on the porch
In fact, I don’t really consider myself a blogger because I post so sporadically. We need a new word for occasional bloggers… or not, who knows what tech will be in place 10 years from now, blogging and using your phone for text messages will be like bad 70’s haircuts. In the meantime, PJ Gallo at Coldfront has written a review of my book, thank you sir!
and cat scans, and so forth: Radiology Picture of the Day I have always been fascinated by the character of x-rays, the ghostly style… glowing bones and muscle and tissue, all a frog’s hair from dissipation. We must do like the animals that rub out their traces at the entrance to their lairs. Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. … Borrow nothing except from yourself, arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts, and rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation. –Monataige, “On Solitude”
Edible.com is both exciting and a disappointment, exciting because it does have some interesting foods I’d like to try (weasel coffee, curried crickets) but the selection is pretty small. Edibleunique.com actually has a slightly larger selection, and various meats and fishes and bugs can be ordered from other places if you dig around a bit. I would like to take hedonistic advantage of the global economy before it collapses; to wit, I am going to try injera again on Weds, this time following the whole 3 day fermentation process and using the teff flour I ordered from Idaho. This time I will make doro wett and probably some lentils instead of gored gored.
The hotel I stayed at in Vegas did not have WiFi, and with only my pda to type on, I could not write from there, which is just as well, since I was there such a short time. The reading was fun, not many in the crowd but everyone was receptive and we all–Jarret Keene, Bruce Issacson, and myself–managed to sell a few books. Las Vegas is an imaginary city, and seems to be in trouble; the city fathers had counted on their city being recession-proof, but the first line of the first article in the local paper was “Ok, now it’s time to panic.” I would think Sin City is a good canary for the coal mine of a depression the US economy is plummeting down. Luckily, poetry really is recession proof, since it has almost no exchange value to begin with…
I am flying to Las Vegas tomorrow morning to go to the Clark County Library and read poetry. I love the idea of flying to Vegas to go to the library. I wonder if the library will have video poker. Anyhow, I am going to bring my pda and keyboard and will try and write a bit about my journey, traveling fascinates me. This book is an interesting account of travel way back when folks walked or rode carts made of wood, axles greased with olive oil…
I have a publisher, Zeitgeist Press, that is small and has not the resources a huge publishing house might have, but they have the freedom to publish work that they like, not just work they think can sell a boatload of copies. Because they cannot send me a $10,000 advance and put me on the John Stewart show, I have to do some of the work if I want my book to sell. And I do want to sell copies of my book, as well as copies of any other books I might write in the future. In the traditional publishing model, or at least the most recently dominant model, I would try to parlay the reputation gained early in my career, via small but prestigious presses, into a contract with a larger publisher. This larger publisher would then print and distribute my later books, set up publicity campaigns, and so forth; in return, I would get a small percentage of the profits of each sale, called a royalty, as well as positions on the boards of poetry journals, increased reading fees, and so forth. The internet, however, has made the exchange of media so easy that this old model…
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The Gored Gored turned out ok, not enough niter kibbeh, and I probably should have cooked the berebere, longer, but it tasted yummy. The injera, on the other hand, I didn’t figure out how to pour until the very last piece, and even then the recipe was wanting: doughy, rubbery, and way too dense.
From Michal Migurski’s blog, some good advice. A few of them remind me a bit of Eno and Shmidt’s Oblique Strategies : immaculate heart college art department rules This (by Sister Corita Kent) was worth retyping: Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students. Consider everything an experiment. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules….
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The last CMS I tried just went blank one day, and no help on their forum, so… I really only need blogging interface and linking at this point. I would like to put my book here for free download, CC copyright, but that is future tense.