In her new book, New England writer Edie Clark proves that you don’t have to go through a big publishing company to produce something great. Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers is the second book she’s self-published and marketed, and it follows on the success of The View from Mary’s Farm, a self-published collection of her popular regular column in Yankee magazine. Those essays, based on her experiences living on a New England farm and slowly rebuilding its farmhouse, have made Clark a landmark New England writer.

In Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers Clark mixes memoir with a love of food and place. The book is categorized by decade, which, perhaps unintentionally, gives it one of its most charming traits: the development of the writer’s growing relationship with New England, starting with visits to an aunt residing in Massachusetts in the sixties. Her memories of the New England states sent me unexpectedly into nostalgia of my own, reminding me of my childhood in Montana, when ski resorts featured only slow two-seated chairlifts and chilly lodges serving instant hot chocolate and burned coffee, cars were clunky, houses drafty, and excellent food could be found in the most unlikely places (in my case a coffee shop run quietly by Glenn Close’s sister in a neighboring town, but that’s another story).

It is Clark’s appreciation for place and the beauty and slowness of nature that gives her writing such strength. I have to admit a slight lack of objectivity here: I once took a travel writing class from Edie Clark, and it was from her that I learned that literary travel writing didn’t have to consist only of hair-raising adventures in far-flung lands, or of throwing oneself into life-threatening positions, or of stories about the unreliability of bodily functions. (In other words, I told myself silently, travel writing doesn’t have to be defined only by men with excessive amounts of … energy.) Clark writes what she teaches: with a talent for observing the details of the life around you, wherever you are, and writing about every aspect that makes a place live.

Clark, a New Jersey native, has made New England her place. Her writing lives and breathes the mountains and forests and waters of a place that is still wild and beautiful. In this book, she brings to life its past and its present, and the people who make up its eclectic communities. And the food they eat. It is a deeply personal book, dealing with personal loss and a growing love of landscape, community, and nurturing sustenance. Clark is one of those writers who proves a counterpoint to depressing news for world travelers of climate disasters and disappearing landscapes — a sense that we can still find beauty and rhythm in the world.

You can order Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers direct from Edie Clark’s website, where you can also read several of her most popular articles from Yankee magazine, ranging from the spread of Lyme disease in the US to an Erik Brokovich-type battle of one cancer-riddled community against polluters of its water, as well as order the classic The View from Mary’s Farm.

Thanks to Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel for this link to Link TV’s announcement of its top world music videos of 2007.

Link’s chosen music videos swing through Chile, Russia, Spain, France, Iran, and many other countries in between. And they’re not just pulling these winners out of a hat. The Link TV website, which dubs itself “Television Without Borders,” has been featured in Rolling Stone for its top-notch collection of new and cutting edge world music videos. The director of music and cultural programming, Steven Lawrence, used to be a producer at MTV, and is now bringing his music know-how to the Internet’s world music community. The site features weekly specials and collections of new music videos, as well as interviews with and documentaries about traditional and avant-garde musicians around the world.

Check out this link, where Michal Shapiro, Associate Director of Music Programming, discusses the cornucopia of world music documentaries available for viewing during the US’s Thanksgiving holiday week. And while you’re there, head to Link’s main Web page to get the full experience of Link’s worldwide news reports, documentaries, and current discussions. In an online world of cacophonic blogs and shrill pundits on TV, Link is carving out a niche where people who care about world news and world culture can find out what’s really going on.

Despite the image of the happy freelance travel writer jetting around the world and scampering through interesting exotic places, the reality is that we spend way too much time typing and gazing into a computer monitor. Otherwise we’d never get paid. We may communicate with 50 people a day by e-mail and phone, but real face-to-face communication like you have in an office environment is all too uncommon.

So as the editor of Perceptive Travel, I made it my goal to set up some real live socializing when I came to my old haunt of New York City last week for a conference. Fortunately I got some help from the generous folks at Hungary Tourism (including Maria pictured here) and Monarchia Winery. I stopped at Monarchia when I was in Hungary recently and got to sit down in their cellar with their award-winning winemaker Pok Tamas. They are one of the few that does a sizable export business, so we got them to educate a room full of travel and wine writers on what comes out of that country’s vineyards.

We had a mixed bag of writers representing a slew of different websites and magazines. In no particular order, we had bloggers Kelly Amabile from Gadling, Claire and Paul from Jaunted (pictured here), Nicole from Globorati, Tom Meyers from Eurocheapo, and others. Max and Kent from the fine site GoNomad were there as was fellow Imbibe writer Amy Zavatto and uncooked.tv director John Gottfried (with me up at the top). Despite all us alternative types there, we even got some people who write for Travel & Leisure to come by and sip some Tokaji Aszu.

It was a treasure trove of authors too: Bruce Northam (Globetrotter Dogma), Tony Perrottet (The Naked Olympics), Ayun Halliday (No Touch Monkey!), Marie Javins (Stalking the Wild Dik-dik), and Robert Reid (loads of Lonely Planet books). All of them have written/will write for Perceptive Travel, so sign up for the newsletter on the Perceptive Travel home page to keep updated with new stories.

Aviation/travel columnist of “Ask the Pilot,” pilot Patrick Smith may have gotten himself blacklisted. Not from flying, but from a media seat on a pre-delivery flight of Airbus’s brand-new and much hyped A380. How? By repeatedly pointing out the airplane’s supreme ugliness. Pondering the aesthetics of airplanes and the A380’s harmony-challenged design in particular in this week’s column, he admits his culpability:

Let the record show that it was Patrick Smith who, in this and other publications, described the A380 in the following terms:

And so on. What, and no invitation? No first-class seat and VIP tour of the factory?

I have to admit I’ve never thought much about an airplane’s exterior aesthetics, although being fitted inside Concorde’s sleekness was thrilling the one time I flew it. However, I’m married to one of those people who, every time a plane flies overhead, stops to peer up to idenitify its tail colors. Whenever I fly without him, he asks me “what did you fly?” not referring to the airline but to the plane model. So I do pay some attention. And, well, looking at this picture of the A380 inclines me to the giggles, looking as it does like a cross between Sponge Bob and Shrek, without the soppy grins. “Beluga-headed” might not be kind, but it’s certainly accurate.

Smith further reviews the A380’s interior layout as conceived by Singapore Airlines, the first company to buy and fly the monstrosity, and its flight capability (not bad). For readers of his column, we’d trade in an insider’s view from a media seat for his sense of humor any day of the week.

First, a few words from our blog carnival buds:

**  Thanks for including our New England Church Supper post in the very-cool Carnival of Travelers hosted by Renaissance woman Mary Jo Manzanares on her Fly Away Cafe travel blog.  She’s collected food/beverage posts from across cuisines and across the world, including candy bars,  Thanksgiving turkeys, even eating grasshoppers in Mexico. 

**  The Nov 5 edition of the Carnival of Cities was hosted by Argentina’s Travel Guide, and they featured our post about New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument.  At the Carnival I also had fun learning about Friday night kayaking in Brisbane, Australia and a wild marsh right in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Now, I’d like to highlight an article in the new issue of Perceptive Travel, our online magazine parent pub;  gadabout author Leif Pettersen’s piece on the Jugglers Rest youth hostel in Picton, New Zealand. Stay there to both feel welcome in a cozy place and also learn to keep those balls in the air.

This sort of unusual, unique and distinctive lodging is one of the great things about PT — you’ll find things here that you won’t find anywhere else.  It’s “anywhere else’s” loss!  If you want more Leif, he’s currently ranting about both Burma and Minneapolis/St Paul after already covering Romania.  That boy does get around….

Finally, remember when PT blog wrote about 6 ways travelers can use social media?  Well, I’m terribly jealous of writer Stephen Hartshorne over at GoNOMAD, because he just went on a press trip to “New Holland” in Second Life, sponsored by the real-life Dutch Tourist Board.  He reports back from over the cyber line, pictures and all.

Hey, I wanna go….!

Technorati tags: travel, blog carnival, blogging, Second Life, New Zealand