Extras for "A Gift for the Sultan"

In case you've been intrigued by the history behind A Gift for the Sultan, this page is for you.

Inspired by the Shelfari/Amazon system of "book extras", available to anyone who has purchased the book for Kindle, I've put background material (including historical tidbits) on my own website, available to everybody — including those of you who have not yet purchased the book. You can find it here: Sultan

And here is mostly the same information on Shelfari. 

More news: The Turkish translation has now been completed, and the Turkish edition of this novel is scheduled for presentation by the publisher, Nokta, at the Tüyap International Book Fair in Istanbul in November.

E-book pricing: Writer Beware™ Blogs!

This whole blog entry may be of interest, but what caught my attention is the discussion of pricing (scroll down the blog).

Writer Beware™ Blogs!

I've priced the e-book editions of A Gift for the Sultan at $4.99 on both Smashwords (for all e-readers: Nook, Kindle, iPad, etc.) and Amazon's Kindle. (The Amazon Kindle price may be higher if you are ordering from outside the United States — that's something I don't control, has to do with Amazon's relations with foreign distributors. The Smashwords price should be constant wherever you are.)

Was that wise? Is it really "competing" against all those e-books offered at $0.99? Or are those cheapo books in an altogether different category for potential buyers? $4.99 feels right; it's accessible to anyone really interested, and those are the people I want to buy it — those who will actually read it.  (The discussion of the difference between readers and buyers is one of the most interesting parts of this "Writer Beware" post.) So far, more people have bought the paperback ($15.70 + shipping from Amazon, or save the shipping if you order it through a bookstore). Now those buyers are almost certainly going to be readers.

I plan soon (as soon as I get it scanned and formatted) to offer my 1988 collection of short stories, Welcome to My Contri, as an e-book at $1.99. That seems pretty cheap for a book reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. But it's not such a throw-away casual purchase as a 99 cent'er.

Your thoughts?

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

You know that list of 1,000 books you must read before you die? It's not true. You will be permitted to die even if you don't read them. So, sad to say, delaying reading them is no guarantee of a longer life. But there may be other reasons to put them off.

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

Other worlds, dark and joyous

I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.

As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.

The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the  universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family  (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.

The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)

My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping  in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,

"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)

Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.

Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.

Here's what Wikipedia through Google (our primitive version of "GI") tells us about the ebullient and creative Stephen R. Delany. And here's  something else I found when I looked him up. Delany doesn't even appear in this first part, but it's in his spirit. Check out this video, The last angel of history.

This is not directly relevant, but fun: a view of some of those 6,200 worlds from our own little planet, in Terje Sorgjerd's video, The Mountain on Vimeo.

In the peninsula of Bithynia…

[Text found in an old notebook, dated 1983.6.11 — slightly edited]

In the peninsula of Bithynia, in about 120 B.C. — the chronicles are not very precise, saying only "in the reign of the Elders of the House of Baal" —a girl was seen near the Temple of Tanit with a T-shirt (for this would seem to be the garment described) inscribed thus: "Ravissez-moi, je suis vièrge. Estienne."

When asked what that meant, the girl said she wasn't sure (the characters themselves were quite unlike the Phoenician script known to the region) but that it was her father's idea, that it was addressed to the Carthaginians and would assure her — and thus the House — of eternal existence in the fiction of Flaubert.

The interlocutor, a young acolyte of Tanit, was not troubled by the reference to the unknown foreign god Flaubert — there were so many gods, and it was well to respect them all — but he was puzzled by the severe and undecipherable characters. How, he asked, were the Carthaginians — who in all events were not expected in the area — how were they to understand a message in a strange language?

"Oh, my father says the Carthaginians of Flaubert understand it perfectly," replied the girl.

∞∞∞

[I must have been reading Salammbô; "Estienne" may be a reference to the type-face used for at least some editions of Flaubert's works.]

Authors Sign eBooks Electronically - NYTimes.com

What great ideas! For all the Kindle and Smashwords readers of A Gift for the Sultan (and other things that I will be publishing shortly — watch this space).

Authors Sign eBooks Electronically - NYTimes.com

By the way, if you're hesitant about shelling out $4.99 for this e-book (even though you've seen the reader reviews and know that lots of other people really liked it), you can download a sample free in either Kindle or Smashwords. With the latter you get the first 20% (with Kindle a little less) — enough to either whet your appetite or (in the unfortunate and less likely case) to tell you that it's not for you.

If you're reading your e-books on an iPad or Nook or anything but a Kindle, Smashwords is your best bet: click here.

David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose | The New York Public Library

If I were still living in New York, I'd want to go to this. You literary folk who are in New York should know about it.

David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose | The New York Public Library

When Brooklyn was gentle

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A sweet, gentle story of an Irish girl who migrates in the 1950s from her small town to bustling and multi-ethnic Brooklyn, learns to cope, finds a nice Italian-American guy, returns to Ireland for a wake and a visit and is briefly torn between slipping back into the familiar comforts of the old place and returning to her new life back in Brooklyn. Though written by a man, this is a woman's book, told from Eilis Lacey's point of view and mostly about her relations with other girls and women, who try to advise, guide or — ineffectively — control her; the guys are secondary characters, mostly bumbling and insecure but generally well-intentioned. Toibin has made Eilis' fears, desires and hesitations all sound authentic, and presented her with a real but not very dramatic dilemma: she will either remain in Ireland and reintegrate herself into what she now knows is a very slow, limiting but unthreatening life, or she will go back to Brooklyn for what she foresees as a dull routine as a housekeeper for her Italian-American plumber husband. There is little excitement, hardly a hint of violence or even serious ethnic conflict in this Brooklyn, but still it is an enjoyable read because Eilis is so likable and believable. But was Brooklyn ever really so sweet?


View all my reviews

Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology

Why e-readers are bad for our forests, and our brains (a provocative little essay by Bill Henderson)
Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology

It's all true. It's also almost entirely irrelevant. Every new technology has negative impacts, beginning (if we restrict ourselves to literary matters) with the invention of writing and reading. People stopped having to learn the great poems by memory, and the very practice of writing (and of reading) rewired our brains, creating many more connections between the right and left hemispheres, with — among other effects — the loss of the voice of the gods.

At least, if you accept Julian Jaynes' argument, which I still find powerfully plausible: The ancients, according to Jaynes, including the Greeks before Homer, Moses, and all peoples before literacy would hear the voices in their right brain hemisphere as though they were coming from somewhere else. And since the voice telling him or her what to do was the remembered voice of the tribal leader or patriarch or sachem, its timbre carried great authority. And since the source was invisible, it could only be the voice of God. Some god or other, anyway. The loss of that direct communication with the gods was seen as an enormous tragedy in the societies that had only recently been corrupted by literacy.

That wasn't all. We went along for millennia with some people with re-wired, literate brains and most without, some people hearing spooks and others unable to except under extraordinary pressure (fasting, self-flagellation, opium-smoking, or some other practice to shut off those right brain-left brain communications). But then Gutenberg and his colleagues and successors made literacy available to almost everybody, with another unintended negative consequence: Widespread use of the written word now created new "imagined communities" of people who could read the same language! Thus people who had hitherto been unacquainted with one another and had nothing in common but the ability to read the same language began thinking of themselves as a "nation" and felt themselves apart from those who spoke and read some other language. And we all know what followed: the Napoleonic wars, world wars I and II, the partition of India, etc. etc. We're still paying the price for that kind of literacy.

And now e-readers, again rewiring our brains and pulping our environment. And like those technological revolutions of the past, they are unstoppable; we're just going to have to deal with them. And maybe there can be some positive effects, too, if we just know how to look for them. After all, there are still people who argue that literacy was a good idea. And that printing on paper had advantages over clay tablets. I'm not so sure — a lot of us still miss hearing those voices of the gods.

Click here for more Jaynes and his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's worth reading.

A woman of courage in a ravaged land — Somalia

Thanks to colleague and friend César Chelala for writing and sending this example of courage in the face of terrible violence.

The Middle East Times - International

We have to try to understand the men who would so furiously destroy life-chances for women. We must try to understand, not to forgive them but to know better how to confront them and what to do so that the next generations can be free of such rage.