Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "check"

My good pal Christopher G. Moore -- who shares with me a birthday today -- came up with a great idea for a new blog on international crime fiction. Chris, who writes a gritty, stylishly literate series of crime novels set in Bangkok, wanted to set up a blog where several authors of international crime would come together to write about their work and share ideas. The result is online as of today: International Crime Authors Reality Check. It features Chris, who lives in Bangkok; me, writing from Jerusalem; Colin Cotterill, a resident of Thailand whose delightfully acerbic detective character Dr. Siri is a Laotian coroner; and Barbara Nadel, author of the successful series of Istanbul novels about Inspector Ikmen.

The blog opens today with an amusing memoir from me called "Quick, woman. Go and get the Koran!"

I hope you'll follow the blog and see what this interesting collection of writers comes up with. (There'll also be some guest bloggers, so you never know who'll turn up.)

The new blog I've started with fellow crime writers Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill and Barbara Nadel has a new post from me today. It's about why I came to write so-called genre fiction. It starts like this:

Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism that makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis. Three years later, I hadn’t learned a thing — except that it was
fine to have a room you could take a girl to without having to sneak past your mother, Guinness isn’t good for you, and the deputy bank manager at Lloyd’s on Broad Street with the goatee and the bald head didn’t just /look/ like Ming the Merciless.

Then I read Dashiell Hammett. Before he published novels, Hammett was a Pinkerton detective. What he wrote was real. I could smell the places he’d been for the Pinkertons, feel the punches he’d taken, think the way he’d had to think to outwit true criminals. I’d been reading Marxist critical theorists on Daniel Defoe and French deconstructionists whose scribblings about the “stereographic plurality of significances” were intended to tell me that whatever I thought a book was about was, indeed, what it was about–except that it wasn’t, was it. Or was it?

Read the rest on International Crime Authors Reality Check.

The excellent UK crime fiction blog It's a Crime features me in a post about the growing number of Welsh crime writers. Tartan crime (Scottish writers like Ian Rankin) has long been big and It's a Crime notes the recent wave of Irish crime writers--I'm a fan of Gene Kerrigen, Bob Burke, Declan Burke and Stuart Neville. Now she says it's time for the Welsh, noting some other up-and-comers.

Let's hear it for the Taffia!

(Perhaps I should explain that to my American readers: the English slang for a Welsh person is "Taff," because the river through Cardiff the capital is called the Taff and few English ever venture further into Wales than that. Therefore a Welsh mafia would be a Taffia...Amaze your friends with that one.)

I've joined up with a few other crime writers to fill a single blog, International Crime Authors Reality Check, with original content. Last week Colin Cotterill wrote about his attempt to get a "vagina" into the title of one of his novels. This week, Colin has a hilarious post about his bemusing appearance at the Crime Writers Association's Daggers dinner -- at which Colin was awarded the "Dagger in the Library" for his excellent body of work. During the post, he notes that his name sounds like an adjective for the clitoris. (I was thinking he might have moved backwards from the vagina to another less specifically female spot, but there's always next week's blog for more bodily musings from the inimitable Colon Clitoris.) Tune in later this week for fellow bloggers Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and yours truly.

My latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.

But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.

There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.

The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.

So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.

Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.

On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.

But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.

It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?

If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.

Or is that just fiction, too?

Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.

Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.

Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.

I've been writing for a new blog founded by me and three other crime writers. One of them, the ever-inventive Christopher G. Moore, came up with the idea for a competition. He got the idea after I suggested in a blog post last week that my Palestinian detective character Omar Yussef ought to stand for Palestinian president. Here's what Chris wrote on the blog and how to enter:

A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog

How to win a free book.

The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.

I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.

The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.

The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.

Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

You can tell a great deal about a people from the conversations in language textbooks. After all, they aim to teach you the words people speak, but also the character of those teaching them and what it might be like to live in their society.

I first cottoned to this when I learned Spanish. My textbook included a basic conversation between a woman and her boyfriend. It went like this:

Maria: I love you! Do you love me?

Pablo: What is love, anyway?

Maria: I hate you!

See? Passionate, fiery Latins.

The same was true of Middle East languages. My Hebrew textbook featured highly critical know-it-alls (“Do you like this actress?” “I’m not crazy about her.”…. “How is the ice-cream here?” “It’s okay, but I know a better place for ice-cream.”) Thirteen years on, I have a more nuanced view of Israelis, but these conversations are still a good basic tool for understanding their deep sense of insecurity and need to assert themselves.

And the Palestinians? My first textbook of Levant Arabic featured conversations in which a fabled character named Jouha, known to be stupid, would end up being so stupid he came full circle and turned out to be cunning:

Neighbor: Jouha, can I borrow your donkey?

Jouha: I don’t have a donkey.

(Donkey brays inside Jouha’s house.)

Neighbor: You do have a donkey. I can hear it.

Jouha: What’s this? You don’t believe me, but you believe my donkey?

If you follow the peace process in the newspapers, surely there’ve been times when you’ve wondered if the Palestinians were being so absurd in their negotiations that they must have some secret, cunning plan up their sleeves? But they were just being dumb.

It turns out Jouha’s stupid AND mean. Which would make him a pretty good member of the Palestinian negotiating team. Not that the Israeli negotiators don’t have more than a touch of Jouha in them…

In my Omar Yussef novels, I try to capture the rhythms of Arabic speech. I also translate directly a number of very formal Arabic phrases, rather than simply putting them in a transliterated italics as is often done with snatches of foreign dialogue. I believe it gives the flavor of speech, and also a sense of how people relate to each other in a traditional society.

For example, there’s nothing poetic about “Good morning,” and what’d be the point of just italicizing “Sabah al-kheyr”? But try this: “Morning of joy.” To which you respond: “Morning of light.” Now that’s beautiful. And it’s what Palestinians say to each other every day.

When my characters receive a cup of coffee—the ritual that accompanies every meeting in the Arab world—they say “May Allah bless your hands.” The person giving them the coffee responds, “Blessings.”

There are, of course, Arabic phrases like this for so many situations and they often convey something beyond the basic meaning of the phrase. For example, in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, my latest novel, a character tells a priest “Long life to you.” Omar and all the other characters present understand immediately that this means someone else has died. (The unspoken part of the phrase is, “…but eventually you’ll die like the guy whose death I’m going to tell you about.”)

How does this affect the plot or pacing of my books? Well, in some thrillers, a character can jump through a door and start berating everyone in sight, even beating them up. In Palestine, he has to—absolutely has to—wish them blessings from Allah and inquire after their health first.

If he didn’t, he’d be showing himself to be a really, really bad guy. And that would be giving away the ending.

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

During my teens, my family lived in a house in Addington, at the very farthest reach of South London. At the bottom of the hill, the road made its final exit from London. Not quite wide enough for two cars, it traveled onto the North Downs of Kent. Sometimes I would ride my bike along the lane and up a hill overlooking the Downs and lie on the grass. I was the border between London and the rest of the world. When a car went by below, I’d send out a silent message to the driver: “You just passed the last man in London.”

Much of my time was spent looking in the opposite direction, wishing we lived in central London– where things happened, where the Underground came to your neighborhood, where there was life, damn it. Where I would feel at one with those around me. Not like “the last man,” the one at the edge of everything. Like any suburban teenager, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where I was. And central London was both elsewhere and not impossibly far away.

Most of my friends from that time and from university, too, ended up living and working right there in central London. Perhaps they knew it was the right place for them, or maybe they never cared to ask themselves that question. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, and I never lived there. I went down the lane that wasn’t wide enough for two cars, and I never came back. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d still have written. But I doubt I would have seen as much or learned what I have about myself.

The Palestinian sleuth of my crime novels Omar Yussef is, for me, a satisfying character because he represents the insights I’ve gathered in distant, eventful travels. But he’s also a measure of my ability to understand the outsiders of other cultures. Not the people journalists typically rush toward–the prime ministers and generals and imams with their false rhetoric and their stake in things staying as they are. Rather they’re the people who seem to climb the same marginal hill that I mounted as a youth and look out wondering why their world isn’t better than it is. That’s the essence of Omar Yussef (and of the best “exotic detective” fiction).

That lane near our house went up onto the Downs and undulated toward Westerham, a beautiful place built around a sloping village green. At the center of the green, there’s a statue of General Wolfe, a native of the village who led British troops to victory against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War of the mid-Eighteenth Century. The latest historical research on Wolfe suggests he was a megalomaniac glory-hunter who got exactly the kind of heroic immortality he wanted when he died at the moment of victory in Quebec.

I haven’t paid the price exacted of Wolfe. (But then, no one’s built any statues of me, either.) I’ve been stoned, abused, hectored, threatened, held at gunpoint. I’ve come out of it with the kind of knowledge granted only to one of those who never expected to be loved by everyone and yet was never driven by hate–namely, an observant outsider.

The sense of being an outsider I experienced as the Last Man in London was alienating back then. But in Bethlehem and Gaza it still gives me a sense for the outsiders—whether that’s the Palestinians without their state, or the minorities who live among them, like the Christian Palestinians featured in THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM or the few hundred Samaritans who live on a hill overlooking Nablus and are at the center of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. It helped me identify the people who could teach me the most about myself, to build a bond of trust with them and understand them. It also led me to write the Omar Yussef mysteries as a direct challenge to every accepted Western idea about the Palestinians.

And to every idea I ever had about me. But that’s for another blog…

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

In the West, our names tend to be pretty nailed down and unvaried. Unless you’re the child of some Hollywood goof who named you Moon Unit or Pilot Inspektor, you’re likely to share your name with many other people. Take me, for example. The family name Rees accounts for 15 percent of Welsh people – not to mention people descended from Welsh immigrants to the US, Canada, Australia. And it seems every other man of my generation is a Matthew.

Elsewhere in the world, people are more inventive. I had an Indian girlfriend in graduate school whose surname was Moorti. I noticed that her brother’s surname was Krishnamoorti. When I asked her to explain, she said that Indians could decide what their surname was themselves. That didn’t make much sense to me. So she just laughed and said I was “so Western.”

I’ve often confronted something similar in the Arab world, and it’s an element I’ve worked into my Palestinian crime novels – not just for cultural accuracy, but also as an important part of the plot. (But I won’t give away how!)

Arabs have a lengthy given name about which there’s relatively little choice. In the case of a Palestinian man, it’d be his name, followed by his father, grandfather, family and/or clan name. So my sleuth is Omar Yussef Subhi Sirhan.

But then there’s the tricky issue of the “kunya.” That’s when an Arab is known as “Abu-something”. Abu means “father of.” Traditionally a man is obliged to call his first son after his father. So even before his first son is born, if his father’s name was Muhammad, he’d be known as Abu Muhammad. (He’d actually be the son of Muhammad and only nominally the father of a future Muhammad…. But faith counts for everything, doesn’t it.)

My father’s name is David, so in Bethlehem I used to be known as “Abu Dahoud,” the Father of David. A few of my friends there were a little confused when I named my first son Cai. “Doesn’t your father object?” one of them asked.

My Omar Yussef is no traditionalist, so he decided to name his son Ramiz. Which wasn’t his father’s name. That means most people in the novels who want to show him respect and, at the same time, familiarity, call him Abu Ramiz.

It works the same way for women, though they’re tied to the name of their husband. Omar Yussef’s wife Maryam is called Umm Ramiz – the mother of Ramiz. No matter what her father was named.

So Abu refers to your father’s name, probably, and your son’s name, certainly.

Except when it doesn’t.

Sometimes the kunya is political nom de guerre. Yasser Arafat, who had no sons, called himself Abu Ammar, after one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. It had a classical ring and also tied him to the early Muslim holy warriors.

A pal of mine who’s a big shot in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls himself Abu Leilah – Father of the Night. I once asked him if he had a daughter Leilah, and why he wasn’t named after his father even if he had no sons. “No,” he smiled, “I don’t have a daughter with that name. I just thought Father of the Night was an exciting name. Mysterious, you know.”

Some time later I was in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, investigating an uprising there by Islamic fighters who had returned from Afghanistan to battle the Lebanese army. The rising had been led by another Abu Leilah. He’d been killed by the army. I asked his family if he’d also thought Father of the Night was an exciting name.

“No,” one of them said, looking at me as though I had suggested the dead man was less than purely heroic. “His eldest girl is called Leilah.”

You can’t win, see.

Of course, in Arab society most men don’t want to carry a girl’s name and I never quite figured out why the Tripoli rebel did it. After all, for Palestinians, “Abu al-Banat” (Father of the Girls) is an insult aimed at men who haven’t been able to father any sons.

This is all the kind of thing that caused trouble with the US “no-fly” lists after 9/11. Perfectly innocent Abu Muhammads and Abu Ahmads, the Tom Smiths and Bob Joneses of the Muslim world, were suddenly
indistinguishable from people considered a danger to the nation. Including the real Omar Yussef, a friend of mine from Bethlehem.

My contribution to all this naming confusion is that in the UK I’m published as Matt Rees, while in the US I use my middle name and am therefore Matt Beynon Rees.

Why? Because I decide who I am.

Except when I’m in Bethlehem. There I’m “Abu Cai.”

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

The Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family is a beautiful sandstone building on the corner where the Via Dolorosa turns briefly onto the main alley of the Muslim Quarter’s souq. Buzz at the main gate, climb up two flights of enclosed steps, and you’re in a palm-shaded garden fronting a broad, four-story façade. Nearly 150 years old, it was built for Catholic pilgrims and for much of the second half of the last century was an insanitary hospital. Now returned to its original Austrian owners, it’s a hotel for church groups visiting the historic sites of Jerusalem.

From its roof, there’s a panoramic view of the Old City. It’s for this that I labored up the front steps with my friend, videographer David Blumenfeld, and his numerous camera bags, lights and reflector shields, last month. We’d already filmed a promo video for my next novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN in my favorite seedy Old City café, where I shone with sweat, swallowed cardamom-flavored coffee and sucked on a foul nargila, until I looked sufficiently like an inveterate marijuana-user coming down. Now it was time for a second video.

I approached the front desk of the Hospice in the large marble entrance hall. A blonde man in his twenties greeted me: “Grüss Gott.” I’m a lover of things Austrian, so I had a good feeling already.

“Grüss Gott. We’re making a short video for my website. Can we film on the roof?”

“It’s not allowed, unless you have permission.” Not unfriendly. Just stating the rules.

But I’ve lived in the Middle East long enough to know that there ARE no rules. “Don’t worry. It’s really nothing. It’s just for my website. To tell people about my book.”

“What is the book?”

The truth: It’s about a Palestinian teacher who goes to visit his son in New York and discovers a headless body in his son’s bed. No, I’d better not tell him that. It doesn’t sound like something he’d want a pilgrim hostel associated with. How about this? “It’s about Palestinians and how they live their lives.”

A bit more of this and the Austrian was thinking hard. “Ok, but just for ten minutes.”

“Of course, thank you. That’s very kind of you. Ten minutes, of course.” In the Middle East, one of the things that really gets me down is that putting one over on someone else isn’t seen as a bad thing to do. If you can get away with it, then good for you. Naturally when I get the opportunity to do this, I have a feeling of payback for all the times I’ve been deliberately misled by the locals. With that warm sensation, I ascended in the Hospice’s rickety elevator.

Up on the roof, the afternoon sunshine was too bright to film. It was so harsh I’d have been squinting into the camera like Clint Eastwood. So David and I descended to the Hospice’s garden café. For a mere 100 shekels ($30) we had a slice each of strudel (an uncommon dish in Jerusalem, where even Israelis who arrived as immigrants from Austria tend to eat Middle Eastern style), some soda and coffee.

Suitably refreshed we returned to the roof and soldiered on, despite the insanely bright sunshine.

Despite the occasional loud Israeli on a cellphone and the Korean tourists who stopped taking photos of the Dome of the Rock so they could photograph me, I managed to read most of the first chapter of THE FOURTH ASSASSIN without a pause.

Then, just before I’d finished, from the corner of my eye I spy the blonde fellow from reception striding toward me.

“Sir, you have to stop now. This has been more than 10 minutes,” he said.

“We’ve only been working a few minutes. We were down in the café most of the time. We had strudel.”

He twisted his face as though his finger had just gone through the toilet paper. “And I should believe you?”

“Yes, why would I lie? Go and ask the people in the coffee shop.”

I feel for this Austrian. After all, Israelis and Palestinians are able to lie with absolutely no compunction. It’s one of the first things you learn when you live here a while. I could see that this poor fellow had been at the front desk of the Hospice for a sufficient time to train him to recognize a lie, but not long enough to give him the graceful Arab ability to maneuver around someone else’s untruths without humiliating them. This fellow had only two options: let me get away with it, or kick me out.

“So five more minutes and then you’re out,” he said.

Here’s where my own cultural training came in. The over-emotional Welshman in me wanted to say: Listen, butty, I paid 100 shekels for some stiff strudel in your café, so you can bloody well calm down. In any case what do you think I’m filming up here? It’s just my face, some domed buildings in the background, and a lot of sunshine. What’re you protecting? It’s not a military installation. I’m buggered if I’m going to be hurried by you.

But I also know that the Middle Eastern way is to move from bald-faced lieing to apparent humility and submission, smug in the knowledge that you’ve got what you want. So I let him think he was having his way.

Twenty minutes later, when David and I passed the reception desk on our way out, I stopped to wave my thanks to the Austrian. Never leave anyone with a nasty taste in their mouth. Arabs taught me that. The kisses on the cheeks they bestow after a dispute really do defuse all the tension.

He ignored me. A Palestinian would never have done that.

Here’s the video David and I made.

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

Since you’re reading this, you don’t care who I am. So I can be anyone I like. At least, that’s what somebody wrote here recently.

I posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago about Dashiell Hammett. I noted that, while a university literature student, I grew tired of all the post- structuralist and deconstructionist and Marxist esoterica I was studying. I picked up a copy of Hammett’s classic “The Maltese Falcon” and found myself transported into a gritty world, a world inhabited by real criminals, it seemed to me.

At the time, I was a real criminal. Only in the sense that I had shoplifted repeatedly (I stole books, including one by my university tutor) and indulged in proscribed intoxicants (including once with my university tutor). Not the kind of criminal Hammett revealed to me in his pages. Just a criminal, but not a bad guy.

In my recent post, I posited the idea that part of what made Hammett so good at writing about criminals was his career as a Pinkertons agent. For those not familiar with US law enforcement history, the Pinkertons were a private security agency whose men worked as detectives, but also did anti-union rough stuff, too.

This idea caught the attention of a fellow blogger who wrote that I was “romanticizing” Hammett. “Writers can toot their horn all they want,” he commented on this blog, “but an author’s bio is the least important — and least read –part of a novel for a reason.”

I think the “reason” may have less to do with readers’ lack of interest in an author’s bio than it has to do with the lack of information in the author’s bio. On a copy of a recent novel by Philip Roth, I learned in his bio that he exists only as a recipient of literary prizes (of which many were listed). He wasn’t born. He may not even write his books. He just collects prizes for them.

Nonetheless, if writers bios aren’t looked at (and are anyway not important), I plan to start including all the information about me which I’ve previously edited out. (In the past, as my novels are about the Middle East, I’ve included mainly just the facts that I was – unlike Philip Roth – born, and that subsequently I went to live and work in the Middle East, where much of what I’ve seen and heard makes its way into my books.)

Here’s my bogus new bio, which qualifies me to write about the Middle East, just as much as my previously available bio, according to some people (Note that only one fact listed below is correct. A free copy of my latest novel to the first person to identify which fact that is…):

Matt Beynon Rees was born in the George Michael Public Restroom on Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles. He was a milk monitor at kindergarten in Cardiff, Wales, until then-Education Minister Margaret Thatcher cut free milk from the schools budget, thus making five-year-old Rees the first of her four million unemployed. He graduated with a degree in finance from the Buddhist seminary at Mt. Baldie, where he minored in Leonard Cohen studies. He flew Tornado jets in the first Gulf War and was shot down over Iraq, trekking 400 miles across the desert to safety in Kuwait with nothing to drink but the urine of passing Arabs. He won Winter Olympic Bronze in the Darts Biathlon (cross country skiing with stops during which contestants must hit treble twenty and drink a lager). He was a ground-breaking radio ventriloquist on the BBC light entertainment program “Gottle of Geer,” until a producer saw his lips move and fired him. His first work of nonfiction “Get the Wife You Don’t Deserve” was an Esquire Book of the Year. He has been married six times, always to Mexican women below five feet in height (in homage to John Wayne, who did the same). He holds honorary degrees from the Mississippi State University School of Floral Management and from the Bob Jones University Department of Satanic Sociology. He lives in his house.