A blog which has nothing to do with gardening

So, after sitting around in a classroom discussing the future of the "publishing" industry, I listened to an awesome new-ish album (2009) and read about how one local performer is DIY-ing her way to financial solvency: Amanda Palmer.

The concept is - the old model of paying artists was to have them "signed" (or for writers, "contracted") to a major label (or publishing house) which would then front the costs of producing and distributing your media.   Now that often that we as writers can create and distribute our media ourselves....do we need that big contract, that big signing?   Well, it certainly would be nice to get an advance..... but is there another way?

I liked this short description of how Amanda Palmer made money simply by promoting herself.  Of course, its a bummer that such a cool, off-beat punk-indie-rock-cabaret (caberet??) artist would not make money off her album.   But its fantastic that she is doing her own promotion, and getting contact with her own fan base directly.   As such a quirky (and dark) non-pop artist, there's always going to be a limited audience - so how do those of us interested in quality over popularity, innovation over selling out, um, sell ourselves?
read on for one possibility....
(I of course would prefer that I didn't have to auction off my stuff, but whatevs...)

http://www.suite101.com/content/amanda-palmer-saviour-of-the-music-industry-a130519

ps: the album is great.  Paste to browser to listen to a song....

http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play#Amanda+Palmer:Guitar+Hero:44419473:s28038082.9144795.3088909.0.2.221%2Cstd_36382125cd664a549cad6ca3fb25527d

Annie Proulx, gardening and fiction

E. Annie Proulx: (2000) "All over this scratched and worn earth regional and rural cultures, the natural world, and the diversity of life itself are eroding and crumbling under terrific outside pressures. For more than a decade, through the medium of fiction, I have been trying to catch pieces of North American rural lives and ways squeezed in the pincers of change. For me everything begins with the great landscape—not scenery but soil and water, climate and weather, indigenous plant and animal life, geography and geology. Against this background human adaptation to, and exploitation of, that landscape in a particular time orders the personalities and characaters of my stories, shapes the stories themselves which must tumble out of the place portrayed. I am concerned as well with the growing gap between rural and urban attitudes and behavior, the rural perception of the economic forces that call out the marching orders."


This summer I started two blogs: one about my garden, and one about my writing and teaching.   I haven't wanted to write too much about the teaching, namely because I tell all my students (I can't believe I have students!) to look at my blog, and then where am I? 

But it's felt like a funny stretch for me, writing about my backyard and my devotion to my tomatoes, beans and peppers, and then also trying to keep up my fiction.  I've always placed these in two separate boxes - writing is indoors, public, and professional, while gardening is outdoors, a private and amateurish pleasure.   But I've known in my heart that they were linked, a kind of ying and yang.   Writing involves sending my mind fixedly far away from the here and now.   Gardening pushes exactly the opposite buttons - it is a radical rooting in the here and now - the smell of this tomato bush, the stink of the compost, the wet or dry dirt, the hidden bean harvest, the way my fingers learn to find little weeds and pull them out.  It's an immersion in sights, sounds and smells - tiny little lacewing insects, flies, worms, birds, caterpillars, rot or growth on a plant.   The information is here and now.  And the product is for my pleasure only: no matter how hard I work to preserve the harvest, it will go.   Eventually, no matter how delicious a meal is, it will disappear into the belly of one of my friends, to be absorbed into their bodies or gone forever. 

Writing is the opposite - it is sitting alone in a little room, the quieter the better, and the only senses triggered signal distractions: a tea kettle, cold feet, the phone ringing, someone at the door.   The world here has to come entirely from our mind.   And it's not to be enjoyed now - what we make now might disappear forever.  But the final product is a kind of everlasting pie - I can (hopefully) pass it around to a world's worth of "relatives" - and unlike a pie, enjoy it or not, it will last months, maybe years. 

Review of "Radical Homemaking"

So, in the inevitable crossover of my literary and gardening pursuits, I present for you a witty and charming review of a book I fully intend to read (just as soon as those dang beans are harvested, the tomatoes safely in their winter storage box, and  my entire herb garden moved!).

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08311001.aspx

Enjoy.


On an update note, this blog seems to have gone as my gardening goes.....super heavy and intense at the beginning of the season, then trailing off a little as August makes everything go crazy, and down to barest maintenance as school starts up and life gets busy in September.    The basic update:  the cool weather slowed down all my fall crops, but I'm still harvesting a little lettuce, beans galore, tomatoes and peppers.  I have ripe bok choi, but can't find the time to eat it.   I've made chili, tomato sauce, steamed beans, more tomato sauce, all sorts of middle-eastern style Tagine potato, eggplant and tomato and pepper dishes, etc. etc. in various combinations.    In general, I have it down to a science at this point:   beans are cleaned, tipped and tailed, and frozen in plastic bags.   Tomatoes are sliced in half, cored and de-seeded, sprinkled with olive oil, a little salt and maybe rosemary, and roasted on parchment paper in a 200 degree oven for 1-5 hours.   (1 hour for making sauce later that evening, when, cooled, the skins slip off pretty easy, 5 hours for bagging and freezing).   cucumbers and peppers are eaten ASAP.   It's nice now, that planting is all done and harvesting, cooking, preserving and eating are the biggest chores.   Looking out now for the first frost, so we can grab all the tender plants before jack frost does!