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I gave a talk this afternoon for a one day workshop given by the Michigan Library Consortium about teaching technology in libraries. It was a keynote-ish talk so more “big picture” talking and less “this is how we do it.”

To that end, I did a new-from-the-ground-up talk about technology instruction and even wrote out notes for all of my slides so people who weren’t there could maybe follow along later. As anyone who has seen me speak knows, I tend to extemporanize (sp?) quite a bit so while the bones of the talk are in the notes, I also told a lot of stories about the libraries I work in and waved my hands around a lot. You can see the notes and a mov or pdf of the slides here: Teaching Tech in Libraries: what are we doing?

I’m still trying to find a good way to put slideware talks online without having to re-give the talk and toss it into Slideshare. Big thanks to all the folks from Michigan for being such a great audience and Twitterfolks for giving me some good advice. (go be Flickr friends with Kevin to see more (admittedly, not that fascinating) photos of this event)

I'm in England right now, feeling a bit travel-sick (literally. It's not a clever idea to try and type in a car going from Gatwick to London) and travel-weary.

I travelled to the airport this morning in a car with Boris and Mrs Spassky in the back, which was odd as I'd put a reference to Fischer Vs. Spassky into the script for "Black Hole" a couple of days ago. Cultural references shouldn't travel in the same car as you.

Let's see. I did an event for kids yesterday afternoon, then late last night was the event for the Festival volunteers -- I was sat on a large red throne and interviewed by Death, Delirium, Destruction and Destiny, among other people. It was fun, and odd, and strangely sweet, and then I signed until nearly one in the morning. Other interesting things I did yesterday would include coffee in the hotel lounge with fellow guests Kiran Desai and Mohsin Hamid, mistaking Colin Thubron for James Lovelock, and failing to get drunk with Jonathan Ames (went to bed instead).

Ran into an old acquaintance in the baggage hall at Gatwick which was nice (and he helped magic me through customs).

How was dinner with Chuck Palahniuk?

Nice, thank you. I had the fish.

I discovered today that Chuck's teaching at Clarion West in 2008, while I'll be teaching at Clarion. (Details at http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/09/instructor-rosters-f.html). The Clarion website is at http://theclarionfoundation.org/ and author Robert Crais made me wistful in Mantova by telling me about his Clarion in 1972, taught by Chip Delany, Gene Wolfe, Joe Haldeman, Roger Zelazny, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm...

Someone wrote to ask if the gigantic polaroid camera was the same kind as in this article -- http://www.making-ripples.com/2006/09/excuse_me_did_y.html -- and it looked exactly the same, yes. (The photographer, Marina Alessi, said there were three cameras in the US and two in Europe.) Someone else wrote to tell me that there's a bigger one -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/essays/vanRiper/011120.htm.
I imagine the coming lack of film will doom that one as well....

Back home, Sharon Stiteler caught the bees on a coffee break, then harvested the honey. With my dog. And I am not there. Sigh.

...

If you want to see National Theatre of Scotland/Improbable production of The Wolves in the Walls ("a musical pandemonium") you can get tickets at https://secure.newvictory.org/newvictory/tickets/production.aspx?PID=86
(and read about it at http://www.newvictory.org/show.m?showID=1028522).

For all the people writing to ask me if it's also going to be showing up in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis etc, as far as I know right now there are no plans for it to go anywhere else. Having said that, if people from local theatres see it in New York and want to bring it in, then all will change.

Hi Neil! In response to the question on Little Red Riding Hood posted a few days ago, the book by Jack Zipes called "The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood" (1993) has a translation of the traditional French oral folktale on which Perrault based his literary reversion :) It's a great resource. Hope all is well! - katrina

And it's by Jack Zipes. Who is my co-Keynote Speaker at the Fantasy Matters conference in Minneapolis in November. (Lots of other cool people and good writers will be there including Patrick Rothfuss and Pamela Dean.)

Details of the me-interviewing-Susanna-Clarke event in London on September 25th are at http://www.sci-fi-london.com/news/article/1185402300/6 (or http://www.sci-fi-london.com/news/article/1188643748/8).

Going to eat something now.

I was meant to be on NPR's TALK OF THE NATION tomorrow. But their schedules have shifted and I'll be on the radio this afternoon -- Wednesday the 8th of August. I think that http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
is their website. I'll be on towards the end of the second hour (the hour that some stations don't get).

John Scalzi writes wisely, as usual, over at his blog about Stardust and how he thinks it'll do:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/08/07/stardusts_chances.html
and I couldn't see anything there to disagree with.

I have no doubt at all that Stardust will do brilliantly around the world, rock out on DVD, and become one of those films that is beloved. But how it will do this weekend... ah, that's a mystery. I was fascinated by this article about success and failure -- and, more importantly, the perception of success and failure -- in movie box office:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/hollywood-where-ignoran_b_59464.html
(link via.)

I remember the first time I went to Hollywood, with Terry Pratchett, in 1992 I learned that you could frame any conversation about something you wanted to do in a plot that Hollywood Execs didn't understand or had a problem with if you referred to another movie that they'd seen. ("So why don't they...?" "Because they forget about it, um -- just like at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK." "Oh. Got it.") And it was useful for talking about the feel of things -- you simply positioned what you were talking about against or with other films.

By 1996, when I went back to Hollywood, something had changed. I remember naming a movie in one of those conversations -- talking about look and feel or about lighting or about something like that -- and having the Exec look at me as if I had something unpleasant on my shoe, and he said, simply, "But that film didn't make any money." He couldn't understand why I would even have brought it up.

...

Over on Charles Vess's blog you can see a photo of us at the end of the premiere, me in a tuxedo and him not, because he forgot his shirt studs.

The birdchick does a honey from our hives taste test over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/08/go-see-stardust-and-little-about-our.html