Madam Mayo: Tom Christensen

Showing posts with label Tom Christensen. Show all posts

Monday, December 15, 2014

Top 10 Books Read 2014

#1. Finding George Orwell in Burma
By Emma Larkin
A splendid, intrepid, and thoroughly original marvel of a travel memoir. Most interestingly, in this day & age of facebookesque over-sharing, Emma Larkin has no web page nor author "head shot"-- such is the nature of her work. Dear reader, if you don't know who George Orwell is, get your 1984 here.
P.S. Emma Larkin on pen names.

#2. The Courage to Remember:
PTSD- From Trauma to Triumph
By Lester Tenney
This may not qualify as a "literary gem," but it takes stupendous guts and a heart as big as the world to offer up such a gift as this author, now elderly, did with his memoir. I would go so far as to say, don't depart Planet Earth without having read this book.

#3. River of Ink:
Literature, History, Art
By Tom Christensen
It was an honor to be able to give this one a pre-publication blurb:

Truffle-rich, cumin-exotic, from Mutanabi Street to Céline's ballets, Gutenberg and the Koreans, a winged sphinx and an iron man and Nur Jahan-- oh, and a beturbaned Sadakichi Hartmann-- these world-trotting essays make one groovy box of idea-chocolates.

#4. Demon of the Waters:
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe
By Gregory Gibson
Read my post about Kindles and the Kindle edition of this extraordinary travel memoir / history, which has the strangest ending of any I can think of... (no worries, I won't give it away).

#5. Struck by Genius: How A Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel
By Jason Padgett and Maureen Seaberg
Deeply, wonderfully weird. Actually made me nostalgic for high school geometry, college calculus, and linear algebra, too.

#6. The End of the Sherry
By Bruce Berger
Read my post about this five star memoir of a soon-to-be Baja bohemian in Franco's Spain.

#7. Texas People, Texas Places
By Lonn Taylor
If you don't love Texas and Texans, you will at least be thoroughly charmed (I mean, "thuruhleh chahmd") after reading Lonn Taylor's latest collection of columns for the Big Bend Sentinel. Plus, he's knee-slappingly hilarious, in a southern-gentleman-historian kind of way.

#8. The Last Frontier:
Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
By Julia Assante
As those of you who have been following my blog know, I've crunched through a heap of Afterlife literature in researching my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I read Assante's book too late to include it in my bibliography, alas. If you're willing to explore this subject (and I know not everyone is) I would suggest that you first read Eban Alexander's Proof of Heaven: A Scientist's Case for the Afterlife, then, highlighter in hand, Julia Assante.

#9. A Gathering of Fugitives:
American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965
By Diana Anhalt
As a long-time expat living in Mexico City, I especially enjoyed this one. For those who know little about Mexico, this beautifully written memoir / group biography lights up some murky corners of Mexican and U.S. history. (It went at once onto my list of recommended books on Mexico.)

#10. A tie between

The Last of the Nomads
By W. J. Peasley
This is one of the most powerfully moving books I have ever read. It tells the true story of the 1979 rescue of an elderly couple, Warri and Yatungka, the last of the Mandildjara people, marooned in the vastness of Australia's Gibson Desert, starving and slowly dying of thirst.

and

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:
The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
By Marie Kondo
A one-time Shinto shrine maiden, Kondo bases her "KonMari" method on the assumption that one's house and all the objects in it have consciousness but, boy howdy, even if you're a die-hard materialist, follow her method and you'll zoom to a wiggy new oxygen-rich level of tidy. I am not kidding.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

River of Ink: Literature, History, Art by Thomas Christensen

I've been a long-time admirer of Tom Christensen, and so I was delighted to receive a review copy of his latest, River of Ink, a collection of essays forthcoming from Counterpoint. Herewith my blurb:

Truffle-rich, cumin-exotic, from Mutanabi Street to Céline's ballets, Gutenberg and the Koreans, a winged sphinx and an iron man and Nur Jahan-- oh, and a beturbaned Sadakichi Hartmann-- these world-trotting essays make one groovy box of idea-chocolates.

Yes indeed, River of Ink goes on my top 10 books read list for 2014. (Here's the Top 10 for 2013.)

P.S. Christensen mentions the Youtube video of Sadakichi Hartmann dancing. Here it is:

COMMENTS always welcome.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Writers's Blogs: 3 More Dos & 3 More Don'ts

This Sat May 3rd is my Writers's Blogs: Best & Worst Practices Workshop at the Maryland Writers Association Conference. On this subject, so far novelist and "Work in Progress" blogger Leslie Pietryzk has weighed in with 3 dos and 3 don'ts, as has writer, translator, and editor and "Right-reading" blogger Tom Christensen. And recently, on the occasion of Madam Mayo's second anniversary, I offered "5 Lessons Learned." Herewith 3 more dos and 3 more don'ts:

Do:
--->Mine your blog--- by which I mean, feature the better / most interesting / traffic-generating posts on your menu (see right-hand column of this page, scroll down, and you'll find, for example, Top 10 Books Read in 2007; Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; and Ten Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Writing Workshop);
--->Keep your text brief and link rich (surfers prefer to click rather than scroll);
--->Offer RSS feed.

Don't:
--->Use that generic "blogger" header (I must admit, it took me over a year to put in something original--- it's designed by Kathleen Fetner);
--->Get into endless rounds with anonymous and crank commenters (surely there are better things to do, for example, write?) I don't even allow comments--- though, certainly, I am happy to hear from readers (note link to "send e-mail" on right hand side of the page);
--->Forget to include the link to your blog on your e-mail signature.

---> For the archive on "Gone to the Litblogs" click here.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Guest-Blogger Tom Christensen, "Right-reading" Blogger, on Writers's Blogs: 3 Dos + 3 Don'ts--- or, the Basics of Karma

Re: my upcoming panel on "Writers's Blogs: Best (& Worst) Practices" for the Maryland Writers Association Conference on May 3rd, I'll be blogging about writers's blogs for the next week, and inviting other writers to offer their tips. Tom Christensen's eclectic and charming, always suprising, and beautifully written blog, Right-reading, is so outstanding that I recently included on my list of top 10 writers's blogs. A delight and honor it is to host this post! Over to you, Tom.

Just as there is no one way to write a novel, so there is no one way to write a blog. I imagine Joyce's blog would look a lot different from Proust's, or from Kafka's, or from Celine's, and so on. But I would subscribe to all those feeds.
That said, there are a few things that I think can limit or expand a blog's interest, effectiveness, and reach. Following are three dos and three don'ts to consider in developing a writer's blog.

1. Don't be too self-referential
The approach that is usually the least appealing and most limiting is the navel-gazing diary--- what I had for dinner, what I'm listening to on the radio, which friend I am annoyed at, me, me, me. I suppose this could work if you are a really celebrated and fascinating person, but for most people, unless you are simply writing for friends and family, being too self-referential is a common, and deadly, mistake.

2. Do have a consistent focus
So if you're not going to just write about yourself, what will you write about? The best blogs have a defined focus. Regularly addressing one area of interest will help attract readers, since they will know what to expect, and by returning they confirm an interest in the topic. (Some bloggers apply the 80/20 rule: if 80 percent of posts are on topic, 20 percent can be on other things.)

How tight does the focus have to be? I think my blog.rightreading.com suffers a little from having a focus that is not especially rigorous. I address all aspects of print and electronic publishing, particularly editorial and design, which are seldom fully integrated. As a generalist, I find it difficult to get much more narrow than that. Still, I did spin off several other blogs-— on Asian art (7junipers.com), on Mesoamerica (buriedmirror.com), on northern California (friscovista.com). These are all things I am interested in that I thought would be better off having their own domains rather than mucking up the content at rightreading.

Am I talking too much about myself?

3. Do create useful and original content
Whatever the topic, you have to have something original to offer. Some bloggers do succeed as aggregators of content produced by others, but I think it is more difficult to get by with that approach than it used to be. Sure, many posts can consist of passing along items spotted elsewhere, but unless you create some original content with a unique point of view, it will be difficult for the blog to grow.

Some web marketers like to talk about "link bait." While the term sounds a bit cynical, it encapsulates an important truth. If you have at least one excellent piece of content that will draw readers to your site, that can help to unmoor the blog and carry it into deeper waters. Rightreading gets more visitors than my other blogs in part because they are drawn to popular pages on how to get a book published, Taoism and the arts of China, my book publishing glossary, my rendering of the Yi jing, and more.

(I will not abuse my host's hospitality by inserting links to those pages; anyone who is interested can find them by typing the search term into the Google search box followed by site:www.rightreading.com; that is, for example, by typing book publishing glossary site:www.rightreading.com.)

It's good to distinguish between print content and web content. Broadly, print is about sustained concentration; the web is about instant gratification. While some bloggers-— Conrad Roth (http://vunex.blogspot.com/) and Gawain (http://heaventree.blogspot.com/), for example-- manage to sustain excellent blogs built on the model of the literary essay, these writers are battling the basic nature of the medium. It is better, I think, to keep things short and sweet, for example by breaking up print paragraphs into two or three web paragraphs.

4. Don't confuse press releases and publicity materials with blog posts
Corporate bloggers often fall into this trap, and most publishing companies are among the worst offenders. When blog posts are always pushing a product, they push readers away. Consider Veer, a good example of a smart corporate blog (http://blog.veer.com/)-— it rarely promotes its own products. It is entertaining and informative, so it attracts readers.

Mention your own articles and books, but be judicious-— limit those mentions and keep them pertinent. Try to look at the blog as the product, not as a vehicle for promoting the product: that is how your readers will look at it. If your blog becomes a destination you will earn links and rise up in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

5. Don't blog in a vacuum
Have you heard the new blogger's anthem (http://www.catbirdseat.org/catbirdseat/aug06/blog.mp3)? Especially with a new blog, you have to be patient. Search engine specialists argue about the nature of a possible Google "sandbox"-— a holding area to which new websites may be assigned for months before they are allowed into the top-ranking SERPS. What is clear is that you need to establish trustworthiness (to build up your "trust rank" in web lingo) before you can consistently rank well for most search terms. That means acquiring links from established authority sites in a natural pattern (certainly not by buying irrelevant links en masse, a technique that might have worked in 2002).

One of the best way to acquire links is to participate on other blogs and forums. By that I don't mean making a quick self-promoting comment on somebody's blog (which is likely tagged "nofollow" in any case), and then never returning, but instead actively participating in web communities. When the conversation comes around to topics on which you have made good posts, you will get links.

6. Do be generous
Old-media types look aghast at bloggers providing links that lead readers away from their websites and off to other areas. And some SEO (search engine optimization) specialists are leery of squandering page rank by leaking away link juice. These approaches will not work. You must credit your sources and link to excellence whenever you can. Most people will notice when you link to them, and they may reward you with a link back.

Your "link neighborhood," the constellation of sites you link to and that link to you, says a lot—- both to your readers and to the search engines-— about the nature of your blog. It's karmic-— if you are generous with credit, praise, and links, I promise you will be repaid.

---Tom Christensen

---> For more of Madam Mayo's guest-blog posts, click here.

---> For Madam Mayo's archive posts on lit-blogging, click here.