Special Summer Blockbuster Trailers Edition

BOOK TRAILERS, of course! Books I'm reading/want to read. What other trailers are out there? Please do share. Enquiring minds, etc. etc.

I can't think of any movies out now that I'm really excited about seeing. This is mainly because I've been living in a cave, but also because there's an awful lot of dreck out now, therefore I stop paying attention. I see two-and-a-half stars from my trusty reviewers and think, Eh, there's one less thing I need to be concerned with, so THANKS, reviewers, and THANKS to the five-star rating system and visual/symbol literacy, and THANKS brain for understanding said system and moving on to the next thing, which is the comics, and also the baby wants more cereal, like immediately, because that kid can eat. So! Let's you and me curl up with a good book trailer followed by reading the book itself. Yes. Get on board.


So You Know It's Me by Brian Oliu

So You Know It's Me Trailer from Be Xo on Vimeo.

Naked Summer by Andrew Scott

Naked Summer: The Book Trailer from Andrew Scott on Vimeo.

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French



Question: would it be odd to make a trailer for a book that has yet to be published? Because I think that would be some awesome fun. And a great excuse to travel and shoot footage. Cue the fog machine. Release the hounds. Vamanos a las montañas. Etc. etc.

Notebook detritus

Yesterday I came across an old "ideas" file on the computer, a place I'd intended to jot and stash images and material for stories, poems and the like. I'd forgotten the file and hadn't opened it in ages, since I usually turn to notebooks and scrap paper. There were only a half-dozen items on my list, which is actually titled "idears," because that seems a little amusing and vaguely British and has "dear" in it, always nice. One of my idears was this gem:

POEM ABOUT DUST

I have no recollection of writing this note-to-self, and not even sure what I had in mind with my poem about dust. The constant battle against? The squeamy feeling that comes with thinking about dust mites on the skin? To dust we shall return?

I really ought to write a poem about dust. Dorianne Laux did, and so did Li-Young Lee.

(Fun for hours at The Writer's Almanac, at least for a word nerd like me. Here you will find the work of David Shumate, a fine, fine, poet I am lucky to call a colleague. Related: Good Poems for Hard Times, selected by Garrison Keillor.)

I have more notebooks than I can keep track of, filled with the unfinished, the half-thought-out. Maybe I need to dust off a few old ones to see what else I've forgotten.

Piece of advice overheard in a restaurant on Elmwood Ave. in Buffalo, N.Y., from a grandfather to his granddaughter, at a post-graduation lunch:

"Stay away from writers and artists. They only make money after they're dead."