider changing your support for Stabenow, while 10 would mean you would continue to strongly support Stabenow.” Ah, okay, I guess. The pollster then proceeded to tell me about all kinds of “positions” held by Stabenow I was supposed to react to: the way the gun lobby groups have given her a failing grade because of her support for gun control, her vote against giving the troops adequate support in Iraq, her efforts to raise the retirement age and the social security tax, her support for partial birth abortions, the fact that she’s being supported by gay rights groups, and so forth.

After about ten of these, I stopped the pollster. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said.

“How many more of these am I going to ask you?” she anticipated. “Not many more.”

“No, no, that’s not it. You’re not really conducting a poll, are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“These questions you’re asking. They aren’t poll questions. They are designed to get me to react to the positions that you say Stabenow holds and to potentially change my mind about my support for her.”

“Ah, I don’t know what you mean.” And I don’t think she did.

“This isn’t a real poll. This is a campaign call.”

“I’m just asking the questions on the sheet.”

“Who hired you?”

“Oh, I have no idea. And it’s, you know, one company or person behind another one behind another one. I don’t know if you really could find that out.”

“Where are you, anyway?”

“Manhattan.”

“Could I speak to your supervisor?”

And I did, though the supervisor didn’t know a whole lot more than the person who called me. I did find this out though: It’s a company called Central Marketing and they’re located in New York, NY; based on the address they gave me (which checked out with a simple web search), here’s where they are indeed located (according to Google). The folks I talked to were all perfectly pleasant and professional and just doing their job. I just wanted to figure out who hired them to do this job in the first place.

I don’t know who hired them, but I have my suspicions. And I think I know two other things:

• Debbie Stabenow probably didn’t hire this firm.
• It’s gonna be a bumpy 2006 in Michigan if these are the tatics they’re starting with.