Where the Buffalo is Marfa? About the Trailer

So, who are all these wacky people in my "Where the Buffalo is Marfa?" trailer for the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts? I have no idea. The clips and photos are all "gigs" from www.fiverr.com-- check out their profiles and many other gigs, all @ USD $5 each. All of these fiverr.com sellers were prompt and professional, and I can recommend them warmly. You can check out their gigs, their ratings-- and if you like one (maybe for a holiday greeting --or your own wacky trailer?), just hit the PayPal button.

Herewith, with my thanks, the cast:

Accordion player: squeezeboxhero

(Australian?) dude reading message and then smacking to wall: coreworkouts

American guy yelling "Marfa!" in a rant-like way: mel864

Plastic bag man: robertocarlos

Redneck character in blue sunglasses: johnwright238

Zombie: kristylynn

Psycho Welshman: facebook_poster

British banana: bethan

Peapod dancer: haleylujah

Funky dancer in brown shorts: coreworkouts (again)

Accordion guy (again): squeezeboxhero

Girl in elephant mask and Marfa sign: reticent

Guy in fur hat with Marfa sign: newsfromstreet

Swimmer with Marfa sign: rubikart

OK, what is truly mind-warping is that I don't know their real names and I don't know where they live nor where they filmed any of these. And these previously impossible, even unthinkable, digital juxtapositions interest me as something to explore in the book I'm about to start writing. When I did my last travel book, Miraculous Air, about Mexico's Baja California peninsula, in the late 1990s, almost no one (outside of a very few people in Tijuana, Ensenada and Los Cabos) was on-line and it was quite the novelty that a telephone or two had arrived in some villages. Now, looking at Marfa, Texas and environs (Alpine, Fort Davis, Valentine, Marathon, and the Big Bend), I find restaurants tweeting their breakfast menus and the local lamp shop on Youtube. I've yet to do a podcast-- the project starts in January-- but I'm already following a small community of West Texas tweeters, and you can follow me @marfamondays.

---> Read about the Marfa Mondays Project

Trailer for My Translation of "Bhima's" Manual Espírita

A new trailer (about 1 and a half minutes):



Forthcoming this fall as an e-book from Dancing Chiva Literary Arts. Want to be alerted when it's available?
>>Join the Dancing Chiva mailing list
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UPDATE October 15, 2011: The book now has its own website, with extensive Q & A, resources for researchers (bibliographies, lists of archives, films, podcasts,and more).

Book Promotion, Book Trailers, and (shazam!!) Carolyn Parkhurst's Trailer for The Nobodies Album

I've begun work, at last, seriously, on a couple of new books, but the question of book promotion continues to amuse, fascinate, and consternate me. In part this is because I have come to realize, both from my own experience having published several books, and from seeing that of friends and students, that book promotion is a Mt Everest of a hurdle, emotionally, psychologically, and even artistically (see my blog post, "The Arc of Writerly Action"). For each writer the size and particulars of the challenge is unique, but it seems that almost everyone, except the certifiable narcissist, feels well, wierd, about promoting their own work.

One of the new and very powerful tools of promotion is the so-called book trailer, a brief (or maybe not so brief) video. (You can view my most recent trailer here.) It's difficult to make generalizations about book trailers, though I've tried-- see my blog post, "Book Trailers: Some Categories (or, Draft of a Taxonomy)".

All that said, the #1 best book trailer I have ever seen, by five hundred miles, is my amiga (and I am not saying this because she's my amiga) Carolyn Parkhurt's latest, for her novel The Nobodies Album. And it co-stars my amigas, novelists Amy Stolls, in the T-shirt, and Paula Whyman, reading the reviews. Seriously, I have never seen a better book trailer. And for you writers squirming about (gasp) self-promotion, just take a deep breath, a swig of whatever you're drinking, and watch the anecdote now:



Good luck, Carolyn!