Small Mistrake, Mongo Sucking Whirlpool

Via Phronesisaical, aka the "Phron", one of my favorite blogs, this approx 10 minute video about a bizarre accident some three decades ago in Louisiana. Keep watching: it gets wackier as it proceeds. It's one of those stories that make you appreciate the forces of nature anew. More anon.

Obama: What's Next? Here's a Hint

An oldie-but goodie of a blog post from back in March by a friend and colleague on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. Via the Phron. More anon.

Dreamy Monday

"Writing and Telepathy" an audacious, beautiful, and oh-yes-this-is-how-it-is essay by Joan Connor in Arts & Letters:

"I approach this topic tentatively and with the risk of sounding New-Aged, but writing invokes a different, less willful form of consciousness than habitual and daily thought. It is more akin to dreaming than thinking..." READ MORE

And some dream construction over at the Phron.

Helmut Answers A Couple of Qs

Phronesisaical, or the "Phron," is one of the first blogs I ever read-- and after more than two years in the "blogopshere," I'm still checking in on an almost daily basis. Founding blogger "Helmut," (not his real name) is a DC friend, a professor of philosophy and an expert (he's edited an anthology for Johns Hopkins University Press and testified before Congress) on the philosophy of torture. Apropos of the workshop I gave last Saturday on writers's blogs for the Maryland Writers Association, I asked "Helmut" for his thoughts on blogging.

Madam Mayo: Do you read any writers's blogs?

Helmut: If fiction, I don't really read many unless I e-stumble upon them. I find McSweeney's, for example, really annoying in its overly self-conscious and preening cleverness. So, I assiduously avoid the site. My dislike there has more to do with the writing itself than with the fact that it's blog-based. It may be that writers' blogs and their drawbacks/assets have as much to do with the medium of blogs rather than writing itself. Part of this has to do with market. For example, I like James Wolcott as a writer and urbane wit, but I tend to check his blog more often than he posts. In some cases with other writers, this would doom them to blog oblivion (under the blogoid assumption that you continually have to post new content)-- that is, supply not keeping up with demand. In the case of Wolcott, however, he has the institutional heft of Vanity Fair behind him, but also individually has a large-ish market of readers. They'll come back, like me, to check for new posts.

Madam Mayo: What do you think attracts readers to a writer's blog?

Helmut: Given the vastness today of the blog world, readers tend to congregate around those blogs that either established themselves early on or have had the good luck to have some basic quality or particular product discovered by some other well-established blog. But to keep the readers, the blogger has to post fairly often. That need to post (if one wants readers and to retain those readers) is going to be in basic tension with the quality of the writing at some point, I would think. If one doesn't care about the readers, I have no explanation for why they're blogging in the first place... Frankly, I have no idea about these things regarding my own blog; otherwise, I wouldn't have given it the ugly name it has and wouldn't have committed myself-- on a whim-- to posting fruit photos.

Madam Mayo says: check out the latest fruit photo on the Phron here.

Hilde (aka Helmut) Testifies on Torture

Read his testimony before today's Helsinki Committee here.

"Helmut's" Phronesisaical, aka The Phron

Yes, there are 700 ba-ga-lula-ga-jillion blogs out there, and yeah, who has the time, but what it's all about is carving out your very own information landscape. What's in mine? One blog I often read is Phronesisaical, founded by my amigo, a Washington DC professor of philosophy, torture (philosophy of, that is) expert, and exotic fruit aficionado (hey, it's blogging, you can do whatever floats your parachute). Why do I read the Phron? Because I always learn something. In particular, I've learned a lot about the blogosphere just from the links he offers. For example, just from Tuesday, here are three excellent posts:
---> Being an Iraqi Refugee in Syria. News is that Riverbend, the widely followed English language blog of an Iraqi, is back on-line. Check the archives on this one.
--->Another Mistrial of the War on Terror Hemlut does some philosophizing...(As Madam Mayo likes to ask, who, really, are the terrorists?)
--->The Jungle Helmut offers a beautiful and original essay about growing up in Taiwan.

More anon.

Helmut Needs to Write a Novel!

Madam Mayo is a big fan of the Phron-- Helmut's Phronesisiacal, that is. Fruit pix, torture, political philosophy and French art & cinema whatnot--- whatever blogging may or may not be (I for one am still trying to figure it out), I still, almost every day, read the farrago o' fun & freak-out that is the Phron. Check out Helmut's post for today on the perfect crime.

You Blog, I Blog, Bloggity Blog Blog Blog

So this morning an interesting e-mail exchange with the wondrous NYC and San Miguel de Allende-based writer, Janice Eidus, who has a sure to be fabulous new novel coming out, The War of the Rosens. (She's a well-known writing teacher and author of the story collection, Vito Loves Geraldine, among many other works.) She's the third writer this week who has asked me about blogging and how it can help promote a book. Well, amigas, here's an example: just this morning, the widely-read Phronesisaical, a philosophy, torture, fruit pix, and politics blog of a DC area philosophy professor who goes by the "nom de blogue" Helmut, just--- bless his heart--- mentioned the news that my memoir, Miraculous Air, is now out in paperback. And by the way, "Helmut" himself has an anthology of essays on torture forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press. Stay tuned! What's fun is that new readers find my work thanks to "the Phron" while, perhaps, new readers will find Janice Eidus and "Helmut" thanks to "Madam Mayo." Yes, it can get cliquish and circular. But at the same time, it sends readers out in all sorts of fresh directions, no? While I lament the recent and precipitous decline in print book reviews, I love reading blogs. The world seems much larger and certainly quirkier to me as a result. All this said, here at Madam Mayo I don't blog much about book promotion. (Pretty much everything I have to say about that is here.) For an outstanding blog about that subject, check out M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype.