Roy Miller's Blog, page 182
May 23, 2017
What to Read Before Your Florida Trip
This content was originally published by CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓN on 23 May 2017 | 10:00 am.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Florida seems to have developed something of a monopoly on the bizarre. Take a 2015 news story about a traffic accident in which the only casualty was a shark. Or the ubiquitous “Florida man” headlines that have inspired parodic Twitter accounts and trivia games. (“Which of these absurd headlines is fake?”) Yet to some, Florida is either just home or an entertaining destination for travelers. The following books will guide you through the state’s swamplands, retirement communities and cultural enclaves, offering outright or de facto defenses of Florida.
____
BEST. STATE. EVER.
A Florida Man Defends His Homeland
By Dave Barry
When did Florida became “The Joke State”? The author argues that the demise of the state’s reputation dates back to the 2000 election. “On election night almost all of the states were able to figure out pretty quickly who they voted for. But not Florida,” Mr. Barry writes. The country has never forgotten that gaffe. Rather than reject the oddball perception of the Sunshine State, Mr. Barry embraces the “Weirdness Factor” and guides the reader in a kooky, humorous road trip to places like Cassadaga, the Psychic Capital of the World, to have his dog’s aura read, and a retirement community with a thriving black market for Viagra. In the process, he recasts the absurd as endearing.
MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS
By Jennine Capó Crucet
A few pages into “Make Your Home Among Strangers,” Ms. Crucet’s heroine, Lizet, recounts the time her father and his friends, as preteenagers, saw a body floating in the canals of Miami. It is a story Lizet knows not to tell her colleagues at the parasitology lab where she works, and reveals fairly quickly that hers will not be a story about Miami Beach’s high-end clubs and celebrity D.J.s. Instead, the author takes us into Hialeah and Little Havana, alternating between Lizet’s world at a prestigious college and her home life in Miami, where her parents have separated, her sister has become a single mother, and a Cuban boy awash on Miami’s shores has ignited a passionate movement to keep him in America. The author investigates themes like family, immigration and race, while demonstrating the Cuban influence on Miami.
SUNSHINE STATE: Essays
By Sarah Gerard
The author blurs the line between memoir and journalism in this stunning book of essays. She opens with “BFF,” the story of her profound friendship with another woman that dissolved, in part, because Ms. Gerard had the means to leave town and her friend, who would become a stripper and spend time in shelters for battered women, did not. In another essay, “Going Diamond,” she writes an account of her family’s foray into Amway, describing their Bayou Club “functions” and including reporting on the company’s founder, Richard DeVos — the father-in-law of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — and its history. Ms. Gerard’s Florida is frenzied, evocative, and optimistic.
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How I Got My Agent: Author Michael Haspil
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 23 May 2017 | 1:36 pm.
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I dreamed of being a writer for most of my life and, although I had undertaken efforts in screenwriting, it wasn’t until 2009 that I decided to commit and try my hand at being a professional author. Always on the hunt for excellent ideas, I kept a journal near my bed so I could write down particularly vivid dreams. One morning, I woke with a doozy. I didn’t remember the dream as a whole, just the overall concept and one line: “I used to hunt vampires for the NSA, now I work vice.”
This was it. This was the one.
This guest post is by Michael Haspil. Haspil is a geeky engineer and nerdy artist. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he had the opportunities to serve as an ICBM crew commander and as a launch director at Cape Canaveral. The art of storytelling called to him from a young age and he has plied his craft over many years and through diverse media. He has written original stories for as lon gas he can remember and has dabbled in many genres. However, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have whispered directly to his soul. When he isn’t writing, you can find him sharing stories with his role-playing group, cosplaying, computer gaming, or collecting and creating replica movie props. Lately, he devotes the bulk of his hobby time to assembling and painting miniatures for his tabletop wargaming addiction. Michael is represented by Sara Megibow of the KT Literary Agency and Adrian Garcia of the Paradigm Talent Agency.
In high school, I was editor of our literary magazine and a theater nerd. No one expected me to pursue a career in the military. They all thought I would be an author. I’ve been a play-it-safe adult, but in this case I was so inspired and excited I had to make a change. I was so sure I could succeed that I actually quit my day job.
To say I was naïve is a massive understatement. I undertook the task of turning that one line into the novel that would become GRAVEYARD SHIFT. As I reworked the novel through subsequent drafts, I achieved a point where I thought it was good enough to send out and began a long query process. I lost count of how many agencies I queried. To my excitement, I received requests for pages from many of them. However, the rejections came later. I estimated that my concept was sound, or at least intriguing enough to get me through the door. Since that’s always as far as I got, I rightly assumed I needed work on my craft.
In the fall of 2009, I attended the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold conference. I remember now, with an ironic smile on my face, that I brought miniature business card-sized CDs of my novel, just in case an agent or editor wanted it right then and there. As you might expect, my experience was somewhat different.
I went to a standing-room-only presentation called, “How to Avoid the Slushpile.” The industry information presented was eye opening and disheartening. At day’s end, I drove home in a funk, aware of the colossal dragon that guarded my path to being a professional author.
[5 Important Tips on How to Pitch a Literary Agent In Person]
I stood at the kitchen trashcan and threw away all the little CDs I’d been so proud of a day before and contemplated not returning to the conference. In the morning, I made the best decision I could. I made myself a strong cup of coffee and drove back. That dragon wasn’t going to slay itself. And, if I didn’t know how to do it, then I was damn sure going to learn.
Over the course of the next year, I joined the Pikes Peak Writers, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and attended every single workshop they offered. I became active with three critique groups and entered as many contests as I could. I even placed in some of them. All the while, I reworked my novel.
It paid off in 2011 at the Colorado Gold conference.
I signed up for a workshop with an editor from TOR, Moshe Feder. We worked through our pages and he responded extremely well to my work. The next day, I had a scheduled pitch session with him and it was one of the strangest in my experience. I hardly pitched at all! Since he was already familiar with my concept, I answered questions about my world building and further elaborated on the story. When he requested the full manuscript, I emailed it to him moments after the pitch session. (Pro-tip: It pays to have a completed manuscript when you’re pitching.)
Elated, I regaled my critique partners, all of whom were also attending the conference, with tales of my achievement. Laura Main and Anita Romero, from separate critique groups, both said the same thing, “You need an agent right now.”
Sara Megibow of KT Literary, who I had already researched, was at the conference. She had the passion and drive I was looking for. Though her agency rejected an earlier draft, this time would be different. Not only had I significantly reworked the novel since submitting it, I was coming at it from a different angle and with editorial attention. I made plans to attend her presentation “Bang, Zoom, Pow! The First Thirty Pages” and since I pitch much better in person than on the page, I thought I would try to speak to her after her talk.
During the presentation, Sara made numerous gaming, science fiction, and fantasy references and jokes. Long before she’d finished, I knew she was the agent for me. However, I wasn’t the only one with the idea of conducting impromptu pitches after her talk. Quite the line assembled. I exercised my patience and waited. I told her Moshe was interested and asked if she would consider representing me. Sara requested that I also send her the full manuscript.
When I got home, I fired it off to her, clapped my hands, and contemplated my next novel. I’d finished this one, and it was well on its way to publication, or so I believed. (You’d think somewhere along the line I would stop being naïve. You’d be wrong.)
[Want to land an agent? Here are 4 things to consider when researching literary agents.]
Alas, Sara passed on the story. She wasn’t sure it was the right story for her in that iteration, which is agent-speak for she didn’t love it as it was and it still needed editing. Nevertheless, she left a sliver of a window open. Months passed as I waited for the fateful response from TOR. Nothing came. Ever the optimist, I did a major re-edit of the novel and incorporated Moshe’s notes from the workshop. My inbox mocked me with its lack of emails from TOR.
Then, early in 2012, I got the email. It certainly looked like an offer. I forwarded it to Sara and asked again whether she would consider being my agent. It is very important to Sara that she represent the author and not just a single work and that she meshes well with her clients. We had several conference calls to discuss my vision for the series, other works, and to make sure we were the right fit for one another. About a week later, after Sara had checked out my reworked iteration of the novel, I signed with her. It has been the best decision I’ve made in my writing career.
We’ve battled many lesser wyverns and drakes since, but this summer, that big original dragon is going down. In July, my debut novel, GRAVEYARD SHIFT, about an immortal pharaoh and his vampire partner who must ally with an unsavory cast to thwart an ancient conspiracy, will hit bookstores everywhere.
My advice to aspiring authors: Attend conferences. Not only will you get to meet people in person, but you will open yourself up to a wealth of information in a relatively short amount of time. In just a weekend you can download the type of information it would take you months to accumulate on your own. Most importantly, a conference lets you feel out different agents for one who might be a good fit, sit at their tables for a meal, or schmooze at the bar, and interact outside of a formal presentation. The publishing process is a lot lengthier than many of us would like; a good agent and partner will have to be there every step of the way. You must have the same goals and personalities that mesh well with each other.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
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If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
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Grayson Perry’s ‘The Descent of Man’: Deconstructing the Masculine Mystique
This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 23 May 2017 | 7:37 pm.
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He’s a complicated fellow.
“The Descent of Man” (the title is from Darwin) is a short book that remixes a good deal of academic feminist thinking about braying masculinity. Little in it is truly original.
But Perry has a quick mind and a charming style of thrust and parry. He’s a popularizer, an explainer, a stand-up theorist. His book is as crisp and tart as a good Granny Smith apple.
Perry calls himself “a doubter at the gates of the crumbling superdome of masculinity.” He writes: “We need to get a philosophical fingernail under the edge of the firmly stuck-down masculinity sticker so we can get hold of it and rip it off. Beneath the sticker, men are naked and vulnerable — human even.”
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Grayson Perry
He’s surely right. As Homer Simpson asked Marge, “What about my womanly needs?”
But the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard is surely right, too, to fret throughout his epic and autobiographical “My Struggle” series that he (and thus modern man) has become soft and feminized. We’ve become “indoor cats,” in Dave Eggers’s memorable phrase.
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It isn’t simple, these days, to possess a Y chromosome and know what to do with it. Like the guileful letter Y itself, men are asked to represent consonants and then vowels. To be graceful while toggling between modes requires Fred Astaire-level footwork.
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Perry is aware of these sorts of ambiguities. He rightly has little sympathy, especially when it comes to the tribe he refers to as “Default Man” — white, middle- and upper-class heterosexual men.
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“The very aesthetic of seriousness has been monopolized by Default Man,” he writes. “In people’s minds, what do professors look like? What do judges look like? What do leaders look like? It is going to be a while before the cartoon cliché of a judge is Sonia Sotomayor or that of a leader is Angela Merkel.”
Perry is a man who takes clothing seriously; he’s a fashion critic in disguise. He notes the “colorful textile phalluses” hanging around the necks of establishment men. He burrows deep into the meanings of gray suits.
Here’s one joyful snippet of his thinking about somber power suits: “Default Men dress to embody neutrality; it is not true that they are neutral. If George Osborne, chancellor of the Exchequer in Parliament, were to dress up as a cross between Flashman and the Grim Reaper instead of a business suit when he delivered his budgets, perhaps we might have a more appropriate vision of who is controlling the nation’s finances.”
That last sentence made me so happy I had to get up and go for a little walk around the room. It’s a good game, to imagine the sort of motley our elected leaders should don in order to outwardly reflect their politics and personalities.
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Grayson PerryCredit
Jochen Braun
I hope he writes a book about clothes. Noting all the “pseudo-functional zips and buckles” on men’s weekend get-ups, he writes: “Men are into frippery as much as women, but they cloak it under spurious function.”
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Perry takes a wide-angle view of masculinity, drawing his examples from many sources. He flips on the television, watches he-man shows like Bear Grylls’s “Man vs. Wild” and thinks:
“They teach us how to survive in the wild; how to skin a deer carcass or build a shelter from tree branches. I would like to see them trying to find an affordable flat to rent in London or sorting out a decent state school for their children. These are the true survival skills of the 21st century.”
Among his ideal modern men is America’s 44th president. “I think Barack Obama presents a superb version of manhood. His calm thoughtfulness, emotional ease, wit and eloquence in the face of gross expectation and intractable problems is breathtaking.” Donald J. Trump is mentioned only once, with disdain.
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Perry’s book has its own failure built into it. One notes the flagrant unlikelihood of the man who most needs this book’s advice accepting it from a gentleman who wears patterned frocks and looks like their dotty Aunt Esther.
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The author does discuss the plight of blue-collar men (“Instead of making iron, they are pumping it”), but he is unlikely to win them over with self-help strictures such as, “Men might need to work less on their biceps and more on their intuition.”
Even at fewer than 150 pages, “The Descent of Man” is too long. In the last third Perry is reduced to stating poorly what he said well earlier in the book. He’s begun to twist a dry sponge.
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But when he’s on, which is frequently enough, Perry is an eloquent and witty tour guide through the fun house that is modern masculinity. He wants us guys to be weirder, freer, less predictable. He’s just the man for the job.
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Saving Your (Fill in the Blank) From Committing Suicide
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 23 May 2017 | 3:30 pm.
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One of the items in your house has decided to commit suicide, but you will not let it happen on your watch. Write the scene where you catch the item on the verge of taking it’s life and your attempt to talk the item out of it.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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Losing Their Clothes, Finding Themselves
This content was originally published by RUTH LA FERLA on 23 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Their book, an outgrowth of interviews, many of them taped over that time, focuses on style mavericks like Fatima Robinson, a video music director and choreographer, who vamps for the camera in the jeweled and feathered headdress she wore for her visit to the Burning Man festival the year she turned 40. “Before that I would have been too stuffy,” Ms. Robinson said. “Now I’m at a place where I can allow myself to let go.”
And there is Gail Chovan, a designer and teacher in Austin, Tex., who after a double mastectomy rejected breast reconstruction and the padded brassiere her mother had urged her to wear. “I’m feminine, and I don’t have to wear a padded bra to show that,” Ms. Chovan said as she posed in a tank top and a series of embroidered vests.
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The former booking agent Bethann Hardison, a pioneering African-American model in the 1970s, posed gamely in a purple bra and boy-cut panties. “This isn’t senior citizen time for me,” she declared. “The revolution ain’t over.”
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Ms. Mandelbaum said that she struggled with her weight as a teenager and that Ms. Goodkind “was less accepting of my body at the time.” But she said that changed when the two began their project.
Such accounts are especially resonant in a sociopolitical climate that can be unwelcoming, if not downright hostile, to difference. “This project goes so much deeper than talking about style,” said Ellen Nidy, managing editor at Rizzoli, the book’s publisher. “It went into the vulnerabilities and hangups of people who didn’t necessarily fit with societal norms of what’s beautiful, what’s fashionable. They were redefining all that for themselves.”
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That disruptive approach is reflected on the book’s cover. Together, its subjects — they include Cathy Cooper, a 60-something former heroin addict, now an artist in Los Angeles; Rachel Fleit, a filmmaker who flouts her baldness for the camera; and Alok Vaid-Menon, a transgender writer and performance artist garbed in a dress — form an eye-opening mosaic.
An exercise in extreme casting, the book underscores an inclusiveness in tune with the fall 2017 runway shows in New York that, however fitfully, showcased models of varying races, ethnicities, gender preferences and, in particular, size. No fewer than 26 plus-size models strode the catwalks in February.
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Yet a similar inclusiveness was not reflected in the fashion advertising campaigns shot during that period. A tally by the Fashion Spot website cited 24. Five percent of models cast were African-American, Hispanic or Asian, an increase of only one percentage point over the previous year. Plus-size models made up only 2.3 percent, and in only two prominent instances was a model over 50 selected for a major campaign, both with the 73-year-old Lauren Hutton.
In the light of such numbers, the book and the filmmakers’ open call seemed all the more timely — even urgent, they might argue. “We want to show what’s vulnerable, what’s honest in these people’s stories,” Ms. Mandelbaum said. “We’re hoping to subvert a culture that promotes a standard of perfection that most of us can never attain.”
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Their ultimate goal, Ms. Goodkind added, is to demystify fashion and to promote self-discovery through the not-so-simple ritual of getting dressed. “The process can be messy,” she allowed. “But there’s beauty in that.”
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Bookstore News: May 23, 2017
This content was originally published by on 23 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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A Wilmington bookstore goes on the block; a Nashville store expands; an appreciation of a Minnesota used bookstore; and more.
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Dear Match Book: What Should I Read on My Summer Vacation?
This content was originally published by NICOLE LAMY on 23 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Finally, you have left the academy behind, so now you can look back and laugh. DEAR COMMITTEE MEMBERS, by Julie Schumacher, satirizes university life from the point of view of a has-been writer and current creative writing professor, Jason Fitger. The lovable curmudgeon pours his literary talents into vituperative letters of recommendation, which may not be appreciated by their fictional recipients, but provide wicked fun for readers.
Yours truly,
Match Book
♦
Fireside Travels
Dear Match Book,
I live right on Lake Michigan. Summers are short, and winters are long, so I do a lot of reading by the fire. When looking for a travel book, I want to be entertained by a unique narrative voice. I also like a mix of travel and science and enjoy books set in Africa. I love “The River of Doubt,” by Candice Millard, about Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition along a tributary of the Amazon, and everything by Redmond O’Hanlon and J. Maarten Troost.
LINDA VON PFAHL
LUDINGTON, MICH.
Dear Linda,
Your taste in travel books covers a lot of terrain — from contemporary travelogues to historical quests. David Grann’s THE LOST CITY OF Z (2009) weaves together both genres into a cinematic epic. (The movie adaptation was released in April.) Grann, an indoorsy journalist, follows the trail of a 20th-century British explorer, Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while looking for a lost civilization in the Amazon jungle. The stakes rise when Grann gets turned around in a mangrove forest and catches a glimpse of the challenges his subject faced.
In LOOKING FOR TRANSWONDERLAND, Noo Saro-Wiwa embarks on a quest with more personal roots. Raised in England, Saro-Wiwa had always resented her visits to her birth country. Summer trips to Nigeria with her family meant being deprived of the middle-class comforts of her childhood (no television!). But after her father’s murder in 1995, Nigeria became “a place where nightmares did come true.” Saro-Wiwa travels from Lagos to the archaeologically rich town of Ikom and many points on the map in between to try to understand the country her family left behind.
Detailed accounts of roadside trash, notes on unappetizing meals and the history of Mongol conquerors — in TRAVELS IN SIBERIA, Ian Frazier gives readers a sense of the landscape and its people by sketching a portrait of a vast geography with quirky, often comic details. His affection for the place is endearing, although it may not be persuasive. He explores the tundra and taiga so you don’t have to.
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Yours truly,
Match Book
♦
Titles for Globetrotters
Dear Match Book,
I am on a somewhat leisurely around-the-world journey and would like some suggestions for books with travel and self- discovery as a theme, like “The Razor’s Edge,” by W. Somerset Maugham.
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BILL HANCOCK
CURRENTLY IN PRAGUE
Dear Bill,
If you’ve read “The Razor’s Edge,” you’re likely to be familiar with the cross-country starts and stops that make up ON THE ROAD, by Jack Kerouac, and SIDDHARTHA, Hermann Hesse’s spiritual fable. If you haven’t yet read it — and you have a cool drink nearby — consider too, THE SHELTERING SKY, Paul Bowles’s 1949 debut novel about existential dread in the desert.
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For more contemporary soul searching, turn to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s travel memoir A SENSE OF DIRECTION, in which the author dallies along three pilgrimage routes on the way to Santiago de Compostela, Spain; the temples of Shikoku, Japan; and Uman, Ukraine, which he visits with his brother and his father, a gay rabbi. Throughout the book the witty, sometimes flip, narration carries the reader along, though it’s his pain, resentment and, finally, acceptance of his family history that give the story its bearings.
In THE SINGULAR PILGRIM, Rosemary Mahoney embarks upon six religious journeys in good faith — or, at least, “faded, worn, resentful, and stubbornly evasive” faith, which allows her to remain both skeptical and exquisitely open to the beliefs and rituals of others. But it’s the earthly details in her travel memoir — the intimacy of a Hindu cremation ceremony in Varanasi, India, for example — that feel like revelations.
For more than 30 years, Pico Iyer — who edited and wrote the introduction to “The Skeptical Romancer,” a selection of Maugham’s travel writing — has been writing travel books. Iyer’s SUN AFTER DARK includes essays about trips he took to Bolivia, Cambodia and Easter Island, among other places. In this collection, as in all of his work, Iyer’s curiosity and compassion give readers a sense of place, and his internal observations on exile and belonging convey a deep understanding about travelers’ states of mind.
Yours truly,
Match Book
Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.
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Nor Any Drop to Drink?: Why the Great Lakes Face a Murky Future
This content was originally published by ROBERT MOOR on 23 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Egan goes on to reveal that the mussels are merely the latest in the Great Lakes’ long history of radical ecological mutations. Ever since the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and accelerating after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 — which allowed large shipping barges to travel from the Atlantic to Chicago — the lakes have experienced a parade of evermore villainous invaders. First, came the vampire-like lamprey, which spread across the lakes with shocking speed in the 1940s, before scientists brought them under control with designer poison. Then in the 1950s came a small bug-eyed fish called the alewife, harmless on its own, but which in the absence of predators, proliferated wildly. By 1967, they were swarming in schools some 10 miles long. To combat them, fishery scientists eventually imported half a billion salmon (including genetically modified “super salmon”), which thrilled sport fishermen, before the salmon and the alewife populations both, swiftly and more or less in tandem, collapsed.
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The salmon-fishing craze, artificial as it was, had one salubrious side effect: It gave rise to a new ecological consciousness among those who caught and ate fish from the lake. When it was discovered in 1966 that the harmful pesticide DDT was accumulating in salmon flesh — a revelation due in part to the heroic reporting of Don L. Johnson at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the same paper where Egan now works — Wisconsin and Michigan became the nation’s first states to ban the pesticide. Today, in a stroke of irony, fishermen whose parents and grandparents had despised the alewife for outcompeting local perch now complain that actions must be taken to preserve the (invasive) alewife, in order to support the stock of (imported) salmon they grew up catching. This is a classic example of shifting baselines, an important concept that Egan, in a rare misstep, glosses over as “a fancy way of saying that kids are getting cheated out of the lakes their moms and dads loved.”
Thanks to a blind spot in the E.P.A. regulations, which allowed shipping vessels to dump bilge water teeming with tiny foreign organisms directly into the Great Lakes, in recent years a host of minor monsters has appeared on Midwestern shores: spiny water fleas, fishhook water fleas, the bloody red shrimp. But none, Egan writes, have been more destructive than the innocuous-seeming zebra and quagga mussels. The mussels managed to spread so quickly because they secrete a superglue-like adhesive that can stick to any solid surface, allowing them to cling to the hulls of speedboats, which then transport them to other lakes all across the continent. Making matters worse, the mussels suck up practically every speck of life in the water except a toxic form of blue-green algae called microcystis, which, due largely to a flood of under-regulated agricultural runoff, blossoms like an aqueous atomic bomb each summer. Egan warns that Lake Erie, which is currently experiencing the worst algal blooms of any Great Lake, and which provides the drinking water to 11 million people, could soon face “a natural and public health disaster unlike anything this country has experienced in modern times.”
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The book’s final chapters look to the near future, when a combination of climate change, a growing human population and even scarier invasive species (“monster-sized” Asian carp, the “razor-toothed” snakehead, a strain of toxic dinoflagellates known as “cells from hell”) will further destabilize the lakes’ already wobbly ecosystem.
In telling what might otherwise be a grim tale, Egan, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative. The book’s title is a nod to Jane Jacobs, but its ideological and stylistic forebear is plainly “Silent Spring,” that ur-classic of red-flag-raising eco-journalism. Like Rachel Carson, Egan is careful to cloak his argument in terms policy makers understand, focusing more on financial damage and human health than any intrinsic, but incalculable, deep ecological value. (The damage caused by Caspian mussels to tourism and industry alone, for example, currently costs Great Lakes communities roughly $250 million annually.) However, one advantage Egan’s book has over Carson’s is its approachable style. As a narrator he tends to glide high above the action, but he frequently swoops down to describe his subjects at eye level, in order to show how massive structural problems affect individual lives. Rereading “Silent Spring” for the first time since high school, I was struck by how chalky it is, how crammed with scientific studies, how devoid of human drama. In contrast, Egan’s book is bursting with life (and, yes, death).
Like Carson, Egan is most galvanizing when he pairs alarming problems with the concrete and achievable solutions. His most convincing suggestion is that we should close the seaway to all overseas freighters, those oceangoing ships nicknamed “salties,” which inadvertently smuggle invasive species in their bilge-water tanks. It is a radical-sounding proposition, which the shipping industry vociferously opposes. But Egan shows that it is surprisingly feasible. It turns out that all of the foreign oceanic freight currently shipped to the Great Lakes each day could be brought in and out by a single locomotive. “If that train delivered as much ecological havoc as the salties have,” Egan muses, “it is unlikely the public would still allow it to be running down the tracks.”
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As a protest slogan, “Halt the Salties!” might just be punchy enough to work. Unfortunately, actually achieving it would likely require vigorous action from the E.P.A. and other legislators, which seems unlikely under the current regime. And, as Egan admits, contaminated bilge water is just one strand in a tangled net of dire problems facing the Great Lakes. The Trump administration’s budget proposal, meanwhile, guts a slew of programs designed to protect water quality, including the virtual eradication of a $300 million program created under the Obama administration to restore the Great Lakes ecology. On the campaign trail, Trump promised voters that he would ensure that all Americans had access to “crystal clear water.” But, as Egan’s book shows, clarity can be deceiving. What is needed now are legislators, activists, citizens and writers, like Egan, who have an appreciation for that murkiest, least attractive of qualities: complexity.
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May 22, 2017
50 Years On, Stories of the Six Day War and What Came After
This content was originally published by GAL BECKERMAN on 22 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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The delusion was to believe that Israelis and Palestinians would ever accept this solution. To see the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, as Chabon and Waldman’s contributors did, is to encounter a military occupation that is deeply entrenched, while settlers, filled with zeal, are constantly and steadily expanding their enterprise. None of this speaks of a willingness to ever leave. Many, if not most Palestinians, meanwhile, even as they find themselves increasingly pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves of authority, have never abandoned the dream of owning the whole land. The Six Day War is not their central tragedy. It always was and still is 1948, when they were either expelled from or fled their homes during what they call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It’s the keys to these homes in cities like Acre or villages in the Galilee — Israel proper, that is — that they pass on to their grandchildren.
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The hope of a clean separation that would end what the Six Day War began is absent from these books. Instead, they all describe a status quo of chronic entwinement, choking the Palestinians and making the Israelis ever more unwilling to give up the security and religious connection that came with attaining the West Bank. We have returned to the crux of the conflict: Two peoples desire the same land, and they will not share it.
The history of the war itself has undergone major revision in the past few decades. Since the 30-year declassification rule opened up the Israel State Archives to researchers in 1997, a number of books, including Michael Oren’s “Six Days of War” (2001) and Tom Segev’s “1967” (2007), have recast the David and Goliath myth that had risen up around the events of May and June 1967. Israel is no longer seen as the weak and passive actor threatened with a second Holocaust and forced into a pre-emptive attack, but as a confident strategist taking advantage of Egypt and Syria’s blundering brinkmanship to fulfill a long-planned expansion.
A new history of the lead-up to the war by Guy Laron, THE SIX-DAY WAR: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University, $28), reinforces this narrative. It presents the economic and geopolitical conditions that made the conflict almost inevitable for all the combatants. In Israel, since the birth of the state, the military embraced an “offensive doctrine” that looked for opportunities to alter Israel’s borders, giving it more strategic depth than the thin lines it achieved at the armistice of the 1948 war. David Ben-Gurion, the founding father, had described those borders as “unbearable.” And although in public he presented Israel as a “small state under siege by powerful neighbors,” Laron writes, behind closed doors, “Ben-Gurion saw the Middle East as an open vista, beckoning Israel to use its military superiority to expand its borders.” When the moment presented itself, Israel’s generals managed to push aside cautious civilian leaders like the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, and strike hard and fast, smashing the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground in the first few hours and essentially winning the war before it really started.
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The conquering army effectively reset 1948 by uniting the entire land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River under Israeli control — what Jews think of as Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) and what to Palestinians is the whole of Palestine. This was a boost to uncompromising nationalistic visions on both sides, giving birth to a messianic settler movement and violent strains of Palestinian terrorism.
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To hear it from the people who currently live in the occupied territories — 650,000 Jewish settlers and 2.7 million Palestinians — it is now as much a zero-sum game as ever. Their voices come through in A LAND WITHOUT BORDERS: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing, paper, $16.95), a wide-ranging travelogue from Nir Baram, an Israeli novelist, translated by Jessica Cohen.
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The great virtue of his book is that Baram lets his interlocutors speak for themselves. Long stretches are verbatim dialogues. And what he hears is total and irreconcilable difference. The only real solution presented is for the other side to pack up and leave. “The Jews’ problems were in the West, not in the East, and in the West is where they should solve them,” Jalal Rumana, a school director and former Hamas operative, tells Baram. “There is no compromise between these two narratives. It will end only when one side gives up its aspirations,” Dani Dayan, a former settler leader and now Israel’s consul general in New York, declares. Dayan wants the Palestinians to move to Jordan. Most of the Palestinians Baram speaks with fantasize about Jews going back to Europe or to America.
Their dreams are not about where the final borders will be drawn. They are about living anywhere in the land they want. In this, most settlers and Palestinians converge. What Baram takes from this is that the “separation paradigm is collapsing — geographically, demographically, politically.” He also presents his own new idea. Baram is part of a small group of Israeli and Palestinian activists calling themselves Two States One Homeland. It envisions Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty each over their own citizens in two states separated by the pre-1967 border, but with the freedom to move and live anywhere on the whole land. This means settlers could remain in the West Bank, and Palestinians who wanted to return to their families’ homes on the Mediterranean coast could do so.
Photo
A Jewish woman resists evacuation of an Israeli settlement outpost in 2006.
Credit
Oded Balilty/Associated Press
This is very far from any possible reality. What seems much more likely is that the state of perpetual limbo — one that favors Israel — will continue indefinitely. Nathan Thrall does a brilliant job describing the political and geostrategic reasons for this intractability in THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan/Holt, $28). In one long original essay and a collection of his recent writing, Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, reinforces his central point that the only thing that has ever altered the basic contours of the conflict in any way is force — either actual violence or serious diplomatic arm-twisting with real stakes.
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Thrall stacks hard facts on top of one another, an approach that reads a bit too much like an NGO report. But his argument is smart and hard to dispute. From Israel’s perspective, he says, the political cost of dragging out hundreds of thousands of settlers and giving up the security advantage of a presence on the West Bank is simply too high. It will always outweigh any moral dividend from ending the occupation. Some American college students and leftists in Europe may tut-tut, but no one with any real power has ever truly confronted Israel. The only country capable of doing so is the United States, and it has not been willing to go there for a long time (since Jimmy Carter, Thrall argues, who forced the 1978 Camp David agreement). For American politicians too, the domestic cost of giving Israel a shove is too high. As for the Palestinians, the only real card they have to play is violence, but they have been ground down by Israel’s vastly superior military might. And the Palestinian Authority itself is made up of an elite class grown comfortable and dependent on Western money with no great incentive to upset a status quo that allows them their own slice of power.
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In short, Thrall writes, “it was, is, and will continue to be irrational for Israel to absorb the costs of an agreement when the price of the alternative is so comparatively low.” On the approach of the 50th anniversary of the occupation, he admits, it is “hard to defend the notion that it was unsustainable.” The seventh day will go on.
The Palestinians have suffered the greatest damage from this indefiniteness. A nation in limbo, they continue to clutch those dusty keys. This is as much a matter of magical thinking (of a pathological variety) as that of the settlers, who imagine that the Palestinian people will one day simply evaporate. But for the Palestinians prospects are worse. Not only do they see their hopes shrink every year, but children are born today who are fourth-generation refugees, locked into lives of perpetual waiting.
“Our mutiny is our remembering,” a character in Hala Alyan’s first novel, SALT HOUSES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), writes. Her book covers four generations of the Yacoub family, starting in 1963 and ending in the present, each chapter from a different perspective. If this sometimes makes the book feel scattered, more like a series of connected set pieces, the long duration has the advantage of illustrating the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter.
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The Yacoubs are not languishing in a refugee camp. When the story begins, four years before the Six Day War, they are living comfortably in the West Bank town of Nablus, having arrived there in 1948 from Jaffa, the ancient port city that was once a bustling center of Arab life. After the 1967 war they move to Kuwait, where they have upper-middle-class lives as doctors and professors in big houses tended by servants. When Saddam Hussein invades in 1990, the narrative moves with the family again, scattered now to Amman, Beirut, Paris and Boston. Trying to explain her Palestinian identity to Americans whose “memories were short,” Souad, a free spirit who comes of age in the 1990s, finds confusion. “People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian.”
At the end of this family saga, Souad’s daughter, Manar, goes to Israel and the Palestinian territories to explore her family’s past. Nablus leaves her cold, and rather than inspiring “kinship,” it’s “the biggest disappointment of all.” Only when she goes to Jaffa does she have a cathartic evening that ends with her writing the names of her family members on the wet sand, then watching them quickly erased. “A large wave washes over the sand, the water eating her words, her family come and gone in this sea that belongs to none of them.”
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Raja Shehadeh’s family was also originally from Jaffa. A longtime civil rights lawyer and the celebrated author of the extraordinary “Palestinian Walks,” he has written another deeply honest and intense memoir, WHERE THE LINE IS DRAWN: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine (New Press, $25.95). In a series of linked essays he focuses on his psychological and physical crossings into Israel, including visiting Jaffa as a boy just after the Six Day War, where he follows his parents into their old house, now occupied by a Jewish Romanian family. His father and mother, he writes, looked “wretched, with clenched, grim faces, as they were confronted with denuded walls and alienating surroundings.”
The major crossing that he chronicles is his friendship with a quirky, bearded Jungian analyst named Henry Abramovitch, a Canadian immigrant to Israel, whom Shehadeh first meets in 1977 when both men are in their late 20s. The entire 50-year history of the occupation is reflected in this incredible relationship with its many ups and downs. Shehadeh is unrelentingly candid in his assessment of his own complex emotions about Abramovitch — the love and connection, but also the anger and resentment.
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In the early years, when the nature of the occupation was still amorphous, the two would spend time together hiking throughout the newly boundaryless country. “Both short, one stocky, the other thin, we would stride down the hills in the Galilee or walk along the pebbly shore of the Dead Sea or through the Ramallah hills,” Shehadeh writes. “And talking, always talking.”
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Shehadeh admired Israeli society then as enlightened and believed that international law would sway it to correct injustices. But then comes the first intifada in the late 1980s, a Palestinian uprising in which he takes part nonviolently; the Oslo Accords that Shehadeh opposes for leaving Palestinians with nothing close to a state; and the increased violence, repression and settlement of the 1990s and 2000s. The relationship suffers. Shehadeh finds himself resenting Abramovitch, seeing him as complicit. He feels a slight even in the most innocuous comment. When Abramovitch writes from abroad that they should see each other when he returns “home,” Shehadeh feels provoked by this one word: “Israel as home. It gave me pause. Henry was not born in Israel. He had come of his own free will. Didn’t he need to make known his objection to what his adopted country was doing to the Palestinians? He insisted he would never join the army, but was this enough? Wasn’t he confirming by the mere act of moving here that Zionism was working and that the settlements were justified?”
Even though Shehadeh’s friendship with Abramovitch often feels like a “luxury,” the periods of estrangement never last more than a few years. And when they see each other their connection is instant. The talking and walking begin anew. Shehadeh finds ways to describe his hurt, and Abramovitch tries hard to be responsive and empathetic.
It’s a remarkable and hopeful thing, Raja and Henry. But one almost fears for the fate of such a sensitive man as Shehadeh living his life in the middle of a conflict that wrecks nuance and reasonableness every day. It seems almost unbearable to be him, aware of the rightness of his cause but also fully alive to the humanity of the other side. Real solutions can come only from someone like him, but as he writes, looking back on his long friendship with Abramovitch, “Yet he is not a leader in his community, nor am I in mine.”
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Instead, Shehadeh can only gaze out from his home in Ramallah at his beloved hills and despair. One day not that long ago he took a walk with Abramovitch in the green valley that overlooks the Arab neighborhood of Silwan, where Israeli settlers have notoriously been evicting Palestinians from their homes in order to increase their presence around an archaeological park said to be the ancient site of King David’s throne. Shehadeh makes an observation that could be a coda for this 50th and certainly not last year of the occupation, one meant for Israelis but that Palestinians could heed as well: “As I looked over the valley, I wondered whether it would have been possible for the Israeli people to create a presence and a history for themselves here without negating ours. All evidence indicated they couldn’t. But until they accept that the land must be shared and that both peoples have the right to self-determination, peace will remain elusive.”
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The post 50 Years On, Stories of the Six Day War and What Came After appeared first on Art of Conversation.
New Agency Alert: Root Literary
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 22 May 2017 | 11:29 am.
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Reminder: New literary agents are golden opportunities for new writers because each one is a literary agent who is likely building his or her client list. In this case, Holly Root and Taylor Haggerty are not new agents, but they are at a brand new agency started by Holly: Root Literary.
About Holly and Taylor: Holly Root is the founder of Root Literary, which opened in 2017. Prior to opening her agency, she worked at Waxman Leavell Literary, Trident Media Group, and William Morris. Based in Los Angeles, her clients include #1 New York Times bestsellers, international bestsellers, RITA winners and nominees, and numerous titles named to Best Books of the Year lists by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, NPR, the American Library Association, RT Book Reviews, Kirkus, and Amazon. She represents authors of commercial fiction for adults and kids, as well as select nonfiction. Visit publishersmarketplace.com/members/hroot/ for more information about her list.
Taylor Haggerty is a literary agent at Root Literary representing commercial fiction for kids and adults. She focuses mostly on young adult and middle grade fiction, romance, and women’s fiction. Prior to joining Root Literary when it opened in 2017, she worked at Waxman Leavell Literary and Gersh in Los Angeles. Visit publishersmarketplace.com/members/tay... for more information on her recent sales and releases.
They Are Seeking: Actively seeking commercial and upmarket fiction for adults, teens, and middle grade, along with select nonfiction. Does not represent screenplays, poetry, novellas, short stories, or picture books.
How to Submit: Send a query letter and the first 10 pages of your manuscript in the body of an email to submissions@rootliterary.com.
All material should be pasted in the body of the email. No attachments. Only electronic queries for completed, full-length works will be considered. Once you submit a query, you will receive an automated response confirming receipt and noting the current turnaround time.
Holly and Taylor work very closely, often passing projects back and forth and occasionally signing clients together, so they welcome queries addressed to the agency in general. If you are specifically querying one of them, include that agent’s name in the subject line of the email.
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