Cyberflanerie: Nifty Stuff Edition

Julia Sussner's latest app! (She's my favorite app designer, based in the blazing heart of Palo Alto.) The app, which accompanies an exhibition, "Never Built: Los Angeles," takes a selection of the projects and situates them on a map, creating an interactive experience of the city, as it is, and as it could have been. 
>>Download it now from iTunes here.
(The Trump project may prompt ironic chuckles.)

PS Check out Julia Sussner's guest-blog post on 5 Fabulous Apps to Experience for Yourself


L. Peat O'Neil's Adventure Travel Writer blog
Her joy for travel is infectious, plus heaps of nifty tips.

Dan Gilbert explains the whole happiness thing (but sorry, Dan, I would still rather win the lottery than end up a paraplegic...) Seriously, this is one of the best TED Talks ever.

The Archdruid Takes Us 10 Billion Years Into the Future
No need to smoke anything, folks. 

Via Real Delia, Jane Friedman's talk (video) on audience development for writers.
(very sandwich-worthy).  

La Bloga: Las Mujeres:
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Rosemary Catacalos, and María Espinosa
Una celebración.


Writer Beth Kephart's very thoughtful blog

No cookie search-o-rama! DuckDuckGo 

Link without affecting page rank (kind of evil, maybe sometimes in a good way)

Recommended by Cool Tools (another favorite blog): The Yeti for podcasters.

More anon.

COMMENTS always welcome.

Guestblogger Midwife and Author Patricia Harman on 5 Sites to Help You Go Green

To the average reader this might seem silly, but we writers tend to obsess about publishing-- so should it be any suprise that what first caught my attention about Patricia Harman's books was that they are published by Beacon? For those of you don't know Beacon, it's one of the finest small literary presses in the U.S. (it also happens to be the publisher of my amiga Sara Mansfield Taber's splendid Bread of Three Rivers.) So I knew Patricia Harman's memoirs, based on her many years of caring for women as a lay-midwife and later, as a nurse-midwife, had to be something very special. Harman's first book, The Blue Cotton Gown, is about her patients; her second, the recently published Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Journey, tells the story of growing up during one of the most turbulent times in America and becoming an idealistic home-birth midwife.

From the dust jacket text:

Drawing heavily on her journals, Arms Wide Open goes back to a time of counter-culture idealism that the boomer generation remembers well. Patsy opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota in a log cabin she and her lover build with their own hands, the only running water being the nearby streams. They set up beehives and give chase to a bear competing for the honey. Patsy gives birth and learns to help her friends deliver as naturally as possible.

Weary of the cold and isolation, Patsy moves to a commune in West Virginia, where she becomes a self-taught midwife delivering babies in cabins and homes. Her stories sparkle with drama and intensity, but she wants to help more women than healthy hippie homesteaders. After a ten-year sojourn for professional training, Patsy and her husband, Tom, return to Appalachia, as a nurse-midwife and physician, where they set up a women's-health practice. They deliver babies together, this time in hospitals; care for a wide variety of gyn patients; and live in a lakeside contemporary home--but their hearts are still firmly implanted in nature. The obstetrical climate is changing. The Harmans' family is changing. The earth is changing, but Patsy's arms remain wide open to life and all it offers.

Her memoir of living free and sustainably against all odds will be especially embraced by anyone who lived through the Vietnam War and commune era, and all those involved in the back-to-nature and natural-childbirth movements.

"There are more honest, revealing moments here than in many memoirs. Harman, whose prose is sparse but not simple, covers a span of decades, deftly revealing her own youthful struggles with identity through the children we witnessed her raising earlier in her book, revealing, in short, a full life." —Publishers Weekly

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Five Great Websites to Help You Go Green, A Little Bit at a Time
By Patricia Harman

Once, I confess, I was a total eco-freak. Forty years ago, I lived in a cabin without electricity and running water. We used hand tools because we didn’t want to waste non-renewable resources like oil and gas. We tilled the soil by hand, grew our own food organically, canned it in mason jars and stored it in a root cellar we dug into the side of the hill.

Looking back, I wonder at our extreme life, but at the time we were worried about pesticides like DDT killing the eagles and power plants polluting the air. We were looking for a way to live lightly and sustainably on the earth.

Then for thirty years, in the rush of raising kids, going back to school and working as a midwife 70 hours a week, I forgot all that. We moved up in the world, started our own OB-Gyn practice, got a house on the lake, two gas-guzzling vehicles and a jet ski. My youthful ideals receded to an amusing antidote about my past.

Lately, however, my conscience has bothered me. The world we face now seems so much more dangerous than in 1970s. With climate change, extreme weather, the disappearance of honey bees and wars in the Middle East fueled by competition for oil, my concerns about the environment have returned

Now, I’ll admit, I’m not interested in returning to a life without running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing, but I’m worried enough to begin altering my ways. Maybe it’s time, for all of us, to again consider how we can live more sustainably. Maybe it’s time we all think about what we can do to save Mother Earth. Maybe it’s time we all consider how we can be a little more green.

Here are some websites I’ve found helpful and inspiring on this, not so extreme, journey.

1. Natural Life Magazine
(35 years of inspiring articles about green family living.)

2. Mother Nature Network
(Recycling, home renovation, sustainable communities)

3. Mother Earth News
(Guide to Living Wisely, how to do it)

4. The Green Grandma
(Homey and witty)

5. Sustainable Communities
(The big picture…world view)

--- Patricia Harman CNM, midwife and author


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--> For the archive of Madam Mayo guest-blogs, click here.
Recent guest-bloggers include travel writer and reporter Gerry Hadden ; master gardener and spirituality reporter Mare Cromwell; and narrative arquitect and app designer Julia Sussner.

CLICK HERE.

Guest-Blogs on Wednesdays...

Except when not. Alas, the one I'd hoped to post today didn't come through-- although already in line for next week, still-to-be-formatted, there's a fascinating guest-blog post from travel writer Gerry Hadden. So herewith, five of my favorite guest-blog posts (ask me tomorrow and I might make a different list):

App designer Julia Sussner: 5 apps to explore for yourself

Organizer Regina Leeds: 5 + 1 resources to make a writer happy in an organized space

Poet Christine Boyka Kluge: 5 sites for hybrid writing, collaboratiopns, and experimental work

Writer Paula Whyman: 5 + 1 sites for books on baking -- for writers and other breadheads

Writer Sheila Bender: Top 5 books on writing

---> For the complete archive of Madam Mayo's guest-blog posts, click here.

More anon.

Guest-Blogger App Designer Julia Sussner on 5 Fabulous Apps To Explore for Yourself

My amiga Julia Sussner is a never-ending inspiration to me. Fresh out of grad school (Cambridge University) with a degree in narrative architecture, she set up her own Palo Alto, California-based company, Parsing Place, and started producing wonderfully original apps and ebooks, among them, the series of Impressionist Paris Walking Tours and, with Katarina Sussner, the children's book Chubby Puggy -- if you've been following this blog, you know anything with pugs rocks my world! (She also did my first book trailer, for my novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. I still have no idea how she got that butterly to fly...)

In her own words, Sussner "approaches the digital realm as an inhabitable space – one which requires design, clarity and comfort in use." I can attest to that: her Paris walking tours are a wonder, utilizing GPS to allow the user to stroll to the exact spot a painting was made and to instantly compare paintings to contemporary photographs (and insert one's own). The apps also include recommended shops and cafes en route (and Julia's recommendations are the best). Parsing Place has just released a Movie Lover’s Paris app for the recent Woody Allen charmfest of a film, "Midnight in Paris." By overlapping the fictional world onto the map of Paris, the narrative from the movie provides a unique portal through which to explore the city. Don't go to Paris, whether by airplane or armchair, without it!

Top 5 iPhone Apps to Explore for Yourself
By Julia Sussner

Versailles Garden App
With little to no interest in developing the city of Paris, Louis XIV improved the gardens of Versailles as if they were an urban complex. The landscaped alleys and avenues lend themselves well to an interactive application. The maze was not a garden motif for nothing…

Terminus Interactive Science Fiction App
There was a period when interactive narrative meant ‘choose your own adventure’ books – while the concept remains timeless, it’s refreshing to see this mode of storytelling reappear.

Star Walk – Astronomy Guide
The sky is not the limit, it’s just the beginning with this app. The celestial landscape is reconfigured according to your place and time. Exploring billion-year-old formations with an iPhone is oddly beautiful.

Our Choice Interactive Book
(Watch the Ted Talk video) This digital version takes the physicality of a book and evolves the components into objects with functions. The reader is now an interactor.

Camera +
Having a camera in your phone means you can capture and save moments as a visual archive. Image processing apps, such as Camera +, let you take better pictures and enhance them – giving a handcrafted edge to the images. But most important are the chemical-free darkroom thrills, right at your fingertips.

--Julia Sussner

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--->For the complete archive of Madam Mayo guest blog posts, click here.
--->Recent guest-bloggers include Eva Schweitzer on the Berlin Wall, Sam Quinones on true tales, and Eric D. Goodman on train stories and, way back when, Nancy Levine on pugs.

Trailers for Books: A Selection

Trailer for 'The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire' by C.M. Mayo from ParsingPlace.com on Vimeo.

Working on the soundtrack for a video shot in Mexico City by Deborah Bonello... meanwhile, just had a fascinating conversation with Julia Sussner, specialist in narrative architecture, who made the trailer for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (watch the 47 seconds here) (or click above). It's not yet an established genre. Anything goes. Herewith a few widely divergent examples:

For Sandra Gulland's historical novel, Mistress of the Sun

For Miranda July's short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You

For James Howard Kunstler's novel, World Made by Hand

For Stephanie Bennett Vogt's self-help book, Your Spacious Self

For Steven Hart's The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway
Note: You might want to mute the sound on this one.

For Penny Peirce's self-help book, Frequency

For Anat Baniel's self-help book, Move Into Life

I'd be interested to know about more unusual and/or especially good book trailer videos. Suggestions?