For Tameme News

For Tameme news please visit www.tameme.org/news.html 

This Blog: A Short Lived Experiment?

Tameme Blog is going to take a vacation. Possibly permamently. I'm in a bit of dither about it. Blogger-- this free blog software-- just updated to a much improved, certainly much faster version, but in the transition, I ran into several snafus. We--- right now the team is myself and Don Q--- may continue blogging here, or blogging on a page of the Tameme website, www.tameme.org In the meantime, we're doing all we can to get the word out about our new chapbook, Agustin Cadena's lovely short story "Carne verde piel negra / An Avocado from Michoacan." Look for more Tameme news at www.tameme.org/news.html

Editor's Eye (C.M. Mayo): Blogging the Avocado

We've yet to send out the review copies of our first chapbook and we already have a few very nice blog posts. Check out Agustin Cadena's El vino y la hiel and Magda Diaz Morales's Apostillas literarias. Other news: Mundo a Mundo, the Spanish language literary translation workshop, will be offered again this July in Queretaro, Mexico. And coming up at the end of this month, the Associated Writing Programs mega-pow wow will be in Atlanta, Georgia-- and Tameme will be there in the bookfair. I'll also be on two panels, one on literary translation and the other on publishing "beyond the book"-- broadsides, audio CDs, "vidlit", chapbooks, and more.

O Canada (Don Q)

Had a quick look on the Internet at some of the Canucks who've appeared in Tameme. Guess what popped up first for Farley Mowat? A rather long extract on a Google website from his 2004 book And No Birds Sang. Not sure he approved these long extracts. Seems to Don Q that Google is getting chaulk all over itself by brushing up against the Fair Use copyright law of the United States if not also of other nations. Tameme has always had a policy of strict adherence to copyright laws in the United States. Unlike some who think getting chaulk all over their clothes, much less eating it is A-OK....The New Yorker magazine has a good background article out now about how Google and others treat basic copyright laws.

Sometimes I wish just Mother Nature was the only lawgiver. Not self-serving politicians and their ilk and those who treat lawsuits as a game to see who has the most money for pre-trial shenaigans. She certainly dealt quickly with the presumptious character Mr. Mowat wrote about who thought living in the high latitudes of Canada would be a snap. I like to imagine her glowering at Google and all others who would attempt to take food and shelter away from writers with their unpaid for "extracts" game. I suppose that's why I'm called "Don Q". Yes, he was a nutter, but Don Quixote has survived for more than four hundred years. Who now remembers the harassers of his creator? The pirates who catured him? The prosecutors who threw him into jail? Who really mattered to Mother Nature and human history?

Do you know which group of people has had the longest continuously operating democracy in the world? They call their parliament the "Althingi". Isn't that a great word! Don Q learned about them in Winnipeg at the Univerity of Manitoba during a law lecture about their written history. Icelanders! And did you know a large number of them came to the high latitudes of Canada and have thrived? No wonder. A smart people with full respect for Mother Nature combined with a long history of literacy and democracy. Wonderful combinations. So mark your calendars to enjoy the best of the Icelanders in Canada at their annual Summer festival in Gimli, Manitoba. A place and time for Don Q indeed!

Editor's Eye (C.M. Mayo): Covers, Mundo a Mundo, Conversational Reading

This week several people have asked me about our covers. At Tameme, we have been very lucky to be able to work with two outstanding graphic designers, Kathleen Smythe, who did the cover of Tameme's first issue, and Ines Hilde, who has done the others, and most recently, the cover of our first chapbook, Agustin Cadena's "Carne verde, piel negra ~ An Avocado from Michoacan." The latter features the painting "Aguacuates" by Edgar Soberon.

Buenas noticias: University of Oregon Professor Amanda Powell will be teaching the fabulous "Mundo a Mundo" Literary Translation Workshop again this summer in Queretaro, Mexico.

Check out Scott Esposito's litblog Conversational Reading. We hear he's in Mexico these days, doing lots of reading.

Editor's Eye (C.M. Mayo): Notes Toward a Taxonomy of Litblogs

Litblogging--- blogging literature--- both competes with and complements print-publishing. To what degrees and in which ways? It's a strange and still emerging paradigm. Writers blog, reviewers blog, poets, groups of writers, associations of translators, you name it--- and of course, publishers blog. A few new blogs in the latter category include News from the University of Georgia Press and Zyzzyva Speaks, the blog of the San Francisco, California-based Zyzzyva literary journal. (Howard Junker, you rock.)

I'm fascinated by the variety of litblogs. As for blogs by writers: Washington DC-based fiction writer Wendi Kaufman has a newsy and massively read litblog, The Happy Booker. Another example is poet and memoirist E. Ethelbert Miller's diary jottings at E-Notes. Yet another: Mexican writer Agustin Cadena, author of "Carne verde, piel negra ~ An Avocado from Michoacan", Tameme's first chapbook, posts original writing on his blog, El vino y la hiel.

Editor's Eye (C.M. Mayo): Getting Started

Welcome to the Tameme blog, which is just getting started. If you're new to Tameme, please be sure to visit our website at www.tameme.org and check our our titles, including our first chapbook (by Mexican writer Agustin Cadena) and back-issues of the Tameme literary journal. The complete catalog is here. Tameme is blingual (English and Spanish), however, my blog posts, for the most part, will be in English. I'll be posting "Editor's Eye" every Tuesday (except when not) and we'll also have some other bloggers with musings and news in both English and Spanish on various subjects related to Tameme's mission. Be sure to visit again soon.