Love when the bear talks.

Build your own platform

[Placeholder for whingy paragraph on how I didn't get into writing to be my own flak and shouldn't publishers be responsible for publishing, which implies promotion, etc. etc.]

After much hand-holding and prodding by tech-savvy consultants, I’m inching towards world domination tweet by tweet, and now that I know my way around blogs, facebook, twitter, shelfari, booktour, and linkedin, the next step is definitely a book trailer. But how? Every reenactment/dramatization I’ve seen borrows its cast and camera techniques from America’s Most Wanted, and the best of the soundtracked tearjerkers make me feel manipulated in a way I’m willing to have happen exactly once, preferably by the book itself. If anyone out there has great trailer models, holler…. In the meantime, here are a few of my favs:

Dreaming in Hindi

I Am in the Air Right Now

Head Case

**298 Danish Krone to my mother. In August, she goes to Copenhagen to visit friends (a family that includes the woman I’m named after), and, mistaking me for Thomas Cook, dropped by today to ask my advice on changing money. I recommended ATMs, but then I also just happen to have a foreign currency stash in my WHQ office, where I have leftovers from trips along with a curious accumulation of currency for places I’ve never been, including Portugal and China.

**A handwoven Ethiopian netela, sewn by yours truly into a Tibetan-style baby carrier (this is also the way I saw many Ethiopian girls carrying their smaller siblings, and a method I imagine is too sensible not to be used in multiple cultures). The carrier was a collaborative project with the visiting DIL (Daughter-In-Love), whose current AZ locale makes the gauzy cotton weave of the netela especially apropos for toting around an increasingly active, heat-generating 12-lb wonderbaby. In the desert. In summer.

**Shallots, shallots and more shallots. Our highest-yielding crop to date (with raspberries a solid second). Other garden plantings that seem to be faring well: the rainbow chard is a gift that keeps on giving; Magda squash seems to be borer resistant; and the various tomatoes–if we can keep on top of the potato beetles–look to be coming on strong. Much curiosity about the currant tomatoes and wondering whether the 3/4-inch little guys will deliver flavor bombs as promised.

**Oilcloth and other fabrics and sewing notions to my niece, Phoebe, and her friend Fazia–so they could make banners for their eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Some kids focused on their high schools, their families, their academic interests. Our girl dealt with such matters in the circular tassels she hung down from hers — but mostly, she made a giant sneaker.

Four days and counting before the 7th Annual Driveway Plant Sale (Saturday, May 15th, 9:00 AM). Things get a little crazy at this point, and I have to hold back from digging up the rest of the yard and adding it to the “inventory.” Several rituals have developed over the years, and one is to give the uprooted plants a week of settling before the sale day so that if something’s going to die, it dies on me and not its new owner. Looks like the final headcount is between 700-800 plants; so far only one flat has been identified as weeds (neighbor Claudia, using her gentle voice, saying, “I bet you thought that was basil”). Price stickers: check. Coffee: check. Mom lined up to act as cashier: check.

4/21/2010: AND SO IT BEGINS

For the seventh year in a row, I’m digging up the volunteers, dividing the out-of-control perennials, and potting them all up for my Divide & Conquer driveway sale. D-Day is May 15, three weeks away, and I’m up to 201 pots (my all-time high was 900). What’s different this year? Spillover from Triangulation Farm, the organic community garden plot we maintain over at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. So there are more veggies and herbs this time around, but still, the bulk of my “inventory” is from many early years of overpurchasing — at Russell Gardens Wholesale Nursery, Produce Junction, and Primex – as well as from the glorious dumpster dives at the now-defunct Frank’s.

Hard to imagine that the wacky weather — multiple blizzards, strange blasts of summer, rain of the Noah’s Ark variety — would have positive results, but I swear there are more hellebore seedlings than ever, ferns out the wazoo, and beefy perennials looking robust and ready to thin out. An added incentive for all this pruning and reshaping is the moment of temporary insanity during which I said yes to Syd Carpenter’s request that I join her as one of the stops on the May 23rd Garden Conservancy Open Days Tour. What was I thinking?

“I’ll reorganize it,” TBH selflessly offered, sidestepping the long Honey-Do List I’d generously worked up for him. (We give and we give and we give. That’s what makes our marriage work.)

“Okay,” I said, “but don’t throw away any of my crap without telling me.”

Poet-Butcher and TBH at work

End Result

Once he set up the metal hanging rods (repurposed trashpicked closetware courtesy of moi), TBH had no choice but to call in the Poet-Butcher, his partner in meat-curing crime. Off they went to Restaurant Depot, where they purchased 80 pounds of pork shoulder. Or was it butt?

Much bleaching of kitchen surfaces and soaking of intestinal casings later, here is the result. Every day, the perfume of butifarra, chorizo and garlic sausages grows stronger.

“What if they drip, the way they did in the guest room?” I asked. The porch was so shiny, so bright, so grease-free.

I know I smell something.

I stifled a whimper.

Meanwhile, the beagle assumed a new command post, forsaking her cushy bed for a fragrant promise, a savory dream.

(On that front, Clarence Page’s column in today’s Chicago Tribune today makes a good point: “[O]ne has to wonder why Wilson would be so surprised that he would lose control during Obama’s speech. Since the full text was distributed to members of Congress beforehand, Obama’s debunking of the illegal immigration myth should not have come as a shock.”)

I’m not alone in asking this question about the possible link between incivility and race, as anyone on facebook will know, but here’s the larger teachable moment that comes out of it for me–an opportunity to look within, honestly, and ask whether my fellow progressives and I have similarly impeded civil discourse in the recent past.

Check out this site: cafepress.com. The site itself is a neutral print-on-demand operation, but under its “What’s Hot” category, there are both pro-Obama and Anti-Obama sections. I was on cafepress.com the other day, and in the same spirit that I sometimes land and stay on Rush Limbaugh when I’m skimming across the dial in a rental car, I clicked on the Anti-Obama section. I was all of the following: Offended, upset, disturbed, disheartened…the list goes on.

Here’s the question. How different are these from some of the anti-Bush slogans I enjoyed and supported?

“Bush Lied; Thousands Died”
“If Only Barbara Bush had practiced birth control”
“Somewhere in Texas, A Village is Missing Its Idiot”
“Worst President Ever”
“If Only He Had a Brain”
“Viva Imperialism”

The truth is, some of those still get me going. Some of them I dismiss as being not my temperament, e.g., “Buck Fush,” and then some are just as physiognomically-based as the anti-Obama slogans that I find racist, e.g., “BUSH: Seriously, just look at him. What a moron.” Or this one, which mocks a learning disability and judges the quality of his sobriety: “George W. Bush: Dyslexic, Dry Drunk with a Messiah Complex.”

Generally speaking, I run with a pack that got good home training, that is well-mannered in the face of disagreement. But for the first time, I wondered how my own barbed expressions of dissent might end up contributing to an impasse that could have terrible consequences for us all.

“Just give them some tips,” was their innocent request.

Anyone who knows me can testify that unsolicited advice is my MO, my raison d’être, the joie of my vivre. And so the old chestnuts will be profferred, (e.g., lotto motto, it’s only postage, and desk drawer), but thrown into the mix will be a smattering of new and surprising extras guaranteed to blow the audience away.

Sneak Preview: Call your mother.

It’s going to be off the hook. Or the chain. Or whatever kids these days say.

Push to Publish 2009: Strategies and Techniques to Get Your Work in Print and Online at Rosemont College, Rosemont, PA on October 17, 2009, 9 am to 5 pm.

Coughing old beagle + $900 vet appointment scrips + cardboard and bottle caps + glue gun = pill box

Allotment in community garden + years of collected canning jars + special trip to spice store for whole allspice + many hours waiting for water to boil = 3 jars of pickled beets

M'Balia Singley

As you can see below, during M’Balia’s appearance at today’s Chestnut Hill Book Festival’s Singer-Songwriter event, she’s also got a wicked strong fan base.

Superfan Adelia

RECIPE

One medium cabbage
2″ piece fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1 big clove garlic, peeled
1-2 T sugar or more to taste
Juice of 3 limes (add zest for extra deliciousness)
1 t salt or more to taste
3 T mayo
1/2 cup half and half (to keep calories down use yogurt or milk)
1 T ground fresh chili paste (available in Asian grocery store) or hot sauce
1/4 c roasted, unsalted peanuts for garnish

1. Shred cabbage and place in large mixing bowl. (I used a regular one and a Savoy cabbage.)

2. Place ginger, garlic, sugar, lime juice, and salt in bowl of food processor. Process, leaving ginger in tiny chunks.

3. Transfer to small bowl. Stir in mayo, 1/2 and 1/2, and chili paste to make dressing.

4. Mix dressing into cabbage. Let sit for 1/2 hour, then taste and adjust seasonings. As slaw sits, it will absorb flavors and dressing will become thinner. I adjust seasonings to taste up until the minute it goes on the table. Stir well before serving and at the last minute (so they don’t go soggy) garnish with peanuts.

*You could add cilantro, chunks of candied ginger, small diced pieces of fresh nectarine or pineapple.

Don’t fuss too much, this stuff is totally forgiving and always a big hit.

–Claudia Raab