Some Life Advice

"All my life I concentrated on moving forward."  --the great Willie Mays

Boycott Amazon

Okay.  I've been an Amazon customer before like most of you.  There are times the used book prices just look TOO good and the purchase is just a little too effortless.  But really, why should an ebook cost less than a real book?  (Don't bother me with the paper argument and the labor argument and all the rest; I get it.)  The thing is that the book didn't cost the writer any less blood to produce.  It didn't save the agent any time.  It didn't remove the role of the editor both in selecting it or in making it better.  Doesn't Amazon already get these services essentially for free?

Amazon has aleady largely run most of the best independent booksellers out of business.  Now they want to dictate to publishers what they must charge to place their books on the precious Kindle.  I'm sure some of you love your Kindles and certainly there must be a place for digital books in the marketplace, but hasn't Amazon become just a little too identical to Walmart?  Yes, even those who have a bit more money like to save money, but haven't we learned the lesson of what is incurred when we always try and reduce commodities to the lowest common denominator?  Mediocrity.  (Doubt the role of mediocrity? Turn on the TV for a moment to any reality series or any network show; sample most of what lingers on the bestseller lists, try cutting a steak with some Soviet era East Bloc untensils...) If ever there was a demographic that can afford to pay real market value for a commodity, surely it is Kindle owners.  The day Amazon wants to get the classics into every school kid's hands for, say $1.99, or if they decide to distruibute free, current textbooks to every high school science class, then maybe I'll cut them a break.  Until then, if they continue to insist on telling publishers what they will publish and what they will charge, I say boycott.  I'm not a Luddite, but books still read like books and there remain quality, sophisticated writers producing work if you are willing to look hard enough to find it (which, by the way, is a tougher search if limited to titles currently available on the Kindle).  The digital age can be transformative, but let's make sure it is change for the better rather than change for the mediocre.

A World Far From Familiar

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenudin
W.W. Norton and Company (2009), 247 pp.


Daniyal Mueenudin’s debut title suggests a book that will force readers to step far outside their lives and enter unfamiliar worlds. Indeed perhaps the greatest reward in reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is gaining entrance to the largely unfamiliar, nearly dysfunctional world of contemporary Pakistan, a culture so stratified and so deadened to its own corruption that its inner-workings may well fascinate many American readers. Mueenudin, a Pakistani-born, American-educated newcomer on the literary scene, has garnered wide critical praise and a National Book Award nomination for this group of eight linked stories. The book is beautifully written and culturally enlightening, though the stories themselves may often prove to keep American readers too distant from its characters and events and sometimes struggles to bring closure to the individual stories. The characters are well crafted and identifiable, though the patterns of their lives may seem largely alien. The vision granted of the vivid and unflinching portraits of Pakistani culture—from its wealthiest landowners to their lowliest servants—can, for readers interested in places and people beyond their own immediate frame of reference, make up for the lack of closure and the grand scale of the collection.


The stories are all linked in one fashion or another to one of its principle characters, wealthy landowner K.K. Harouni. Whether exploring Harouni himself as his once vast landholdings are slowly sold off to low bidders in the effort to maintain his luxurious lifestyle or centering on the tales of his servants and managers, the linked stories eventually allow readers to recognize that everyone within Pakistan may share similar linkages. These stories are connected by association to Harouni and, more importantly, by themes that focus on bartering and greed and manipulation, by the sexual politics of advancement for women and the power hunger exhibited by those who can touch the fringes of wealth. It is not a collection of stories that assembles to form an alternative sort of novel, rather the stories offer the reader, as the title suggests, glimpses into rooms they have never inhabited. The Pakistan that Mueenudin introduces us to is one where corruption and near chaos exist at every social level, where middle managers skim profits from their employers, women attempt to sleep their way off village streets and into the manor house, where the educated and the powerful are often bored and harm themselves and others by their attempts to resolve boredom, and the peasants often mimic the wealthy they serve. While the stories sometimes fail to complete a storytelling arc that is comforting to American readers, the characters and their sometimes desperate measure to better their living conditions prove fascinating and likely universal. For literary readers who recognize the role essential elements of Pakistani culture will play in the West’s inevitable future interdependency within Pakistani politics, the book can prove particularly fulfilling.

Mueenudin sees his own culture with astonishing clarity (the author has returned to Pakistan after earning degrees from Dartmouth and Yale to run a family farm). Importantly, he refuses to be overtly charitable nor chastising with any of his characters. Nearly all seem deeply flawed individuals, characters whose very flaws may arise either from the expected “back-scratching” reality of their deeply stratified culture or by elemental human envy and desire for advancement. The tale Mueenudin tells is larger than any of these individual characters, larger than Harouni, larger perhaps even than Pakistan. While some Western readers may feel kept at arm’s length from the events that unfold, they will find themselves thinking about the world Mueenudin portrays long after they close the final story.

Language and Structure

Consider this rich quotation from T.M.McNally's The Goat Bridge (a greatly under-read book, a powerful novel that conveys the complexities of the Baltic wars with grace and intelligence):

"Study the common things of this world long enough and things reveal increasingly what they have in common: namely, the language by which we describe them. This search for detecting forms of order and arrangement, always, is the work of all artists, regardless of form.

"Art joins,war, like pornography, seperates."

New Year's Words

"He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future."
                                                         --Francisco de Quevedo

Winter Visitors

One of the benefits of living in the rural West, we had three elk wandering around on the back deck last night eating the last holdovers out of the apple tree.  I suspect some would find them a nuisance or worry about the damage they might do to landscaping, but I can't help but feel blessed by their presence.  After all, we live in their winter feeding grounds, not the other way around.  It was a biting cold night, somewhere in the 12 below range, a clear night with good moonlight--all in all a perfect night to be indoors and admiring some impressive ungulates just a few feet away, even if it was two in the morning.  The irony is that we usually don't get such visitors at all, probably because we've had two winters of record snowpack that's made moving in the valley as difficult for them as in the surrounding mountains and thus it is easier to mosy down the road to the refuge where the state of Wyoming benevolently feeds them fresh hay.  It's good to see them here in their traditional winter range and a comfort to be reminded of some of the "others" we share this landscape with.

Structure and Shape

As I was working on the never-ending revision of an early novel, a particularly layered, difficult novel to be fair, I found myself asking the question: can structure alone save a story?  Now even as I type that, I know it is a ludicrous question, for no element alone can carry a story, let alone save it.  Everything in a novel works in harmony if it works at all.  It would be asking too much of any element, be it structure, plot, character to do the work a whole book must do.  But as I contemplated the intended revisions, I saw also that by giving careful, renewed attention to the shape of the story I also found entrance to other elements to partner with it, aspects of narrative and character that echoed the logic behind the desired structural revision.  To the journal I turned.  From the journal to the manuscript.  Work begets more work, but perhaps together solutions emerge.