Cyberflanerie: Others Did It So I Don't Have To Edition

(But did she ever get to Alaska?)

Live through an Alaskan Winter in an RV

Watch a Famous 4 Hour Interview with Mega-Famous Movie Star María Félix

(via David Lida. David, Did you actually watch this?)

Figure Out in Crunchy Techno-Industrial Detail What Happened to Tom Cruise

P.S. As for things I get to do and that I recommend: I am reading an advance copy of Tom Christensen's River of Ink and it is beyond splendid. Stay tuned.

COMMENTS always welcome

Cyberflanerie: Alain de Botton on Pessimism

Well worth watching…

Doreen Baingana: The Role of Offensive Language in Novels

My fellow Writer's Center faculty member, novelist Doreen Baingana's recently gave this thoughtful talk for TED@Nairobi.

Rather Good, These Peculiar Little Videos

Ham Bikini

Parsley Expansion
(wonder what he smoked before doing this one)

Eggs in Peril

The Internet is Made of Cats
and... drumroll...

Viking Kittens Reveal Lyrics to that Led Zeppelin tune

Anna Dello Russo and The Leopard

Here's an amusing video starring fashion editor & icon Anna Dello Russo in which (look carefully) you'll see her trompe l'oeil of a scene from the movie based on the novel The Leopard.

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

At Play in the Fields of Keynote: On Designing Dancing Chiva's E-Book Covers

So what's Dancing Chiva? It's a company I set up a few years ago to do writing workshops, and recently expanded into publishing. Like many writers whose book contracts of yore left them the digital rights, I am bringing some of my already published books into new life as e-books. But with Dancing Chiva I am also publishing some new works as e-books, for example, a collection of blog posts on creative writing and my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Spritist Manual, as well as long out-of-print or, in some cases, never-before-published works of Maximiliana. Check out the Dancing Chiva catalog here.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF KEYNOTE:
A note on the covers by C.M. Mayo
As a writer, I've had the sometimes disconcerting (if othertimes also joyous) experience of having someone else—a person I have never met and perhaps never will—design the covers of my books. I am talking about the professional graphic designer. Book cover design is a specialty informed by both graphic design principles and marketing. A publisher wants a book cover that fits with their brand image and— everyone hopes— will fly off the shelves to the cash registers. Alas, though sometimes fortuitously, the author's vision for the cover is not always taken into consideration, and in fact, very few publishers will cede approval to the author in a book contract (believe me, I've tried). . .CONTINUE READING.

Follow Dancing Chiva Literary Arts on Twitter @dancingchiva




P.S. Tuesdays are the day I usually update the Maximilian ~ Carlota research-sharing blog, but, as you can see, I've been otherwise occupied. I still have several file cabinets worth of research to share there, and I'll get back to it, asap.

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!