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(Rusty Shackleford on Feb 21, 2007 5:30 PM) As they said in 'Days of Thunder' - "rubbin' (nudge, nudge!) is racin' ".

(misty on Mar 15, 2007 12:43 PM) i just stumbled upon your blog and i LOVE it... you are clever... I read about a half a dozen posts down and had to let you know i am hooked! :)

(Nancy Bauer on Mar 25, 2007 8:39 AM) You've disappeared.

(Howard on Apr 11, 2007 11:29 PM) Well...they're both racy.

(Carmen on Apr 29, 2007 10:10 PM) Hi Miriam, I am contacting you regarding a blog survey I am conducting. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Mass Communication at Penn State and my dissertation project consists of a survey that looks at women bloggers� perceived motivations for and effects of their blogging. I am sending the survey to a number of bloggers, and I would like to invite you to participate in it as well. Participation should take approximately 15 minutes of your time. I would appreciate it tremendously if you would be willing to take the survey. If you decide to do so, please follow the link below: http://www.personal.psu.edu/cds205/blog/signin.htm I would be very happy to share the findings of my study with you once it is completed! If you have any questions or comments, please don�t hesitate to contact me! Thank you in advance, Carmen

from Louis Lapham, Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-De-Siecle

Doing my bit to increase the rubble, here and there. But sometimes it's a thankless task.

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(Welshcakes Limoncello on Feb 18, 2007 12:57 PM) Keep on trying to "increase the rubble", scribbling woman! You've got a lot of support out here!

(joseph duemer on Feb 18, 2007 3:04 PM) We all have to do our little bit of "creative destruction," to coin a phrase.

(Adam Roberts on Feb 19, 2007 5:15 AM) "...the noble edifice of Western civilization had collapsed into the rubble of feminist prose." I like this metaphor very much. Its implication is that feminist prose is the raw material, the bricks and mortar as it were, out of which Western civilization was originally constructed. Quite right too.

(mj on Feb 19, 2007 10:55 AM) Thanks! (and Adam, I hadn't thought of that. Now my head hurts.)

I am: Samuel R. "Chip" Delany Few have had such broad commercial success with aggressively experimental prose techniques.

Via A Blog Around The Clock. Who, sadly, is Robert Heinlein.

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(Adam Roberts on Jan 31, 2007 5:58 AM) I was Arthur C Clarke. So, obviously, I retook, and then I was Delany too. All I need now is a 'Which University of London Academic are you?' quiz and I'll be perfectly happy.

(Anniina on Jan 31, 2007 8:12 AM) I was Arthur Bester (^o^)

(Another Damned Medie on Feb 4, 2007 2:20 PM) William Gibson, thanks.

(Xine on Feb 6, 2007 12:14 AM) Hmmm. This tells me I am Cordwainer Smith (Paul M.A. Linebarger) - a unique storyteller created a future with so many deep layers of history that all the world we know is practically lost in it. I wonder what this says for my writing? No wonder my blog is called chicken-scratch. Thanks :)

(Chuck on Feb 14, 2007 1:12 PM) William Gibson. No complaints about that.

(Princess Haiku on Mar 11, 2007 4:56 AM) This is my second visit today as I can see that I am going to have to stay a while to delve into your archives. Glad that I wandered into your space.

(Princess Haiku on Mar 18, 2007 4:48 PM) Writer? Sometimes I think my life is a sci fi novel and I can't find the ending.

(Ms. Cornelius on Mar 19, 2007 11:34 PM) HEY! Watch the Heinlein cracks!

(New Reader on Apr 16, 2007 5:30 PM) David Brin. What the hell...just go with it!

The theme of this carnival is "back in the saddle":

Tenured Radical on setting their hair on fire. Flavia on setting the tone. Ancarett on the start of term (and on the enviable flexibility of, to a large extent, organizing ones own schedule). New Kid is starting her term with a bang and a whimper. JM embraces the start of term for the way it structures her other work. Liz Kleinfeld on thinking one semester ahead. Anne Galloway has decided to follow the Chinese calendar this year. Mary McKinney remains philosophical. Dr. Virago is still in her pajamas. Janet Stemwedel on the physics of parking. Dr. Crazy wants them to come to class.

Manorama on teaching feminism.

Trillwing on mentoring graduate students with Bitch Ph.D, and Spencer Schaffner on the politics of putting together committees.

An American Professor in China asks what's in a name? Sarah learns some names in English.

An excellent post at The Paper Chase: "Teaching students with chronic illnesses, kindly."

Horace posts an oldie but a goodie.

Or maybe the theme should be, "back to basics":

Readin'

Films, that is: Chuck Tryon on that celluloid phantasm, the noble teacher.

And: reading last term's evaluations and learning that gay history is not history.

Writin'

Hilaire on "The joy of writing...and writing about teaching."

Scot Barnett asks, why teach digital writing?

Marcia says, "It's all professional writing," from emails to essays. She also posts on writing and researching using del.icio.us

Senioritis on ghost writing.

Laura tries Second Life, with mixed results.

Some practical tips for teaching with blogs at xoom. Delaney Kirk has more on blogging.

Jason Jones' students will "collectively populate a timeline of British literature since romanticism." (And he contemplates using Atlas, too).

Dr. Fabulous exposes anti-technology rhetoric.

George posts about assignments designed for either end of the undergraduate teaching spectrum: some truly inspired assignments for a senior seminar, and freewriting with an intro. class.

Jill wonders if her worksheets for students are crazy.

Tinma worries about censoring students online.

Finally, as far a writing is concerned, it turns out that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Speakin'?

Krista Kennedy on teaching cadence in a public speaking course.

Jenny asks, is it wrong to be wrong in class?

Manorama and Dr. Crazy on participation.

'Rithmatic (work with me here)

Timna plays the numbers.

David Silver just began two courses, one in digital journalism and and the other in media internship.

At Parts-n-Pieces: "The Benefits of Project 365." Ditto at Scrivenings.

Strength in numbers: Zimbio is calling for a new Carnival of Edublogs.

And check out the 103rd edition of The Carnival Of Education at The Education Wonks.

If you would like to tag your posts for future carnivals, find out how here. Sorry if I missed you; there were lots (LOTS) more great posts, but I ran out of steam! Check out the next Teaching Carnival at revisionspiral on February 15.

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(George on Jan 30, 2007 7:12 AM) Nice work! Thanks, Miriam.

(JM on Jan 30, 2007 10:38 AM) Good one!

(John on Feb 2, 2007 12:11 AM) Thank you!

(Lonnie on Mar 2, 2007 12:09 AM) Thanks for including me....Great job! Best from China.... OMBW

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(dr. b. on Jan 25, 2007 1:13 PM) I'm going to pass on the book because reading the post gave me a headache. The book might make my head explode!

(Anniina on Jan 26, 2007 2:32 PM) Want me 2 trnsl8 it 4 U? Bng Finsh got2B good 4 smthng :P

(Anniina on Jan 26, 2007 3:50 PM) Hey, I posted another news article on the same on my blog, and my best friend is going to get me a copy of this book. Heheh. :)

(Another Damned Medievalist on Jan 28, 2007 12:17 AM) Lordy. My students send me messages not written in txt, thank goodness, but in dialect. Fortunately, I've watched lots of The Wire...

Guess they were avoiding a deadline.

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(Rusty Shackleford on Jan 12, 2007 7:43 PM) http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/ Procrastination Research Group, Carleton U....

I suppose this is a risky venture; one of my colleagues did the same thing some time ago and ended up having to teach Anne Rice. Don't get me wrong: I have read most of the vampire books myself; I teach genre fiction; I research street literature. And I think almost any novel has something to tell us, even if it is only a cautionary tale. But I still hope to hell they don't select The Da Vinci Code!

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(Mr. Kong on Jan 12, 2007 5:59 PM) That is an interesting and surprising list. If I were eligible, I would vote for Life of Pi or Leonard Cohen. :)

(Hugh on Jan 20, 2007 3:36 AM) I was asked to write an article for my residence community, on any topic. Since I couldn't write anything of value (i.e. with honesty) regarding my residence community, I wrote the following. What do you think, is it intelligible or do I risk alienation? One Value of Literature The value of something consists in its ability to accomplish something else. Money is valuable insofar as it allows us to buy things. A formal education is valuable because it opens the door to possibility. One could go on interminably. I have always found reading to be valuable. When I was a little boy, books had value in themselves - each story that I would read made me a better reader, improved my vocabulary, and so on. Although I could have obtained these skills elsewhere, the fact of the matter was that fiction, from comic books to Camus, entertained me (and still does). So if someone had asked me, in 1999, why I wanted to study literature in university, I would have cited these reasons, underlining the employable corollary of volubility too. But there was more to my decision than a conscious desire to become voluble through entertainment. Literature felt like a profound source of knowledge. Until very recently, however, this feeling would always frustrate me. Stuck in the ostensible gap between imagination and reality, I was unable to express my subjective experiences in objective terms. "You don't know something," one rather analytic friend once told me, "unless you can put it into words first." I have always felt that this seemingly irrefutable argument is refutable. Must babies understand a language before they can know and love their parents? True love, it seems to me, precedes its verbal expression. Cannot the same be said of knowledge? One value of literature is just this: that it can render our unintelligible knowledge intelligible. Literature is great when it puts into words that which we already feel to be true but cannot express as such. The most pleasurable part of reading is the moment in which we must lay the book down to exclaim, "That is sooooo true!" Those of us who disparage a book because "it doesn't say anything that we didn't already know" really mean to say that the book expresses what we could already express and that, for this reason, it has no aesthetic value for us. At this point in my ramble, a concrete example is needed. Once upon a time, I was quite Catholic. I believed that Truth lay in Catholic dogma. Exemplifying Orwellian doublethink to a tee, I did not question that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered," all the while knowing that this was somehow not the case. Then I read Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage. Without spoiling this great Canadian novel, let's just say that it tore me between ideology and evidence. Findley took my familiar Catholic reality as his content and made it seem horribly unfamiliar. I mean horrible in this sense: I became acutely attuned to the horror that is the Church's teaching on sexuality. Thus, to recap: before reading Not Wanted on the Voyage, I consciously knew that homosexual acts were wrong but unconsciously knew this to be untrue; after reading Not Wanted on the Voyage, this unconscious truth became real, the validity of dogmatism vanished into thin air, and here we are. This is all fine and dandy, except for the one problem that had long frustrated me: how does one express - after the fact - the moment of truth that occurs while reading a great work of literature? My newfound convictions aside, I still could not explain to conservative Catholics why a reality that does not repress homosexuals is more valid than their conservative worldview. Hypothetical priest: "why are you not going to church?" H: "it's full of baloney." Hypothetical Priest: "explain." H: "I read Not Wanted on the Voyage." Hypothetical Priest: "but the bible clearly says . . ." At this point, I was going to discuss how one can go about refuting the aforementioned argument that one must verbalize truth before it can be known. But it seems to me that I already have. This, I maintain, is one value of literature. And this is truly something else.

At any rate, here are the three newborn blogs:
Looking about
being any gender
1001 reasons to read

I am trying out WordPress, and so far, it's really nice. I miss being able to mess with the CSS though; you have to upgrade for that.

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(meg on Jan 7, 2007 8:44 PM) I'm in a state of panic too. If it's something in the air, it's covering the continent, since we're at opposite corners, more or less. I haven't set up my class blogs yet. First I need to get the syllabi licked.

(Lorelle on Jan 8, 2007 3:02 AM) A little bit of confusion needs clearing up. You've linked to the full version of WordPress, which allows you total access and control of your blog, but I think you are referring, by the look of the new blog links, to WordPress.com, the free hosted blog service by WordPress. That one only allows CSS editing with a small fee. Still, you have a ton of WordPress Themes and Widgets to choose from to do some minor customization. Good luck!

(mj on Jan 8, 2007 3:11 AM) I'm not confused, but I am probably confusing others! Thought I would link to the main site as that has the widest information about the programme, and it links to the hosting site. But yes indeed, go to WordPress.com for free blog hosting and an introduction to WordPress.

(Andrea on Jan 8, 2007 6:20 PM) I'm envious of your ENGL 1001 class! I love WordPress, but I agree with the minor annoyance re: CSS customization. Where will I put my shiny new Humanities Computing skillz to use?

(susie on Jan 8, 2007 7:20 PM) Like, V for Vendetta? That's hip. I wish I had an excuse to sit in...

(mj on Jan 8, 2007 8:21 PM) You are more than welcome to drop in!

(Anniina on Jan 9, 2007 6:33 PM) Great classes, MJ! Don't worry, I think a lot of us are flying by the seat of our pants atm. I'm trying to implement blogs at Luminarium and it's killing me - I'm trying to get up the WordPress server, to offer free hosted blogs, and the coding is making my head spin! But the WordPress themes sure are pretty - I love "Quentin" which you used for the c18 Drama blog!

(Delaney Kirk on Jan 12, 2007 12:07 AM) I've decided to use blogs in all three of my classes this semester also. Two will be for information, links, assignments, class notes, etc only and the third will require the students to comment twice a week (that's 40 students x 2 a week so I may be in over my head). Please keep us informed how you feel your class blogs are going.

(Rusty Shackleford on Jan 15, 2007 2:27 PM) Wordpress is very flexible.. Highly recommend Wordpress 2. You can modify just about everything in the template editor or just get another theme (to modify)....... There is a style.css page and so on.....

It's a good show.

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(Howard L on Jan 5, 2007 9:43 AM) Thank You for the very kind words MJ. I feel the bar has risen a bit, knowing that people can hear my weekly show, regardless of the time (I know a few people who are not "morning persons"). Please don't be shy to ask for a special request... between the stations 13,000 CDs and 185,000 mp3s, I'm sure to be able to find a few cuts you might enjoy.

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(Bibi on Jan 1, 2007 11:14 PM) A happy new year Miriam!

(Anniina on Jan 3, 2007 11:26 PM) Happy 2007 :)

(mj on Jan 4, 2007 1:17 AM) Back atcha!

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Save Rockwood Park
Friends of Rockwood Park
City Under Siege. The Fight For Saint John

This is what we get for living in the last feudal state in the West.

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(susie on Dec 27, 2006 3:44 PM) Can we bring David Suzuki back here, by any chance?

(mj on Dec 28, 2006 12:13 AM) David Suzuki would be good. Though I am thinking more of the Hulk.

Last month, the well-known New Brunswick blogger made provincial legal history when he was acquitted on charges of obstructing justice by provincial court judge William McCarroll, who ruled that the Fredericton man was simply plying his trade when police arrested him out side of a business conference in Saint John last June.

The focus of the article is on the contentious question of whether or not blogging is journalism, and if so, in what way. I am delighted to have been quoted (as was Joe; we're a tag team). My only beef is that I hope my remarks on gender and blogging did not seem quite so bald: I was trying to describe various debates and ideas about gender and blogging and not saying, in effect, that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Gender is not the focus of the article, mind. But still.

So no complaints, please, from diffuse, chatty female bloggers or terse, single-minded male ones!

And congratulations to LeBlanc.

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(Lori Witzel on Jan 7, 2007 8:38 PM) Hehehehehehehehe!!! Well, found you completely by accident -- Koshtra/Dale's blog led to Marty Weil's blog which led to yours. I am mightily impressed with all the linkage, you do get around more than I do. But this...and the post with those snippets of gender-funnies -- tickled me to no end. Thanks for the grin.

(mj on Jan 8, 2007 2:59 AM) We aim to please!