NEW BOOKS COMING - THE SET UP

I wonder what a book tour is like in Africa? Take a look at this picture. It's from the current issue of The Economist. It's a satellite view of Europe and Africa at night. The Africans are certainly doing more than their fair share of the work to combat global warming.

I don't know how many inches of glacier I've melted with all the emails I've already sent out to lay the groundwork for my upcoming book launch. I am driving for most of the upcoming tour. That's not good, but it's not as bad as if I was flying to the 20 or so cities where I have events planned. At least my office isn't air-conditioned. (Which is something I've regretted during the past week.)

The problem with book promotion these days is that you never know what's going to work. Lately I've heard that the only guaranteed book sellers these days are appearances on Oprah, The Daily Show and on the display ladders at the front of Barnes & Noble and Borders. (B&N and Borders sell 85% of the books they sell, from within the first 20 feet of the front door.) Supposedly, even The Today Show and Good Morning America can't guarantee book sales anymore.

Everyone's talking about viral marketing and every new book seems to come complete with a "book trailer." Click here to see mine. If your book trailer hits on YouTube, you'll supposedly sell a lot of books.

But, there's no way to guarantee a hit on YouTube, or anywhere else. Not long ago a publisher spent, by its own admission, $60,000 on two one minute short films to get a buzz going online about a new book. It didn't help. So far as I know the book hasn't earned back its advance, much less that extra sixty thousand bucks.

I suppose getting arrested could help, a little. Getting arrested in a compromising position with Paris Hilton might help even more. But maybe people are getting sick of Paris. I know I am.

So what can a writer do? What sells books?

I'm opting for the machine gun approach. Jam as big a clip as I can into the thing, set it on full auto, hold down the trigger and blast away in as many different directions as I possibly can. Surely I'll hit something. If I was a big name author like Stephen King or somebody, my publisher could afford the hydrogen bomb approach, laying waste to readers all across America - and the world. But they can't afford that, and neither can I.

So, here I am again, a blind man with a gun. (Oh wait, there's a Chester Himes novel called something like that - Blind Man With a Pistol.) Only this time, having been through this a couple of times in the past with previous books, I've got a bigger magazine of bullets and I might be able to conserve some by shooting in controlled bursts.

And I've got some booksellers on my side. They're good allies.

So if in the next few months you get more emails than you want from me, you see my name more than seems seemly on websites and bulletin boards (and maybe some restroom walls), and I show up in your town and pester you to come see me in person and buy multiple copies of my books and it all seems like too much shameless self-promotion... Tough! A writer's gotta do, what a writer's gotta do

Why I Don't Have Any Tattoos

Commitment issues, it's as simple as that. I can't come up with any particular image, word or symbol that I want permanently on my body. I know myself, I'd change my mind sooner or later and getting tattoos removed is painful and not all that effective.

The closest I ever came was when I was in college in Olympia, Washington. I used to hang out on Pacific Avenue in Tacoma and I had befriended a tattoo artist named Painless Brenda. One night I was drunk. I walked in to Brenda's shop, sat down and told her that I wanted a mushroom cloud on my right bicep, with the words, "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" written below it. In my inebriated state it struck me as an existential badass tattoo.

Brenda looked at me, shook her head no, then threw me out of her parlor. She told me that she didn't permit "cursing in her presence" and to come back when I was sober.

I did go back when I was sober. I brought her a bottle of the wine she liked and thanked her for having tossed me out.

I like tattoos. A good tattoo can be beautiful, and sexy. There are plenty of others that are just plain interesting, fascinating even. There are plenty of bad ones though. Sooner or later some of the chain tattoo removal parlors are going to start making lots of money. There wasn't, however, any traffic at their booths yesterday at the Tattoo and Body Modification Expo at the L.A. County Fairgrounds.

Every chance I get, I go to tattoo expos. What's great about them is that everyone who's there, shows up to see and be seen. They take the word "expo" seriously. It's a photographer's paradise. A whole crowd of people who love it when you take their picture; who are comfortable with their bodies; who are, often literally, colorful.

Here's a few photos from Friday and Saturday at the Tattoo Expo. (If you want to see a lot more, I've put them on a Flickr page. (I suggest using the slide show function.)

But, for those of you who don't want to go to the Flickr Page here's a preview:

Emma and Immigration

Emma Goldman has long been one of my heroes. The beliefs that she so clearly and beautifully articulated, speak to the best sides of human nature. As I've grown older - my 55th birthday was on Wednesday - I've come to regard some - not all, not even the majority, but some - of her beliefs as naive. That's due, I suppose, to the growing cynicism with which I regard the world around me.

And it's a shame. This would be a far better place if Emma's vision could realistically be fully implemented.

Whether her vision for the world was realistic or not, Emma Goldman's writing and speeches still resonate. June 27th is the 138th anniversary of her birth. As a donor, I received the following quote in an email from The Emma Goldman Papers Project at UC Berkeley. It is from her closing statement at her 1917 trial for speaking out against the World War One draft. She was convicted, imprisoned and then deported. Her words, from 90 years ago, speak very loudly to the issues of today.

“Gentleman of the jury, we respect your patriotism, we would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty?

"I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must... consist in blindness to its social faults, in deafness to its social discords, inarticulation to its social wrongs. Neither can I believe that the mere accident of birth in a certain country or the mere scrap of a citizen’s paper constitutes the love of country.

"I know many people — I am one of them — who were not born here, nor have they applied for citizenship, and who yet love America. Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.

"So we, too, who know America, love her beauty, her richness, her great possibilities; we love her mountains, her canyons, her forests, her Niagara, and her deserts — above all do we love the people that have produced her wealth, her artists who have created beauty, her great apostles who dream and work for liberty.

"But with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her cant, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the alter of the Golden Calf...We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America."

If you want to know more about the Emma Goldman Papers Project - they are producing a remarkable set of volumes of her writing, speeches and articles about her - you can click here and be taken to their website.