Today I received the following email notice from my publisher:
Quote:
For the period from November 1, 2007 to April 30, 2008 we have not been
paid for any orders. Your next statement will be issued on January
31, 2009.
Not one copy sold through Rose Dog Books. I know my cousin bought one from Amazon, so I could see a check yet, but sales have not been good.
But I see some of you Zappaphiles found my web site. Thats good. Exposure helps but doesn't pay the rent on my trailer. Glad for the thumbs up though. Look me up on art bistro for higher rez photos of my paintings than on my own site. Nice of some of you to suggest I do a cover for Gail (and I would be happy to) but why would she want me while Cal Shenkel is alive and closer?
One of you (who stated that he had not read my book) started rambling about the title, so I'm going to explicate with a quote from the books preface:
Quote:
The title of this book may seem a little obscure. Let me explain. “Mea saurus” is from the Latin. The penitent ancient Roman (Christian) would beat his breast three times and say, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” (It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it is very much my fault). [4] Usually that was what he said. However, he may have sought penance by saying these alternative words: “Mea saurus, mea saurus, mea maxima saurus” (I’m a lizard, I’m a lizard, I’m the biggest lizard). Since very few of us are taught Latin anymore today (me included), we find the “mea saurus” incomprehensibly bizarre and totally unrelated to the “mea culpa” still used by lawyers, but to the ancient Roman, “mea saurus” meant essentially the same thing. How is this possible?
It is because the connotation of the Greek word “saurus” has drastically shifted over the last one hundred fifty years, and we essentially have one man, the Victorian scientist Sir Richard Owen, to thank for that. He is the person responsible for pairing deinos (terrible) with saurus (lizard) and coining the term “dinosaur.” Ever since, the utterance of the Greco-Roman word for lizard immediately congers up images in our imaginations of extinct creatures like Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus- enormous lizards. This is not the only instance where science has redefined the common meaning of a word. For example, “primate” used to mean “archbishop,” but thanks to science, it now means, “ape.”
Modern Americans think of lizards as pets kept in terrariums, but to the ancient Greeks and Romans, they were nuisance pests. Creatures like podarcis, the common wall lizard, were the cockroaches of the ancient Mediterranean world. All reptiles (and amphibians, which they did not recognize as distinct) were regarded as despicable, literally “creepy-crawly” things (the word “reptile” is from the Latin reptilis, creeping). Today, spiders and centipedes better fit our definition of “vermin” than lizards, but the ancients found all such creatures repulsive. Therefore, when ancient Romans called themselves lizards, they were branding themselves with an extremely humiliating and self-depreciating term. Armed with this information, we can reconstruct the original meaning: “I’m a creep, I’m a creep, I’m an enormously despicable creep,” not “I’m a great big dinosaur!” I chose “mea saurus” over “mea culpa” as the title of my confession deliberately because I get a kick out of such etymological and semantic confusions.
HEY! CHECK OUT ONE OF MY LATEST PAINTINGS:
http://www.artbistro.com/account/photos/view_photo/614081