Asides

Made it out West mostly intact, except for the keep-it-closed latch on my laptop, which broke a couple hours ago. I’ll have to see if I can take it by an Apple store tomorrow. But right now, I’m sitting in sunny Berkeley, enjoying a mild and breezy 68 degrees. Dinner with my mom’s sister tonight, then into the city tomorrow to check into the hotel. And it was around 30 when I left the house this morning. I could get used to this CCCC-in-warm-locations thing — but next year it’s Chicago. Enjoy it while you can, I suppose.

I was careless when upgrading to WordPress 1.5 and managed to make a big mess of things. It’s gonna take me a little while to get all the pieces put back together. (I so didn’t need this right now. . .)

UPDATE: That’s a little better, at least. I don’t have time to fool with CSS before flying out to San Francisco, so I’m afraid it’ll look clean, functional, and rather dull for a while, though I miss my green and black.

Just arrived in today’s mail, from Utah State University Press:

Genre Across the Curriculum, edited by Anne Herrington and Charles Moran, with a chapter titled “The Teaching and Learning of Web Genres in First-Year Composition” by Mike Edwards and Heidi McKee.

Thanks to Anne and Charlie for being terrific editors, and to Heidi McKee for being a gracious, insightful, and generous co-author.

It’s suddenly that time again: grappling with the CCCC presentation, working on writing and editing and design with the textbook committee, figuring out why two of the crawls in the website database at work keep breaking, trying to put Chapter 2 together, getting the Tacitus-and-weblogs article whipped into shape to submit for publication, and always the hundred additional domestic details. (How does one pack and ship a 54-inch-high chest of drawers 400 miles? Where do I even find a box like that?) Well, I shouldn’t complain. Tink’s singing to herself in the kitchen, and John’s recently put up two deeply insightful weblog entries that are well worth your attention: one on community college scholarship, and one on the social security debate. Check ’em out.

And I have to say, I’m very much looking forward to CCCC; not only to the presentations, which I inevitably find hugely valuable and informative (no matter how much I might gripe about some of them, which — as I hope might be self-evident, and I’ll refer you again to the English translation of this weblog’s name — is more a mark of my splenetic temperament than an indicator of any presentation’s quality), not only to seeing the folks whose weblog entries and journal articles I enjoy reading from day to day, but also to seeing old friends from other institutions, and colleagues who’ve recently gotten jobs and moved on. I’m hoping to blog some of the presentations I go to again this year, but I’m also going to be sure this time (as I did at Computers and Writing) that I ask the permission of the presenters, which I haven’t done at past CCCCs, and about which I’m feeling a little guilty.

Why does my random-image displayer Perl script seem to have mysteriously stopped working? I haven’t changed anything — the HTML, the CSS, the images, the script itself, they’re all just the same as always, permissions are OK, so how come my right-hand-side tall thin greenish scene doesn’t show up now? Grr. Anybody with more tech expertise have any theories?

I had dinner with a good friend tonight, and described my Father-Ong-as-Army-Chaplain dream to her and my thoughts on its likely provenance. Wayne Booth mentions Ong (83) as one of rhetoric’s “Major Rescuers,” and Ong’s spirit is certainly present throughout the text in Booth’s attention to the importance of audience in rhetoric. The other source, I think, was in some disturbing video footage from Iraq I came across this week: it definitely left an impression.

I related this to my friend, and — having seen the video footage, and knowing my abiding interest in the uses of rhetoric — she was quiet for a moment. “So what this dream is telling you,” she said, “is that, subconsciously, you’ve linked your life’s pursuit to tipping over outhouses.”

“Yup.”

“And you’re OK with that.”

Yup.

My Army dreams always only come when I’m feeling stressed. No exception, this one — only academia and the Army are starting to blur in really weird ways in my dreams.

Pretty simple, really: I was in the Army again, and we were in the desert, in Iraq. I had my woodland camo BDUs on, my rucksack, gas mask, M16, and I was driving my old 724 HQ6 humvee.

And Walter Ong was the battalion chaplain, and I was driving him around looking for the footlocker full of bibles that had fallen off the back of the humvee, and he was being really kind.

Let me say that again:

Walter Ong was the battalion chaplain.

Moments like that, I look at my subconscious and ask: what the hell?

It’s a sad day: Hunter S. Thompson killed himself.

These successive MetaFilter comments sum up the emotional response better than I could:

With Cash, and now Thompson, gone — what’s the fucking point of being an American?

The list of living people I admire is growing smaller and smaller.

I don’t usually say, out loud, “Oh my God!”, but I did when I saw this. This is very, very sad.

Holy fucking fuck.

“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

He’ll be missed.

UPDATE: More here and here. And from the 400+ comments of the MeFi thread:

“Hunter Thompson was Deep Throat!”

I’ve been tinkering with the layout some, trying to get that tall skinny graphic on the right side to line up flush with the top box; unfortunately, I’m bedeviled by the fact that all these browsers interpret the CSS box model differently. Basically, the top black area has some padding so that the left menu and middle body text don’t butt flush up against it, so I’ve tried to remedy that by giving the right box a negative top margin. Unfortunately, what this seems to mean so far is that in Safari, OmniWeb, and Konqueror-based browsers, a minus 12 pixel top margin gets the picture flush, and gets it with just a one-pixel line in Mozilla-type browsers. Unfortunately, it winds up looking like crap in Opera (which is really weird: is the rest of the browser industry wrong, or is the W3C’s Håkon Wium Lie wrong?), and even worse crap in Macintosh MSIE (which isn’t weird at all).

According to my site statistics, most of the pageviews I’m getting come from Mozilla-type browsers. So I’d like to ask you for feedback: how does the layout look now, in your browser, especially with how that right-side graphic lines up with the black top box? Much obliged, dear reader.