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.

I went through a number of stages in titling my book. I had a few provisional titles, and some of them were working titles for my book. In registering my book with the Library of Congress, I had to electronically change my title 4 times to accommodate all these changes (and I’d like to offer many patient thanks to Cassandra Latney and Lynn Souder at the Library of Congress!). “Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole” was the final contender for the title of my book, but I considered others, including:

* Creative Alchemy
* Trance Mutations
* Corporate Tranceformations
* Creativity, Destructive Creativity
* Creative Commentary on the Splendor Solis
* Orange-Tinted Mystery
* Expense Report of my Alchemical Hallucinations
* How to Transform your Expense Reports into Gold
* Lead into Creativity

But none of these titles conveyed the full scope of my book (themes of creativity, corporate America, and alchemy) so I decided on a title that had something to do with everything and nothing to do with anything. It’s more creative that way, anyway.The final title even looks great on the cover of my book — and here’s a sneak preview of it….

While I’m thanking people, I’d like to thank the editor of the Press of Atlantic City for his advice on what fonts to avoid on the book cover, as well as for some crafty press release insight, and I’d also like to thank the Digital Media Design Manager at frogdesign.com’s New York & San Francisco offices for his editorial comments on my book’s theme.

In the last week, my publicist filed a handful of press releases online, using such sites as PRWeb.com, express-press-release.com, i-newswire.com, PRFree.com, Arrivenet.com, clickpress.com, PRLeap.com, webnewswire.com, malebits.com, newsreleaser.com, and theopenpress.com. Each of these press releases mentioned my upcoming book, and a link to books.thewestern.net. And after a week of press releases, what was the result?Surprisingly, more than I thought.I thought at first that there would be no result, that nobody reads press releases anymore. But weirdly, people still read them, and they use them to come to my book’s website. My press releases have been copied onto such sites as newbookreviews.org, wikiverse.org, soloespanyol.net, wordIQ.com, timberfrog.com, necktie.towear.info, lattitudegallery.com, watapata.com, bookreview.abblogger.com, russiangunner.com, freesearcharticles.com, topix.net, showhappy.info, dmcast.info, probo.info, synetix.info, xenite.org, 2rss.com, and — inscrutably — my press release has appeared on the homepage of onlypunjab.com.Why would readers of onlypunjab.com want to know about my book? As the author of my book, I’m confused — surprised, yes — but confused. But then, I’m also confused by one site (cached page here) which lists my press release as coming from the United Arab Emirates.Who reads press releases anymore? With press release categories such as “Maritime” and “Business - South East Asia”, you get the sense that relic colonialists from the British East-Indian Empire are still awaiting their shipping news, or news on coffee bean futures, or news on which schooners and packet ships will be coming into port soon. You imagine these relic businessmen in Punjabi port cities as old-fashioned gabardine-garbed suntanned men in spectacles with a predilection for pre-prandial brandy and post-prandial cigars … but then you realize that the press release market caters to people like you and me. There’s an irony in having a publicist submit press releases for my book, of course; the press releases say that in my book, I eschew corporate America, that you have to get out of corporate America — and yet, I use the tools of corporate America (ie, press releases themselves!) to promote my book. Still, it’s only human to be the sums of our ironies and inconsistencies. And besides, Punjab doesn’t even have a port.

The following materials are available to the press, to bookstores, and to libraries for Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole: a modern-day alchemy book.

Press Release: PDF file

Author bio/interview: PDF file

Author photos:

(300Kb .png file)

(1 Mb .png file)

High-resolution 600dpi images from the book:

Book Cover (3 Mb .png file)

Image from page 8 (6 Mb .png file)

Image from page 69 (3 Mb .png file)

Additional materials are available on request; please contact the Oscura Press for more.

I’m not sure what a “Tadpold” is, but the promotional postcard from Page One Books which is advertising my reading tomorrow seems to think I write about a “Tadpold”. Perhaps a Tadpold is a frog named Leopold?

Still, I can’t complain; the postcard features the Futura font, after all. And I respect Page One Books for creating a book-loving culture and community in New Mexico. So I’m really looking forward to this. I spent the morning writing what I would say during my reading; I prefer to write outside the house in a small yurt which I built to write within. However, there was a family of mice infesting the yurt today — pine nuts and mice droppings everywhere — so I spent an hour or two with the vacuum cleaner and a fireplace iron trying to chase the mice out of my yurt. And then another hour with duct tape trying to tape-up any loose cracks in the fabric, by which the mice might have entered. You might think that mice are cute with their enormous big noctural eyes, but when you find their dessicated droppings and that they’ve nibbled at your collection of alchemy books, then you politely put aside any anthropomorphizing feelings you once had and chase the mice around with a fireplace iron. I have to admit, I’m nervous about my reading. I’ve stood up and given speeches to corporate CIOs and CTOs, but those were situations where I didn’t have to talk about what I was most passionate about — my own ideas. Anyone can talk to a C-level executive about internet technology, but it’s another thing entirely to pitch your own book to people who work at Sandia Labs or Intel or who-knows-where in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. But I think my speech has a great blend of fact and humor, and it’s at just the right level, so we’ll see!