As I contemplate whether and perhaps how to embark on a new textbook project, I imagine how a new text might embody my current thinking about teaching and the pushing of writing. A new text would have to sing the social turn and new media. A new text would have to pour forth on the second Web. A new text would have to pour forth with headphones filling spaces between my ears. That’s the ticket to the new textbook ride, a rhythm bumping behind the concentrated raking forward of assignments, exercises, and texts. Work with it, the rhythm. The wetter pieces will be media layered over and into the instruction, the pieces themselves new media compositions to turn the crank on new media composition.

The book will be beautiful. It must be. Books are. But the shape’s the question. Moldy modes of discourse? Arguments? Topics? Themes? No matter. The rhythm will drive it. The book will flow and projects will shape it. Projects like the playlist or the collage. Projects brought forth on the second Web with lots of samples, ideas, and revisions of writers (students). Labels and categories must swirl colorfully into the mix. Making new things. The rhythm behind. No ideas but in tags? Rhythm things? Flowing always through the teaching surfaces of the project must be projects.

And it always must be ready to ask the audience, “How you feeling?” “Is this thing on?” Pfwhheeaaaa. Pfwhhuueaa. Not just while building the book, but while building from the book. Teach to build, and build to teach. The project is cranking on teaching, and that will happen outside of the three-year cycle of current textbook production. Dates must guide groups and mark time, but rolling out the teaching will pace with the rhythm of the years. Fall. Winter. Spring. Summer off? Summer off. This is a textbook manifesto from a writing pusher.

Don’t doubt that there will be some layering of deeply dabbled new media mixtures. Visual. Yes, very. Texts. Yes, the word. Yes, Yes, the word. Audio. Absolutely. Music matters more than we’ve realized in the classroom. Sing. Play. Listen and sing. And touch. Let's not forgot writing moves the body just as the body moves the word, even through cyberspace. Paintbrush. Shadow. Filter. Print. Push. Push. Push.