29 May, 2009
28 May, 2009
Hooray, vanity publishing!
If there a stabilizer for a shaky ego more effective than a stack of books with one’s name on the cover, I don’t know what it is. I’m evidently not the only person who feels this way, as there were, apparently, more print-on-demand than conventionally published titles produced last year. (Note that the figures quoted do refer to titles published and not units sold—I spent a horrified minute thinking that only one in one thousand or so Americans purchased a book in 2008, horror, in this case, being a function of near-plausibility.)
27 May, 2009
25 May, 2009
Because, by all accounts, it’s summer
I will be listening to Erykah Badu—exclusively—for the next three months or so. I never said my interests were consistent.
Erykah Badu – Live on VH1 Soul Stage (2008) [MediaFire link : 82.43mb : 1 hour 19 minutes]
In other news: purchasing seitan veggie sausages is still easier and largely preferable to making them at home.
Edited to add: I realize that, of the admittedly limited number of people who read this thing, I am likely the only one who listens to Erykah Badu. And that, friends, acquaintances, and random Internet persons, is why I write the blog and you do not.
Brief: Windsor and Its Metaphors
I’ve started working on a piece of writing, tentatively called “Windsor and It’s Metaphors” (a nod to Sontag, though the original title was going to be “DNR“). I probably won’t finish it, and it’s even less likely that, if I did, I would go so far as trying to have it published. It’s certainly…uncharitable in its tone, and it would probably be less so if I wrote it with some distance (emotional, physical) from the place. It’s going to be awhile before I stop taking this city personally.
Windsor, Ontario imagines itself a certain kind of town. It is, by its own account and its own recollection, a manufacturing town, a union town, and a “border town,” encumbered with the border town’s accumulated weight of superstition. It is, for each of these reasons, a town that understands itself in terms of serving one or another purpose, of performing one or another task. “To serve a purpose” is, in Windsor’s native idiom, not the same thing as “to be of use.” Windsor is a town possessed of an excess of purpose, and it is, at the same time and increasingly, useless. Windsor’s function has been relegated to the ceremonial; its arguments for itself are intractably religious in their character, its aims fundamentally magical, its rewards forestalled—unknowable, millennial, apocalyptic.
Later, I may or may not have referred to something as “a Potemkin village of environmental sustainability.” So there’s that.
That thing I wrote for that show I did
Last week, I put in an order for 30 copies of the updated version of my support-document/catalog-thing (I added pictures of the thesis show, took out mention of a piece that never ended up getting made, generally made the prose of the thing less obnoxious). They should be in sometime next week (you have to wait a long, long time if you don’t pay any expediting fees). If there’s anybody I’m likely to see in person who wants one, just let me know. They’re $30 each, I’m afraid—at what cost, vanity publishing? The things aren’t cheap to produce.
People in the States and elsewhere can order the book directly from the publishing company. There, it’s being sold at-cost, but, after shipping, it’ll end up being about $30, as well. I’m not making anything off of either transaction, I assure you.
Or you can just read or download the PDF here. (The printed book will not, I assure you, be all streaky like that: if it is, somebody is going to get cut).
24 May, 2009
On the Detroit River It’s free
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this sign for the Odette Tax Shelter—I mean, “Sculpture Park“—that greets people leaving the Windsor airport, but if I don’t do something with it, Ron Terada will. I’m thinking it would be nice made out of sandblasted flash glass mounted on a light box. If not that, somebody should at least make it into a T-shirt.
Let’s try this again.
So, I’ve decided to start this thing over. I was just going to upgrade Wordpress (which I hadn’t done since I started the site), and I did do that, but some conversion in the character set ended up leaving most of the posts a bit wonky. So I turfed the whole thing. Also a factor in the decision was this post-graduation spasm of “vague concerns about professionalism” in which I now find myself.
I don’t think there was too much in there that was too dreafully inculpatory, but, you know, when—try though you might to disassociate the two—your full name and your blog address are ineradicably linked, and when the category on that blog that you use most frequently is called “Being a Dick,” there’s maybe some room for a little bit of housekeeping.
And here we are.
I’ve backed everything up should I ever feel nostalgic (I give it about three months), and nothing is ever really deleted from the Internet, anyway.
Also, I forgot to check before making the upgrade to see if there would be any change in the RSS feed—there might have been. So… if you’re not reading this, you might want to update that? Also also, I got rid of the associated Livejournal account. It was a bit of a nightmare to maintain, and I think there were only two or three people that actually used it. So there’s that.