Self-Promotion and Beatrix, and Beyond

I still haven’t been able to respond as quickly or as well to comments as I would like (it’s one of my 2017 resolutions, but I clearly need to keep working on it!).  To make up for this a little bit, I am going to use today’s whole post to respond to a query.  Long-time Ferrebeekeeper reader and commenter, Beatrix, asked a great question in response to my post about New Year resolutions. She asked ‘How do you promote your blog?”

Now the literal answer to this is: um…I don’t.  I don’t really promote my art either.  It has always seemed to me that you can be good at doing things, or you can be good at promoting yourself.  The divergence between the two explains so much about our world of shiny empty celebrity and poor outcomes.  Yet, if the self-promoters can fill up the world with their hate rallies, rap videos, and stupid naked selfies, we artists and writers can at least make a little more time to promote ourselves and each other.  Andy Warhol’s acolytes can’t have everything, dammit (even if they have ascended to the nation’s highest office).

As classically construed, self-promotion involves pushy behavior and obtrusive stunts, but there are things that regular people can do too.  I am going to rebuild my online art gallery, sell more inexpensive prints and artworks, and “cross promote” across platforms. I am also going to rephrase Beatrix’s question and crowd-source it to all of you: what do YOU think works best for promoting content in our world where everyone is always trying to get people to look at their youtube channel (or using cheap stunts like caps and bold letters to catch attention)?

(Or just portrait photos)

Most importantly though, I am also going to promote Beatrix’s blog “Keep Calm and Curry On” This delightful site features amazing anecdotes and tales of daily life in rural Nepal and life beneath the eves of “the roof of the world”.  Beatrix talks of her multicultural marriage which combines the world’s two largest democracies under one nuptial roof.  She also gives us a treasure trove of essays on gardens and herblore which literally bring you the flavor of South Asia.

But all of that is merely garnish: the true main course of her blog is a magnificent list of curry recipes. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but you can tell they will be delicious just by the ingredients.  As a winter treat I promise to cook one of your curries, Beatrix, and I will blog the results here.  However first I need to get a chance to walk to the other side of Ditmas Park (or maybe even head over to Kalustyan’s).   These recipes are obviously delicious, but they don’t make any concessions to the American household which has maybe a jar of Madras curry powder or some cumin.   It might take me a little while to get some cassia leaves and ghee (and to dig the cardamom pods and turmeric of of the back of the cabinet), but I know it will be worth it.

So check out Beatrix’s site, and head over to Instagram and look at my “Flounderful” collection.  Even more great content is on the way, and, above all, let everyone know what you think with a comment!  Readers are the best people in the world.  I love you all. so let us hear directly from YOU!

…plus here’s a saucy celebrity gif.

Hey! How did that get here?

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Merry Christmas

Best wishes for a Merry Christmas!  I am featuring my Christmas tree again, just in case anyone hasn’t seen it.  Fortunately, I added a lot of new animals like an andrewsarchus, a basilosaurus, an arsinoitherium, and a priapulid worm.  Of course my favorite animal, my little housecat Sepia is there too, at lower left, wondering why I am paying attention to a fake tree instead of playing with her.  It seems like she might also be interested in a second dinner.

The year is wearing down fast and I am going to take a few days to paint and draw and relax, but there are a few more posts left for 2015 and then there will be a whole new thrilling year for blogging.  Having you all as readers is the very best present possible. Let me know if you have any ideas or concerns. Happy holidays!  I wish I could get everyone a miniature donkey, or a flying squid, or a walking catfish, but you will have to settle for more wacky eclectic content…and for my happiest and best wishes and warmest regards now and always.

Countdown to One Thousand

Ferrebeekeeper is quickly coming up on its 1000^th post (this one, which you are reading is the 990^th). Before we get to the thousandth post, we’re going to have a special top ten countdown to look back at some of the highlights of all the topics we have covered so far. Then I’ll write something really super special for the millennial post! After that, it will be Halloween-time, which always features some of our best material…so it’s going to be a great autumn! However, before we get to these thrilling special events and celebrations, I wanted to address some of the issues raised by this blog and also ask the readers a few questions.

Most importantly, what is the purpose of this blog…or any blog? I actually started writing Ferrebeekeeper merely because a friend set it up for me. Also my blog-hero Andreas Kluth (who has seemingly stopped writing his blog, now that his book is published) recommended blogging as a way to organize one’s thoughts, feelings, and creative impulses. Ferrebeekeeper has 29 topics (you can see them right there to the left) and I try to write about one of them each day. Sometimes I can combine several—like when I write about Chinese snake art, or Ancient Egyptian bee-crowns. Those are happy days! Other days I can’t think of anything that fits any of the listed topics—so I write something random and chuck it under “uncategorized.”

So I started this blog to share interesting and meaningful things with you–and that is still my wish. I want to use it to push forward my ideas about art, science, and human progress. I also want to keep this blog exciting and relevant—and growing. Yet now I am also stumbling about accidentally on the threshold of a career in journalism. Writing articles a certain way in exchange for money is causing me to reassess the purpose and future directions of Ferrebeekeeper. The media world has been changing with vertiginous rapidity. Sadly, for someone who is a technophile with dreams of space colonization, I have minimal web-savvy—so I didn’t get into the blogging game until the golden age of blogs had passed. Yet the idea of blogs is uniquely powerful and democratic. Ferrebeekeeper is a sort of one-person magazine about life, art, science, and history. Yet when one compares it to a real magazine, the differences become abundantly clear. Magazines are made to make money. They are large corporate entities with marketers, logisticians, and advertisers (in addition to all of the artists, writers, and editors who make the content).

Instead of a whole team of highly paid artists, illustrators, writers, editors, marketers, and photographers working together to churn out exciting highly produced content, there is just me in my pajamas trying to create a daily post [editor’s note; he doesn’t actually have pajamas…or, for that matter, an editor]. I do the best I can, but some days the research does not pan out and the topic ends up a bit flat (like, erm, cough, this bland post about the color viridian).

Of course a few blogs (or tumblers or twitter accounts or whatever) are making it big. If you specialize, you can sell to special advertisers. My friend always tells the story of his cousin the Korean food blogger who was able to retire from her day job of being trapped in a beige cubicle. All she does now is write about delicious Korean food every day as sponsors fight each other to giver her money! Can you imagine?

 

Argh! Why didn’t I write about Korean food?

But I suppose the point of writing a blog isn’t to seek out wealth and fame (which is what twitter and reality TV are for). Instead I write this blog to explore the world (the universe?) in two ways. The first and most obvious is that I have to find out something every workday and write about it. Some posts, like the ones about parthenogenesis, brown dwarf stars, or alternation of generations are especially interesting and challenging. I am forced to learn all sorts of new things to write effectively about science, history, and geography. However, even the rapidly slapped together “list” posts of mollusk mascots or gothic clocks offer precious and unexpected insights into what is beautiful, intriguing, and meaningful. There have been points where I felt like everything was going to come together in some amazing epiphany–Chinese painting, turkeys, invaders, art, astronomy, and history would all become the same thing and I would understand the world. That larger understanding of how everything fits together always ends up eluding me, yet writing helps me try to weave wildly disparate threads of knowledge into a coherent weltanschauung.

The second way that this blog allows me to explore the world is through the readers who are always making unexpected connections, or asking questions. Since I can not travel the globe in person, I do so through this blog. Intelligent people from all sorts of different countries have written comments to me (and, according to the analytics tool, even more of you are reading). I am poor at quickly responding to people’s submissions, but I always try to respond cogently.  Please keep writing comments!  I know that wordpress makes it hard to respond, but I really esteem your input.

I guess the point of this blog is you–the readers! Of course, like all writers, I want to be read and to reach more like-minded souls! The fact that someone is actually reading Ferrebeekeeper is what makes it different from being a diary or a weird set of notes. I am constantly thinking about how I can make this effort more appealing while not selling out and using misleading click-bait to write about worthless celebrities.

Although Katy Perry always manages to sneak in somehow.

It comes down to this paradox. This blog is not about selling something (although I guess WordPress sometimes puts ads on it), yet I do want it to be better and reach more people—which involves selling myself more effectively. What can I do to improve? How can I make this space better for you? Please write to me with your concerns, suggestions, and comments.  Working together, we can make the next thousand posts even more astonishing and beautiful!