Make Money without Selling Your Soul?

by Jeff Goins 

I didn’t start blogging to find a way to make money. I did it, because I love writing. But at a certain point in exploring a passion, you have to ask: “Can I make money doing this? Can I find a way to monetize my passion?”

Yes, you can.

Photo credit: Images_of_Money (Creative Commons)

Freelance writing and book publishing traditionally doesn’t make a ton of money (unless your last name happens to be “King” or “Rowling”). So we writers have to be inventive with how we support our families and keep the water on. Or settle for being starving artists.

But these days, there is a third option: BLOGGING.

You can do what you love, find ways to monetize it, and then use it to fund other less lucrative passions, like writing a book. That’s what I’m interested in. The question is:

Can you really make a ton of money with a blog, like all those “gurus” say?

Yes. You sure can. And no. You absolutely cannot. Allow me to explain…

How to make a buck with a blog

I just got $120 worth of free books on Amazon.

On a whim a few months ago, I signed up for Amazon Affiliates a few months ago and started linking to books I would’ve recommended, anyway.

I was surprised when the pennies turned to dollars without much effort on my part. I’ve since decided to save up my earnings and finally get a Kindle.

This is what blogging can do.

It’s a fun little perk, but is it enough to quit your job and pay the bills? Well, no. Not in and of itself. But it is just one strategy among many in how people can make money online.

Here are other ways people make money online:

• Affiliate marketing: Selling other people’s products for them and earning a commission on each sale. My Amazon story is an example of this. I’m also starting to see some fruit from promoting other products I believe in, like 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.
• Product sales: Sell your own products (eBooks, webinars, iPhone apps, whatever). I’m working on a few of these myself. The trick is delivering value and only giving your community what they want.
• Advertising: If you have decent traffic, you can sell ad space. (I’ve just started exploring this, but so far it’s been fruitful. Recently, to jump-start myadvertising, I offered a 50% discount on Cyber Monday.)
• Market your own services: If selling stuff makes your skin crawl, you can use a blog to build an online presence and brand and then use it to land consulting or freelance services. (I’ve had several people contact me about things like writing an eBook, SEO, and other topics I’ve written about.)

When I started placing Amazon links on my site, I was amazed at how quickly I started earning commissions.

Then, I started promoting other products with higher returns. And that’s when it became fun. When I would get emails in the middle of the night, informing me I had earned $10 here, $50 there — without having to lift a finger.

This led to a startling realization: You really can do this; you can make money with a blog. (Without selling your soul.)

So what’s with the “no” part?

The gurus are wrong

The gurus say this is easy. They say you’ll make money fast. Just like they did. But that’s not true. At least, it’s not probable.

The reality is making a full-time living online is hard. Not impossible, but hard. This is why they call it “work.”

You’re probably not going to make six figures with a blog. Not right away, anyhow. But that’s not to say you can’t make decent money.

I know people who make $20,000-$40,000 (USD) per year, which is nice, but nothing noteworthy. Even Darren Rowse, founder of Problogger.net, said he had to work very, very hard to make $36,000 his first year as a professional blogger, which is hardly stop-the-press kind of news.

In other words, there is no magic bullet. No success-over-night story. And if there is, you shouldn’t count on it.

I don’t know about you, but this is actually a relief to me. I’m not interested in get-rich-quick schemes; I don’t believe they’re possible or even smart. All the millionaires who remain millionaires practice something else: Get rich slow.

If you want to succeed, you should, too.

So what do you do?

This brings us back to the beginning, back to writing for the love of it and using blogging to supplement your passion.

I’m not interested in being the next professional blogging success story. I just want to find ways to make my blog pay for itself. And I’d like to earn a little extra money to make the hours I invest into blogging worthwhile.

And if you’re a blogger, this should be your bare minimum, too.

Even if it’s a passion project, there is no reason why your blog shouldn’t be able to eventually pay for itself. And then on top of that, your life.

My goal is to find creative ways to help others — ways that people are willing to pay for — to give me the freedom to do what I really love doing: writing. Without having to worry about paying the bills.

(Fully taken from http://goinswriter.com/)

“I Need Money!” 10 Legitimate Ways to Get Quick Cash

by Anisha 

If you’re short a little cash at the end of the month, here are ten ways to make a quick buck. While these may help you make ends meet during an emergency or cover a one-time expense, be sure to get your spending on track and look for ways to make more money long-term and budget accordingly.

1. Sell your blood or plasma

Selling blood is an easy source of money, provided you meet the requirements. There are hundreds of for-profit blood centers out there that will pay up to $50 for your blood or plasma. Check out Biolife Plasma to see if there are donation clinics near you. If you’re feeling really hard-core (or in dire need of cash) you can also sell your sperm (men), eggs (women), white blood cells and even hair. Keep in mind that the Red Cross recommends you wait 56 days between blood donations and 28 days between plasma donations.

Here are a few donation clinics in major cities:

Los Angeles	Austin	Chicago
Biomat USA Florence Donor Center 1715 E. Florence Ave Los Angeles, CA 90001 (323) 586-0100Biomat USA Van Nuys 14435 Sherman Way, Suite 115 Van Nuys, CA 91405 (818) 989-0611	BioLife Austin 14415 Owen Tech Blvd. Austin, TX 78728 (512) 251-8855DCI Biologicals Austin 5789 Airport Blvd Austin, Texas 78752 (512) 380-9226 Biomat USA Austin Laboratory 4401 Freidrich Lane, B1 Suite 105 Austin, TX 78744 (512) 441-7372	BioLife DeKalb 1455 County Farm Road DeKalb, IL 60115 (815) 754-5777 Interstate Blood Bank 3324 West Lawrence Avenue Chicago, IL 60625 (773)478-2989

2. Cut down your costs

There are any number of money leaks you can plug to earn some fast cash: get rid of cable, use cash back websites and rewards malls to lower the cost of spending, and hunt for coupons on everyday purchases. Then, use that money for whatever you need.

3. Sell your junk

You most likely have a bunch of used or even unused things lying around you no longer need or want. Get them online using Craigslist, eBay, or any other community bulletin board, or go old school and have a garage sale. Some services will buy your old cell phones, ink cartridges, and the like, so if you find a treasure trove, do a quick Google search of “we buy [whatever it is you want to sell].”

4. Rent it out

Websites like AirBnB make it easy to rent out a spare room in minutes; other websites let you rent out your car, parking spot or even lawn-mowing equipment. However, be sure to check with restrictions on your apartment or rental before signing up.

5. Become a rideshare driver

The taxi industry used to be limited to just licensed, fully employed cab drivers; services like Lyft, Sidecar and RelayRides let anyone with a driver’s license and a clean record earn some money ferrying others around. You can work your own hours, making this ideal for those with a strict day job.

6. Freelance

Whether you’re a handyman, a graphic designer or just an average Joe, websites like TaskRabbit and Fiverr let you sell your skills (or lack of skills). The variety of tasks make it ideal for anyone: You’re likely to find requests for anything from assembling Ikea furniture to user testing.

7. Participate in clinical trials

Like donating blood, another medical fast-cash route is signing up for research testing. Large universities and research institutions need participants for anything from a sleep study to trying out a new drug. Compensation can be under a hundred bucks or up to thousands of dollars.

8. Be part of a focus group

Focus groups are made up of average people used to evaluate and give their opinion on new products or even sit on a mock trial jury. You can earn anywhere from $50 to $300 an hour. Be careful not to lie during the application process, though.

9. Sell to stock photo websites

Websites like iStockphoto and Shutterstock will buy images of everyday images, from an empty teacup to a kid at a blackboard. Thankfully, you don’t have to be the next Ansel Adams to make a sale; routine items are the most in demand.

10. Take paid surveys

Finally, you can get paid to answer surveys through companies like SurveySavvy and Harris Polls. While this can be an easy way to make money online, you’ll have to be careful about scams. Websites like SurveyPolice can help you verify which ones are legit.
(Taken from http://www.nerdwallet.com/)

NATURALISM

The logical outgrowth of literary Realism was the point of view known as Naturalism. This literary movement, like its predecessor, found expression almost exclusively within the novel. Naturalism also found its greatest number of practitioners in America shortly before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Naturalism sought to go further and be more explanatory than Realism by identifying the underlying causes for a person’s actions or beliefs. The thinking was that certain factors, such as heredity and social conditions, were unavoidable determinants in one’s life. A poor immigrant could not escape their life of poverty because their preconditions were the only formative aspects in his or her existence that mattered. Naturalism almost entirely dispensed with the notion of free will, or at least a free will capable of enacting real change in life’s circumstances. The theories of Charles Darwin are often identified as playing a role in the development of literary Naturalism; however, such a relationship does not stand up to investigative rigor. Darwin never applied his theories to human social behavior, and in doing so many authors seriously abused the actual science. There was in the late nineteenth century a fashion in sociology to apply evolutionary theory to human social woes. This line of thinking came to be knows as Social Darwinism, and today is recognized as the systematized, scientific racism that it is. More than a few atrocities in world history were perpetrated by those who misguidedly applied Darwinism to the social realm. Naturalism, for better or worse, is in some respects a form of Social Darwinism played out in fiction

One could make the case that Naturalism merely a specialized variety of Realism. In fact, many authors of the period are identified as both Naturalist and Realist. Edith Wharton for one is frequently identified as perfectly representative of both aesthetic frameworks. However, Naturalism displayed some very specific characteristics that delimit it from the contemporary literature that was merely realistic. The environment, especially the social environment, played a large part in how the narrative developed. The locale essentially becomes its own character, guiding the human characters in ways they do not fully realize. Plot structure as such was secondary to the inner workings of character, which superficially resembles how the Realists approached characterization. The work of Emile Zola provided inspiration for many of the Naturalist authors, as well as the work of many Russian novelists. It would be fairer to assert that all Naturalist fiction is Realist, but not all Realist fiction is Naturalist.


The dominant theme of Naturalist literature is that persons are fated to whatever station in life their heredity, environment, and social conditions prepare them for. The power of primitive emotions to negate human reason was also a recurring element. Writers like Zola and Frank Norris conceived of their work as experiments in which characters were subjected to various stimuli in order to gauge reactions. Adverse social conditions are taken as a matter of fact. The documentary style of narrative makes no comment on the situation, and there is no sense of advocating for change. The Naturalist simply takes the world as it is, for good or ill. The Naturalist novel is then a sort of laboratory of fiction, with studies underway that ethically could not be performed in the real world.


The work of French novelist and playwright Emile Zola is often pinpointed as the genesis of the Naturalist movement proper. His most famous contribution to Naturalism was Les Rougon-Macquart, a sweeping collection of 20 novels that follow two families over the course of five generations. One of the families is privileged, the other impoverished, but they each stumble into decay and failure. The action takes place during the rule of Napoleon III, a time of great uncertainty for the French people. The atmosphere in Paris, as well as in the novels, was one of dread and uncertainty. Zola crafts over 300 characters for his epic, yet on the whole they are rather thinly drawn. His concern is not with character as such, but how characters react to circumstances. Often, an inanimate object or place is given as much potency as a human character. Zola’s often grim subject matter is couple with a sober and scientific narration of details. There is a clinical aspect to his craft that is echoed in his descriptions of novel-writing as a form of science. Later writers would concur, citing Zola as their major inspiration in pursuing the Naturalist aesthetic in literature.


One of the first truly Naturalist works of literature, and certainly the first in America, was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Crane spent a great deal of time in the Bowery of lower Manhattan gathering material for his first novel. Like a research scientist accumulating data, Crane wanted to learn as much as he could about life for the impoverished, mostly immigrant residents. Maggie was unusual for the time in that it perfectly reproduced the ostensibly vulgar dialect of the persons portrayed. An earlier novel treating the same subject may have romanticized the immigrant life, but Crane portrayed abject poverty exactly as it was. The book was not a great seller, and he lost a hefty sum of money on the venture, but those who did read it saw the promise of a new talent in American literature. Like many of his fellow American novelists, Crane began his career as a journalist, and he continued to travel and report on international stories for the remainder of his career. His total contributions to the body of literature were relatively small, as he died before his thirtieth birthday.


Despite his short career, Stephen Crane’s talent stands out above every other writer of the period. This was not fully realized until many years after his death. Modernists like Ernest Hemingway worked hard to rehabilitate the critical reputation of Crane, and today that reputation is resoundingly positive. Crane’s most celebrated and often misunderstood novel is The Red Badge of Courage. The novel was set during the Civil War, and follows one young soldier’s experience of that war. What’s truly remarkable is that Crane wrote Red Badge with no actual experience of battle. His descriptions and scenery were inspired by war and history magazines, which he found dry and too matter-of-fact. To Crane’s mind, the stories lacked any connection to the real feeling warfare, as dates and locations of battles cannot even begin to reproduce the essence of combat. He saw an opportunity to craft the first novel that explored warfare from the point of view of the psyche. In his own words, Crane envisioned “a psychological portrait of fear.” He achieved this vision through intense, almost painterly prose. Characters speak in realistic dialects. The story is not rooted in a specific locale. The soldiers cannot see the big picture of the war, and neither can the reader. Many characters are nameless, even the protagonist Fleming is often just “the young soldier.” Throughout the novel runs a current of deep, bitter irony. The glory of warfare is replaced by ignorance, pain, and fear. Crane offers no sentimentality or mythology. He reports the events in fine detail, but makes no authorial commentary. The Red Badge of Courage is frequently required reading for high school English classes, yet the irony of the text is often lost. Crane abhorred the mythmaking that surrounded armed combat, and his greatest novel is an attempt to show that humans were not designed to commit such atrocities on each other.


Though she is frequently lumped together with the Realists, Edith Wharton often produced novels that just as rightly belong in the category of Naturalism. Unlike the bulk of her contemporaries in the Naturalist vein, Wharton’s novels dealt almost exclusively with the concerns of the upper crust of society. Though she herself descended from enormous wealth, Wharton was able to step outside her own experience and take an objective view of privilege and class. Her agenda was to show the unforgiving nature of life at the top of the class structure. Her characters often fall from grace through their own mistakes, miscalculation, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Interestingly, Wharton also had a successful career as a designer of homes and landscapes. This attention to environmental details certainly found expression with her literary productions. More so than most Naturalist writers, Wharton displayed a real sympathy for her characters. Even when they meet unfortunate ends, Wharton’s affection for the characters she creates is readily apparent. In that sense, her particular brand of Naturalism was less cold and clinical than many of her contemporaries. Still, one cannot escape the sense that Wharton subscribed to the notion of determinism – a world devoid of free will.


In Ethan Frome, Wharton departs from her typical subject matter and attempts a thoroughly provincial narrative. The setting is rural Massachusetts, and the characters are poverty-stricken and hopeless. There is the faintest hint of romance, but all hopes of a happy resolution are dashed, quite literally. Unlike her upper-class novels, in Ethan Frome Wharton’s tone is cold and unsparing. The poverty of the characters is presented as a roadblock to even the slimmest chance of fulfillment. The lead characters are not even permitted to end their suffering through suicide – their fateful sledding accident only adding to the tragedy of their existence. There is no epic sweep to the tragedy either. The world of Ethan Frome is very small, and the characters’ attempt to escape from it makes it even smaller. The sense of irrevocable fate is overpowering, as is the unforgiving, elemental nature of the harsh Massachusetts winter.




In Frank Norris, American literature found its most potent expression of Naturalism. Profoundly influenced by evolutionary theory, Norris’s chief concern was with how civilized man overcame the brute, animal nature that still lived inside of him. His novels are Darwinian struggles played out in fiction, and he was sometimes criticized for making literature that was too scientific and lacking in sympathy. Like many Naturalists, Norris was interested in the trials of life of the poor and destitute. InMcTeague, his most famous novel, he studies how ambition and greed derail the life of a moderately successful dentist. Characters are frequently referred to in animalistic terms, and there is an undercurrent of unhealthy sexuality that permeates the first sections of the novel. Overall, McTeague is a grim exposition on human nature’s inability to rise above instinct. The title character is small-minded, almost childlike in his view of the world. Because of this, his well-meaning efforts to improve his economic situation go hopeless awry. In the final scene, one gets the impression that the protagonist, if one can call him that, could not have ended up anywhere else.


Despite the resounding pessimism of their literary output, the Naturalists for the most part were genuinely concerned with improving the situation of the poor in America and the world. Frank Norris wrote and campaigned on behalf of social reforms, and Stephen Crane’s journalism reveals a mind keenly aware of human suffering. There would seem to be a disconnect between the opinions of the authors and the statements made in the contexts of their novels. However, closer study reveals this not to be the case. Norris intended his novels to be warnings about the capacity for mankind to sink to its lowest common denominator. Critics, both contemporary and modern, sometimes accuse the Naturalists of ethnocentricity. True, the images presented of immigrant and ethnic groups are unflattering. However, given their backgrounds in journalism, the Naturalist writers would probably argue that they simply presented life as it appeared. If the life they saw was ugly or depraved, they were not to be held responsible.


Naturalism was a relatively short-lived philosophical approach to crafting novels. Few writers of the period experienced real success in the style, but those that did became titans of the art form. One wonders at the profound literature that might have been produced had Stephen Crane not died before his thirtieth birthday. Frank Norris likewise died before his time, an irony that should not escape modern readers. It is difficult to gauge the total effects of Naturalism on the path of American literature. The fact that Social Darwinism eventually came to be seen for the disguised racism that it is probably marred the reputation of Naturalist writing. However, the sheer art and craft of the literature that the greatest novelists of the period generated overcomes such handicaps.


This article is copyrighted by Jalic Inc. Do not reprint it without permission.


(This article is copyrighted © 2011 by Jalic Inc. )

Dreamy World

Song: Dreamy World

Well I tell you it's a dreamy world,
I want my baby's company,
and it's also a scheming world,
I need someone to comfort me.
Well you know that it's a crazy world,
sometimes I doubt my sanity,
but it's also an amazing world,
I want to bring some of it back with me.
Some mornings it's a lazy world,
I lie there dreaming that we're free.
Then I wake into this changing world
and put on myself to be me.
Lots of times still it's a lonely world
when I can't share what I've been through
Where are you now in this only world?
I wanna I wanna I wanna go home with you.
All those times when I can't meet your eyes
I still do want to let you in.
Hard to tell you in this spinning whirl,
I want to begin again.

1972

Bird vs Snake

• 
  

Why Teachers Should Be Trained Like Actors

Teaching is a lot like acting, a high-energy, performance profession that requires a person to act as a role model. But when teachers go through training and professional development, the performance aspect of the job is rarely emphasized or taught. Acknowledging this aspect could be a missed opportunity to restructure ways teachers learn new skills and tactics.

Actors, musicians or acrobats spend hours perfecting their craft because that’s how they improve. Teachers on the other hand, are often asked to identify teaching tools and tactics they’d like to try and to reflect on how those new elements could be integrated into the classroom.

“Knowing what you want to do is a long way from being able to do it,” said Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools, a non-profit school management organization and author of Teach Like a Champion and Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better in a recent Future of Education conversation with Steve Hargadon. He started trying to improve teaching by identifying the best practices of exceptional teachers and giving workshops on those “gold nuggets” to less experienced teachers. While many teachers found what they learned helpful, they couldn’t put the new methods into practice.

“Every other performance profession prepares people by practicing and breaking things down into sections,” said Lemov. So he shifted his professional development workshops to emphasize practicing good teaching strategies rather than just thinking about them.

[RELATED READING: Are Teachers of Tomorrow Prepared to Use Innovative Tech?]

Those first workshops were a learning experience in building on skill sets. Lemov remembers in one of his first groups, teachers pretended to be unruly students in a class taught by another teacher present. The teacher tried to give her lesson as her “students” misbehaved. She was unable to do so; they were throwing too many challenges at her at once. “What just happened there is she practiced failure,” Lemov said. “She just got better at losing control of the classroom.”

At this point he realized that, like learning a new piece of music or the lines to a play, the challenges of the classroom had to be broken down into component parts. In order for the teacher to practice succeeding, to feel the satisfaction of a well-given lesson to a controlled classroom, she needed to first practice controlling simple behaviors. Then gradually, the pretend students added in new types of challenging behaviors, adding layers of complexity so she could improve at a manageable pace.

“To really learn something teachers and students have to embrace the normalcy of falling down and picking yourself back up.”

“So often we ask people to do things that are outside their realm of possibility,” Lemov said. That’s a disservice to the learner because it gives the impression that the difficult task is insurmountable when in fact it was thrust on the person too quickly. Lemov gave the example of teaching his son to play baseball and allowing his son to try the batting cage after he’d just barely learned to connect with a slow pitch. His son changed his practiced swing to randomly connect with the ball, undercutting all his previous learning. The rate of failure in the batting cage was too high for his experience and time practicing.

That’s not to say that failure is bad. In fact, Lemov councils that failure needs to be a much more accepted part of the teaching practice. “You can’t learn if you are afraid to fail,” Lemov said. “To really learn something teachers and students have to embrace the normalcy of falling down and picking yourself back up. But it needs to happen in a manageable way.”

In the workshops that Lemov now runs he encourages teachers who are “practicing” their craft to take the suggestions offered in real time and immediately try to use them. So often in teaching feedback is delayed or must be ignored in the moment for the good of the whole group. Lemov champions a space where teachers can immediately shift course and practice the difference.

But it’s not easy to get teachers to give up old ways. It’s hard to tell an earnest educator who has prepared for his work primarily through reflection that he should practice. “Getting them to feel comfortable and safe in that dynamic is a big part of what has to happen for it to be effective,” Lemov said. It has to be safe to do something risky, not a culture supported in many schools.

Through his work Lemov has observed that there is a correlation between how well a teacher gives instruction to students and the quality of the academic content. Giving clear instructions is only one of many skills a teacher needs, but Lemov found that if a teacher had mastered those external elements of the teaching craft, she was also more successful on the academic side because she thought about discussion in the same clear, measured way.

“I do think there’s a strange correlation between intentionality about seemingly little things on the behavioral-cultural side and big educational ideas,” Lemov said. A teacher who pays enough attention to make instructions clear is probably also paying close attention to how academic discussions and projects are structured.

But the most important thing is to realize that by practicing good teaching methods, a teacher can begin to embody good habits and feel successful at once difficult classroom tasks. Ultimately, professional development should make teachers feel that they can perform their jobs better, not merely know cerebrally what they should do differently.

(fully taken from http://blogs.kqed.org/)

FIRST MOON PARTY

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Sara Suleri's  Meatless Days

  

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days -- Novel or Autobiography?

Suleri herself does not term Meatless Days as an autobiography, but her publisher markets it as one.
Daniel Wolfe wrote in The Book Review that "the writing is beautifully constructed and yet a little cold; Sara Suleri expertly paces out the boundaries of her subject without giving the reader the pleasure of getting inside." Suleri would respond to it that the novel is not about getting inside but is about showing what happened, without explanation, with "no introductions" (Interview, December 1990).
To be sure, she acknowledges that genre of autobiography, by its very definition, engenders a form of self-censorship because it is one's own choice what to include and what to leave out of the text. However, she adds, "Forgetting is just about as important as what you remember." At the same time, she does not believe in authorial control, saying that "a narrative should shape itself." When she writes, "a lot of it is being dictated by what is down there on the page; what I remembered and forgot was beyond my control." Perhaps for this reason Suleri's prose is peppered with the phrase "of course," as in the opening sentence cited above: "Leaving Pakistan, was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women."
Suleri does not need to make many if any revisions to her work; her first draft usually is her last.

 The Selective Autobiographer in Meatless Days

Sarah Suleri's Meatless Days tackles an ambitious number of topics, ranging from gender matters in Pakistan to the history and politics of the country, all within the framework of the author's personal vignettes of her own life. The book's scope is daunting, but Suleri lets us know throughout that she is not telling us the whole story. Unlike many travel writers who try to conceal their selectivity, Suleri is not afraid to alert the reader to the fact that many important events in her life have been intentionally left out of the book. For example, she informs us in parenthesis that she will not write about her sister's death: "For in this story, Ifat will not die before our eyes”(103-4).
Her circuitous (s r-ky -t s). writing style, her habit of following the tangents of her own thought associations rather than a clear narrative logic, make it evident that this is not a self-contained or conclusive story, but one that will leave many unanswered questions and hidden secrets. In the following passage, Suleri describes her own reluctance at times to reach into her past to retrieve information that might be germane to the topic at hand. By admitting to this conscious aversion to bring back certain memories, Suleri is distinctly outlining the terms of her writing, a writing that will produce a story both enormously selective, and necessarily incomplete.
But to travel back thus far is too enfeebling, too bone-wearying a business for my imagination. It is similar to my new reluctance to visit old Muslim tombs and contemplate again what I know I'll find, that inlay of marble on the walls with their curious flat-faced flowers, so dainty and scornful of their own decoration. And then the dead center of the grave can sit so heavily sometimes, surrounded as it is with tiny writing, words like capillaries to tighten in the head, as you read round and round with them all ninety-nine of Allah's appellations. O light, O clarity, O radiance, you read, until suddenly sequence becomes a vertiginous thing, and your brain is momentarily short of blood or breath. I used to enjoy the spaciousness of those places, the shoes-off of it, which put coolness at my feet. Now, I am not sure I would stop to consult those images, even by accident, in a passing book. [76]
In this passage, Suleri explicitly defines the limitations of her willingness to probe her own past.
Suleri often makes use of extended, detailed metaphors to explain abstract concepts, metaphors that often require a great deal of mental acrobatics to comprehend fully. In this passage, she compares bringing back old memories to walking among Muslim tombs and reading the minute engravings upon them.

The allusion to the writing on the Muslim tombs draws attention to the status of Suleri's own writing, especially when she claims that she would "not stop to consult those images, even by accident, in a passing book." this meant to be ironic that how does the act of reading the inscriptions on the tombs, described as "vertiginous," relate to our own reading of Suleri's book.

Post-Colonialism in Meatless Days

In Meatless Days, post-colonialism is used, like the English language itself, self-consciously. Post-colonialism and English have become not just historical links, but tools used by the authors to communicate their unique, non-Western visions of life. Discussion of post-colonialism in this novel illustrates the confrontations of two worlds, Western and colonized, but this conflict is not bemoaned or decried. In fact, post-colonial rhetoric, metaphors, and imagery have been appropriated in it, as it has the very use of English. Meatless Days deliver a forceful image of a unique culture that has collided with Western tradition in no uncertain way. Works such as this can illustrate the effect the fermenting residue of colonial power will ultimately have on nations confronting the dual identities of indigenous and imposed culture.
Meatless Days, colored by the effects of colonialism, provides a unique vision that is not explicitly post-colonial in nature. Meatless Days treats multiple themes (gender and sibling relations, political strife, religion, etc.), but above all it is a personal novel, a celebration and remembrance of her English mother. In communicating her personal vision, Suleri necessarily writes about colonialism, for she is a Pakistani. However, as a celebration of her mother, post-colonialism is conceptualized as a communicating tool and metaphor. She asks, "How can I bring them together in a room, that most reticent woman and that most demanding man?... Papa's powerful discourse would surround her night and day" (p. 57).
Post-colonial rhetoric aids her in discussing her mother's relation to Pakistan and herself.

 Public and Private History in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Suleri constantly reminds the reader that she is writing a public history. Even the death of her sister Ifat connects to chaotic politics in Pakistan, for her family fears Ifat was murdered as a result of her father's political leanings. The "alternative history" that Suleri calls Meatless Days is an attempt to deal with private history in a public sphere, setting the two "in dialogue." According to Suleri, she tried to create "a new kind of historical writing, whereby I give no introductions whatsoever. I use the names, the places, but I won't stop to describe them" (Interview, December 1990). In contrast to other third world histories, which she criticizes as too "explanatory," Meatless Days simply presents Pakistan as it appeared to her. Using names and places without much definition, description, or explanation was her "attempt to make them register as immediately to the reader as it would to me."
Some might argue with her assertion, however, that she does not interpret. The New York Times Book Review claimed, for example, that Suleri takes "one step back for analysis with every two it takes toward description." Indeed, some amount of reflection and interpretation is to be expected when one writes from the present looking back on the past. At one point she writes as she recounts a memory in the book, "Could that be it’s?" (p. 134) Here she is wondering, as she reflects back. Indeed, Suleri readily admits, "How does one maintain a sense of privacy when you construct a text like this?" and she acknowledges, "I'm sure I did reveal a lot" and that Meatless Days is "a very private book" (Interview, December 1990).
Suleri, like Anglo-Pakistani author Salman Rushdie, weaves her own personal history into that of Pakistan because the two entities are, as she says, "inextricably connected to one another." Suleri set out to write a historical novel, but one that is not based solely on facts and figures but rather is based on the facts in interconnected public and private histories. The deeply intimate aspect of the work, then, is not subjugated to the history of Pakistan but, combined with her remarkable use of syntax and diction, works instead to complement and redefine the country itself.

 "I" Versus "They": The Textual and Communal Self in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Although Meatless Days is more explicitly personal than Joan Didion's The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it nevertheless belies a clean categorization as autobiography. Suleri, links her personal story to the narrative of her culture. She conflates her internal landscape with the external landscape so that what is personal is never simply personal -- it is part of a larger question, a more historical assertion. In turn, Suleri begins to "lose the sense of the differentiated identity of history and [her]self" (14). Her mind becomes a "metropolis" (74) "a legislated thing" (87).
Suleri struggles with a feeling of national displacement: her motherland is Pakistan, and yet her own mother -- White, Welsh, representative of the colonizer -- can barely speak the "mother tongue." She is a woman from the third-world, and yet, as she puts it, "There are no women in the third-world" (20), "Pakistan is a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary". By rooting her self in language, Suleri addresses her postcolonial identity. She deals with the "the unpronouncability of [her] life" (138) by becoming "engulfed by grammar" (155), by "living in plot" (154).
The manner in which Suleri constructs the identity of her family and friends, sheds light on the way in which she constructs her own identity, in discussing them, Suleri uses the same techniques as in discussing herself: she fuses somatic discourse with textual discourse. The sister who was once "a house I rented" (4) becomes after her death "the news" (68), and later, a "municipality" (104). Her mother, who "seemed to live increasingly outside the limits of her body" (156), becomes "the land [her father] had helped to make" (140) and later, "the past [Pakistan] sought to forget" (164). Her face is described as "wearing like the binding of a book" (151). Even her friend, Muskatori, is represented as such a convincing piece of "land" that, as Suleri declares, "they could build an airport on [her]" (70). Suleri refers to her own "schizoid trick" (personality disorder) of disconnecting the syntax of "life and body" (68) and, again and again, we see the trick, or technique, in action. The book, which is self-consciously intertextual and academic, turns everything in its wake into a construction of language, a piece of text. The body becomes a narrative device, a metaphor for -- but also a way of dealing with -- its fragmented surroundings.
  
When Suleri leaves Pakistan, she remarks that she "was not a nation anymore" (123). More than a denial of physicality, the statement contains an explicit correlation between her self and her narrative subject. She abstracts history -- nationhood -- into her body, and then reads her body for historical clues. At various points in the book, Suleri describes herself as a "landscape" (87), an "otherness machine" (105), and a "state" (127). In one particularscene, Suleri and Shahid swim together and get bitten by fireflies. Suleri interprets the bites as "tiny writing on [her] skin" (108). When Shahid attempts to apologize, Suleri tells him it doesn't matter: "It never had any plot to it anyway" (108). In this scene, Suleri, like Didion, dramatically broadens the personal and physical. She turns this scene of physical play into a scene of textual play. She interprets the blemishes on her body as metaphors for the place she holds in the community: she is written upon, or, colonized.
Throughout Meatless Days , food functions as a link between body and nation. In Meatless Days , this logic holds: through food -- what the body consumes -- dramas of national identity play out. In the second chapter, Suleri writes that "Food certainly gave us a way not simply of ordering a week or a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we remembered against a chronology of cooks. Just as Papa had his own yardstick -- a world he loved -- with which to measure history and would talk about the Ayub era, or the second martial law, or the Bhutto regime, so my sisters and I would place ourselves in time by remembering and naming cooks" (34). Whereas her father measures history by keeping track of male heads of state, Suleri measures history by keeping track of what enters her body. The passage makes explicit not only the connection between body and history, but it reveals a gendered dichotomy: the males participate directly in history; the women, on the other hand, exist only in metaphorical relation to it. They keep track of history by what they consume, by what enters and fills their bodies. This blurry relation between body and nation/language, is one that structures the novel.

 A Method to Her Madness: The Style of Sara Suleri

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days is an incredible literary work. Part memoirist, part sage writer, Suleri shows us the wonder and the anguish of her childhood and surrounds us with the bold colors and sundry sounds of a volatile postcolonial Pakistan. Her intensely original style and flair for description leave the reader with the sense of having read a complete and utterly true story. Each chapter is brimming with memories from her past and present, interwoven with dialogue, thought, and breathtaking description. The book, which is written in a free flowing form, resembles in many ways the way a mind thinks: constantly drawing upon different musings in order to come a final conclusion.
The most striking aspects of Meatless Days are how credible the story feels and the uniqueness of Suleri's personal ethos. Suleri, who appears to bar nothing from the reader, presents herself as a warm and trusted interpreter. She unlike any other writer is credible, unfaltering and her personal ethos is strikingly well defined.
Perhaps the most expedient method by which an author can create credibility is to prove that she knows more about a topic than the reader does; more intricate details; more complicated names and histories. Including exhaustive detail about a topic proves to us that our author was truly a part of the event, or that she studied the issue in great depth, either outcome solidifying our faith in her credibility. Suleri, McPhee and Didion all use this method in their work. Throughout Meatless Days, Suleri intermittently updates us about the changing political situation in Pakistan, each time mentioning exact dates, and numerous names which have not made the evening news for many decades:
How different Pakistan would be today if Ayub had held elections at that time, in 1968, instead of holding on until the end and then handing military power over to-of all people! -- Yahya . . . If Ayub had held elections there might still have been a deathly power struggle between Bhutto and Mujib: Mujib, the elected leader of East Pakistan; Bhutto, of West Pakistan. [120]
  
The detailed descriptions, facts, and citations that an author puts in a book help to build her credibility, yet strangely, what the author leaves out can be just as important. Although Meatless Days recounts her own thoughts and history, Suleri admits that there are aspects of her life in Pakistan that she will never fully comprehend and thus can not explain to us. When writing about her brother, Shahid in the section entitled "The Right Path; Or, They Took the Wrong Road," she confesses her imprecise understanding of her brother: "We had always thought of him, having as he did, the greater mobility of the male, as the most Pakistani of us: it never crossed my mind that he would choose to stay away or choose a life that would not allow him to return" (101). Though she confesses that she does not have a full knowledge of the topic on which she writes, we continue to value Suleri's interpretation. Her disclosure of her lack of certain understanding, in fact adds to her credibility. Nonfiction pieces are meant to be loyal to actuality and, as fellow human beings, we understand that when one is writing about certain significance or the inspiration of another it is impossible to possess complete understanding. Thus, admitting a lack of expertise in certain areas helps to confirm the actuality of the story.
What authors leave out of their stories is just as important as what they leave in. It helps to build credibility when an author admits to us that she will not tell us about something because her lack of understanding will not allow her, but it is also effective when an author tells us that there are some topics about which she chooses not indulge us. Scattered throughout Meatless Days are mentions of a woman named Dale. It is apparent that Suleri cherishes her, yet she never divulges where they met or even the nature of their relationship. The modest amount of information about Dale is a clear choice made by Suleri, who even writes in the closing pages of her book: "I will not mention Dale at any length, although great length occurs to me (be distracted, elsewhere, Dale, as you read through this shortest sentence)" (176). This line adds further to the mystery of Dale and to our frustration about our lack of knowledge. But Suleri's refusal to bestow upon us her entire story creates credibility. Her story is a personal one. Thus, it is expected that there are certain people and memories from her past that she would want to keep for herself. Although we may be frustrated and curious, we expect that if her story is in fact credible she, like the rest of us, holds certain memories sacred and will shield them from the world.

The powerful and effective nonfiction writer like Suleri is a trusted interpreter of events. The greater the displays of knowledge, prowess in written word, and alluring personal style, the more effectual the author is as a trusted interpreter, yet she must make heed not to inject her writing with too much of her own opinion and judgments.
Suleri's seemingly emotionless and judgment-free writing style can at times take readers by surprise because her writing is so extremely personal. Her writing about her father's sudden divorce from his first wife, Baji, after having fallen in love with her mother, is completely free from any judgment of her father's insensitive action toward his daughter Nuz:
Mamma at twenty-five must have been a talking thing-but I would hardly have thought that sufficient for him to pick up his life with Baji and just put it in his pocket. Oh, knowing his makeup I have no doubt he sang with pain, but he went through with it anyway. The divorce was conducted by mail, and in Karachi Nuz at nine was told that her grandparents were her parents, that Baji was her sister. [116]
Suleri was wise in omitting many of her own judgments out of Meatless Days. The book is already charged with her very personal and very painful stories. Thus if she had included more of her own judgments and emotions, her credibility would have been threatened, and the book would be at risk for appearing too slanted a view.
In brilliant displays of her writing expertise, Suleri, like Didion, often uses other means then direct statement to convey her emotions or opinions. Much of the uniqueness of her style comes from her ability to substitute other images as metaphors for her emotion. In the chapter "Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom," Suleri describes her relationship and its end with a man named Tom by piecing together images of their time together, thoughts about being alone, and scraps of conversations with her sisters. At the conclusion of the chapter when she describes Tom's final words to her, she does not write about her own sadness but instead lets her interpretation of his words portray the emotion for her:
In the closing words of the chapter, Suleri successfully uses the image of the wind whipping through an empty cave to portray her sadness. Further, her certainty that she would hear Tom's name in the wind clearly conveys that she was affected by the ending of their relationship. Suleri's subtle yet stirring manner of conveying her emotions is unparalleled. This ability enables her to weave her own personality throughout her writing while still maintaining her credibility.


Just as central to the effectiveness of a piece as an author's credibility is her personal ethos. A writer's personal ethos is the lens through which she views the world and the manner in which she projects this view to her reader. The writer's voice is of course extremely significant to the personal ethos of the piece. The words of the people about whom the author writes also help to create its message.
In Meatless Days, Suleri's quotes people in a style that is uniquely her own; so much her own in fact that she often seems to be feeding her own eloquent words right into the characters mouths. In "Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom," she quotes what her former boyfriend supposedly said to her once in sadness: "'I am sick,' he said in self remorse when he last spoke to me. 'It clutches at my heart and does not let me move,' he wailed; 'It puts me out of pulse and frightens me' (89). It can be safely assumed that her boyfriend, in a moment of intense emotion, did not speak so poetically and explain himself in symbols. It is also safe to assume that when her mother expressed her worry about her biracial children she did not wonder to herself, as Suleri tells us: "What will happen to these pieces of yourself‹you, and yet not you‹when you dispatch them into the world? Have you made sufficient provision for their extraordinary shadows?" (161). Although it is apparent that Suleri gives us her own lyrical interpretation of other people's words, the constant weaving of her own voice throughout every aspect of her story is enormously effective in creating the personal ethos of Meatless Days. The book is a memoir and as such we look to be taken to Suleri's world as she sees it. By shaping the character's words into a voice that is more her own, she creates a world held together with the majesty of her own prose. The fluidity of her voice as narrator is never broken, not even broken in the words of other people.
It goes with out saying that Suleri, McPhee, and Didion are all masters of prose. Credibility and personal ethos in the nonfiction piece can be helped by detailed information, subtlety in employing judgment, and well placed quotations, but what ties any great piece together, any piece that makes you quiet with inspiration, twinge with recognition or shiver with emotion, is the writer's ability to create brilliantly crafted words.
  
Suleri's greatest strength in Meatless Days is her flair for description. Her book focuses a great deal on Pakistan, a land most readers have never seen, thus her ability to create striking visual images is at the heart of the book. When writing about her trip back to Pakistan to run away from pain in her life Suleri silences the reader with the grandeur of her description:
I went in search of another cure from him, back to the Himalayas of my childhood, the winsome gullies that climb up the hills beyond the more standard attractions of Murree-a mere hill station of a place, with its mall, its restaurants, and its jostle. [86]
In this short description of a hill side, we can truly envision the mountain with "its winsome gullies", a sweet haven from the bustle of the city below. Each of her chapters are infused with awe-inspiring descriptions which make the world of Pakistan come alive to the reader. Upon finishing Meatless Days, a silence immediately came to me. I knew that if I were to once again crack open the now wrinkled pages, I would immediately be taken back to Suleri's intensely visual world, to the colorful streets of Pakistan, the dusty and uncertain roads of her childhood, or to the cold sidewalks of New Haven.
Meatless Days is a jewel of a book, full of emotion and astounding insight. Sara Suleri is a master writer, who creates a warm and effective personal ethos and develops a bond of trust with the reader. There is clear technique and skill involved in nonfiction writing, and just as a blacksmith must learn the tricks and steps to shaping metal, writers too have steps to follow in their craft.
To read Meatless Days is exhausting. Not because the book is boring by any stretch of the mind, but because Suleri writes so effectively that the reader feels transported to her world. We are involved in the arguments with her father, emotionally wrenched by the death of her sister, and touched beyond words by the enduring love of a family that cannot be together. Sara Suleri must have tirelessly studied the techniques and methods used by remarkable nonfiction writers, for her implementation of their craft in Meatless Days is breathtaking.

Works Cited

Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
McPhee, John. The Crofter and the Laird. Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Didion, Joan.The White Album. Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

Fitzerald, F.Scott.The Great Gatsby. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.