Archive for July, 2008
Rather than do a screenshot of each e-commerce site as it comes online with my book, I’ll just update this page with the listings, by country.
Best prices so far:7.31€ if you’re in Germany17.80 Swiss Francs if you’re in Switzerland£4.52 if you’re in the United Kingdom
$8.95 if you’re in the United States,¥1,044 if you’re in Japan,and 99.96 South African rands if you’re stranded in the Kalahari desert and need to figure out how to escape from corporate America with your soul intact.
My book is now on http://www.amazon.de, but it’s still not on the US Amazon site:
Let’s deconstruct this listing on the German Amazon.com site.1) I am now known as “von Jason Murk”. Please address all correspondence to von Jason Murk, c/o his Bavarian castle.2) My book is categorized as “Üerblick”. For those who don’t know German (and I’m one of them) Üerblick is a very cool, high-end kind of bling. Üerblick is also like oobleck, the gooey semi-solid mixture formed from corn starch and water that you probably played with in Kindergarten.3) To their credit, the German Amazon site already has 2 copies of my books on hand, although I think a price of 10.09 euros is a bit high. They crossed the psychological 10 euro point, and should have aimed for 9.95 euros instead. Still, this gives me an excuse to use the euro symbol (€) which I have never typed in my life before. So, today really is a first!4) I’m actually happy that a German site is carrying my book.
Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole is illustrated with woodcuts from a German alchemy book called the
Splendor Solis which was published in Hamburg, so it’s only appropriate that my reproductions of these 16
th century German woodcuts find their way back home.5) What is Kaffe-und Espressogenuss? Whatever it is, they seem to think that readers of my book might be interested in it. Is it coffee? Instant genius? If anyone knows German and wants to comment, I’d love to know more.
My book is now available to Booksense stores:
For those of you who might not know it, Booksense is affiliated with the American Bookseller’s Association, a consortium of independent booksellers. This interests me because my book is anti-corporate in its stance, and on my forthcoming roadtrip this summer through New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, I only plan on doing readings and signings at independent bookstores. Booksense is a program which links together about 60% of the country’s independent bookstores, providing them for instance with a title database which allows my book to be carried in stores from San Francisco to Santa Fe. Given the fiercely independent stance of Booksense bookstores, you can see that I would be pleased to be listed by them. I highly encourage everyone to patronize your local independent bookstore, whether it’s a Booksense store or any other enlightened bookstore. In fact, I encourage everyone to smuggle books out of your “local” Borders and to put them into the shelves of your hometown independent bookstore, so that they can sell them instead.It’s not that I have anything against Borders, or any other chain store. It’s just that … well, I actually do have something against chain stores and the intrusion of corporate America into everyday local life. In fact, I wrote a book on this subject! You might have heard about it; it’s the book whose blog you’re reading!
My book is now available on http://amazon.co.uk:
The way that my book gradually makes it onto the internet bookstores fascinates me.F’r instance, the first store to show my book was Barnes & Noble. Then,
Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole was available on the Booksense.com database. And now, my book is available on
Amazon.co.uk. It’s also available on
Amazon.ca, the Canadian arm of Amazon. For some reason, you can get the book shipped (”dispatched”) to you within 1-2 weeks in England but it takes 3-5 weeks if you buy it in Canada. Must have something to do with the exchange rate. Strangely enough, I’m not on the US version of Amazon.com yet. But I’m heartened by the fact that all my former coworkers at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce sitting in their offices & surfing the web can order copies of my book online, and probably expense them to the deep pockets of CIBC.Still, it’s fascinating to watch as one Amazon storefront after another starts to carry my book. I’ll post screenshots of each regional Amazon site as it comes up. Before long, no doubt, my book will be available on Amazon’s Punjab site, or at least Amazon’s United Arab Emirates website.
My book is on Barnes & Noble now:
I can remember going to Barnes & Noble bookstores with my aunt in New Jersey when I was a kid. She would buy me any book I wanted … she probably still would, too. When I was a kid, books in a bookstore always seemed authoritative: there was something definitive about a book, something solid. There still is, of course (even though nobody reads books anymore) but it comes as a surprise nonetheless to see my own book listed on Barnes & Noble.It’s not in stock yet, but that will change soon. And then I’ll return to New Jersey in triumph to buy it. I’ll buy one for my aunt, too. And if people are more content to read blogs than books, then I’ll have to use stealth to get my book into their hands: I designed my book to be small, slimmer than a volume of Mexican poetry — I designed my book to compete with the internet, which is inherently visual in nature. Illustrations make up nearly half of my book, and the portion which remains is elliptical … zenlike … like the kind of koans you get if you crossed the Osho Zen Tarot with a modern-day alchemy book. It’s the kind of book you can read in one night, in one sitting.And once you’ve read it, getcherself down to Barnes & Noble and write a review! Heck, you can probably write a review right now. You can say that my book is so zenlike that you grasp its meaning before you’ve even read it; you can say that you knew Jason back when he was once a two-headed tadpole in an ill-fitting necktie working for a dot-com company; and you can say that my book competes so well against the internet that you’ve decided to turn your computer off right now——
My book is on Barnes & Noble now:
I can remember going to Barnes & Noble bookstores with my aunt in New Jersey when I was a kid. She would buy me any book I wanted … she probably still would, too. When I was a kid, books in a bookstore always seemed authoritative: there was something definitive about a book, something solid. There still is, of course (even though nobody reads books anymore) but it comes as a surprise nonetheless to see my own book listed on Barnes & Noble.It’s not in stock yet, but that will change soon. And then I’ll return to New Jersey in triumph to buy it. I’ll buy one for my aunt, too. And if people are more content to read blogs than books, then I’ll have to use stealth to get my book into their hands: I designed my book to be small, slimmer than a volume of Mexican poetry — I designed my book to compete with the internet, which is inherently visual in nature. Illustrations make up nearly half of my book, and the portion which remains is elliptical … zenlike … like the kind of koans you get if you crossed the Osho Zen Tarot with a modern-day alchemy book. It’s the kind of book you can read in one night, in one sitting.And once you’ve read it, getcherself down to Barnes & Noble and write a review! Heck, you can probably write a review right now. You can say that my book is so zenlike that you grasp its meaning before you’ve even read it; you can say that you knew Jason back when he was once a two-headed tadpole in an ill-fitting necktie working for a dot-com company; and you can say that my book competes so well against the internet that you’ve decided to turn your computer off right now——
eBooks are digital, they’ll survive the second Dark Age. eBooks are finally here, and the Mobi Reader is as smooth as a spin on black ice at night. So take a stroll with me over to MobiPocket, which is the iTunes Store of digital books, and check out my eBook, which is now a “New Arrival” on their store! 
Blatant self-promotion aside, eBooks have come a long way since the PDF files of yesteryear. You once had to be a hoary old wizened Postscript programmer to tweak the look and feel of an eBook, and now anybody’s sixth-grade kid can program HTML — which is the lingua franca of Mobi books. (Of course, sixth-grade kids can also do PowerPoint presentations these days — GenY are going to rule the world one day, what’s left of it, anyway, after the Second Dark Age….)
There are shelves of Mexican poetry at the University of New Mexico library — somehow, and I’m not sure why, all these volumes of Mexican poetry date to the late 1960s — perhaps there was a renaissance of Mexican poetry during that time? There doesn’t seem to be much before or after that time period. But when you browse the aisles of late 1960s Mexican poetry, you see all these volumes with white covers and spot-color illustrations, with perhaps the simplest hint of color on the spines — volumes of Mexican poetry whose colors seem somehow to resemble the cover of my own book, or perhaps it’s the other way around. I’d like to think that somehow I’m carrying on the late 1960s tradition of Mexican poetry with
Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole — although my book has nothing to do with Mexican poetry, and nothing to do with the late 1960s. Still, there’s a vibrancy here. I imagine a border printing-press in Tijuana, where the resident typographer has a sparse spot-color style of design which speaks volumes in an elemental, existential way. I’d like to think that this Tijuana style somehow informs the design of my book, somehow made its way into the offices of the Oscura Press.Still, I’m proud to be in the company of such illustrious books of poetry as
Muchachos and
El Pequeño Arquitecto Del Universo. I like to think of myself as a friendly world-builder as well.
There’s nothing like holding a copy of your book in your hands, hot off the presses. The first galley for my book came in from the printer today, and it’s stunning to hold it, to physically hold your own words in your own hands. I’ve labored over a laptop screen for so many years in writing my words, but I’ve never once seen them bound together. In this way, the analog will always triumph over the digital.And the book itself! The paper is so creamy, like the inside of a triple-crème cheese. You know, the orange buttery creamy kind of cheese which is so smooth that it almost seems to slide off the plate as you try to cut it. The book’s triple-creme smooth paper shows off the illustrations to such a great effect! It’s 24-pound paper (90 grams per square inch) which means it’s thick enough so that you can’t see the printed material on the opposite side of the page — hot damn, it’s great! Hot damn with a hot layer of triple-creme cheese, in fact!
In editing “Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole” down to size, I had to eliminate from the book a fragment which I really enjoyed, but which just wasn’t appropriate for final release; I strived to keep the balance of image and text perfect, but this particular paragraph was simply too long. However, with the internet as my personal filing system, I can post this lost fragment online … I feel that it deserves to see the light of day, well, or at least the dark undergrotto underbelly of the internet in all its ARPANet glory.Here’s the fragment:
And so, what is your mind’s filing system? Your mind’s filing system? No, wait, I mean creativity. And so, what is creativity? Creativity is when your mind’s filing system breaks down. It’s like an Iowa 1880s post office, with little glass doors with spinny combination locks which people can open to get their mail. In back of the little glass doors are slots in which you can pigeonhole people’s mail. You’re a post office employee sorting people’s mail into pigeonholes. Some people get a lot of mail, others don’t — you get kind of fascinated by those people who don’t get much mail. You start to feel sorry for them, start to give them some of the other people’s mail. That’s fun for a while, but then you start reading people’s mail. That’s fun too, for a while. Then you start pigeonholing other objects into people’s mail slots, like frogs maybe. And then you get kind of tired of pigeonholing everything into slots, you get tired of organizing everything, and you just burn the whole damn post office down, mail and all, frogs too. That’s creativity.
Blatant self-promotion aside, eBooks have come a long way since the PDF files of yesteryear. You once had to be a hoary old wizened Postscript programmer to tweak the look and feel of an eBook, and now anybody’s sixth-grade kid can program HTML — which is the lingua franca of Mobi books. (Of course, sixth-grade kids can also do PowerPoint presentations these days — GenY are going to rule the world one day, what’s left of it, anyway, after the Second Dark Age….)