Virtual book tours
I can see both sides of the arguments for and against Margaret Atwood's "LongPen" that allows her to autograph books from quite a long distance away. My only objection is her statement, "Our generation invented the Book Tour, and now we are paying for it." While I realize Ms Atwood is not as young as as you or I but I had no idea she was a contemporary of Charles Dickens.
Dickens was supposed to be loads of fun on tour, acting out all the parts as he read selections of his work (he got lots of mileage out of "A Christmas Carol"). Tennyson...not so good. He would stand at the podium and mumble so softly not even the front row could hear him, or even be sure he was doing more than move his lips. One story of Oscar Wilde's tour of the American West had him scheduled to visit a mining town where a group of residents, knowing about his orientation, determined they would show him how tough Real Men were by taking him to the bottom of the mineshaft with a case of whiskey and keeping him down there until the liquor was gone. Their preconceptions were first inverted when Wilde turned out to be no delicate flower but bigger and brawnier than many of them, but down they went. Not surprising to anybody who ever hung out with gay guys, when dawn came and the whiskey was gone the elevator came up and Wilde was the only one still standing. He was made an honorary citizen.
(Not to stick a pin in an Authentic Frontier Anecdote but I always assumed the guys who were going to teach Wilde a lesson were really the gay citizens who wanted to party like it was 1899 without getting beat up.)
Dickens was supposed to be loads of fun on tour, acting out all the parts as he read selections of his work (he got lots of mileage out of "A Christmas Carol"). Tennyson...not so good. He would stand at the podium and mumble so softly not even the front row could hear him, or even be sure he was doing more than move his lips. One story of Oscar Wilde's tour of the American West had him scheduled to visit a mining town where a group of residents, knowing about his orientation, determined they would show him how tough Real Men were by taking him to the bottom of the mineshaft with a case of whiskey and keeping him down there until the liquor was gone. Their preconceptions were first inverted when Wilde turned out to be no delicate flower but bigger and brawnier than many of them, but down they went. Not surprising to anybody who ever hung out with gay guys, when dawn came and the whiskey was gone the elevator came up and Wilde was the only one still standing. He was made an honorary citizen.
(Not to stick a pin in an Authentic Frontier Anecdote but I always assumed the guys who were going to teach Wilde a lesson were really the gay citizens who wanted to party like it was 1899 without getting beat up.)