Thomas Carlyle wrote that “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” There may be some debate as to whether Timothy Leary’s life was well-spent. However, his biography by John Higgs is one of the most well-written and compelling books you’ll ever come across. “I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary” is an alternative history of the turbulent times that made modern America. Though it’s nonfiction, it reads much like James Ellroy’s hardboiled fictionalizations of the duplicitous reality behind the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. Once you read the book and read this interview with John Higgs, you’ll understand why he was so attracted to Leary, the scientist who saw LSD as the answer to many of society’s ills and who ended up being called the most dangerous man in America by the FBI. No, not for the drugs (though one can’t rule that out….) Rather because John, an experienced tv writer and producer, is a man who doesn’t accept the idea that things simply have to be the way they seem to others.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before you could make a living at it?

I don’t see living entirely off writing as a realistic aspiration in the Twenty-First Century, if I’m honest. It is still possible, of course, but the publishing model is in such a state of flux that only a wild and reckless gambler would wed their future financial security to it. The most significant factor, in my view, is that the amount of writing available to the reader has increased exponentially, and a sizable percentage of that is free. That alone changes everything, and threatens the writer with smaller, more fragmented audiences at best, or obscurity at worst. However, the cultural gatekeepers are also becoming increasingly irrelevant and you no longer need permission to go out and find readers. I’m delighted by all this. I love eBook readers, Print on Demand, profit-share deals with publishers and all the rest. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be a writer.
It’s not the best time to be in the publishing industry, of course, as it undergoes a slow-motion nervous breakdown. The industry operates at such a 19th Century pace that if you killed it, it wouldn’t notice for eighteen months and then it would take another year to actually get round to dying. But even so, everyone can see that major, unstoppable structural change is happening. I have a hunch that in a few years time the writer-agent-publisher relationship will be start to be replaced by a writer-manager model, with publishing, promotion and distribution farmed out on a project-by-project basis while the manager concentrates on building a long-term readership for the author.

I’m not sure that everybody is prepared to be realistic about the changes that are happening. The idea of ‘writing books’ as a profession rather than a vocation, interest or even hobby is a very romantic one and people cling to it. Writers get very angry at the idea that no-one wants them to write enough to actually give them money to do it. Painters and, to some extent, musicians and actors are generally more realistic about this than writers, and also more realistic about why they do what they do. There’s no reason why writers should be above working for a living - the likes of Philip Larkin or T.S. Elliot were prepared to do so. I think a big part of this is because the idea of using writing as an excuse to lock yourself away and withdraw from the world can be very seductive.
Of course, I like money. I like people giving me money, and I especially like getting money for something that I have written. But I think the writer/reader relationship is much healthier now, now that the playing field has been leveled, and if that means authors need to hold down a day job then that’s a fair price to pay.

What’s a typical working day?

There’s no such thing as a typical working day, just as there’s no such thing as a typical person or a typical philosophy. My writing life consists mainly of trying to find little two-hour windows where I can sneak off and furiously type away, without anyone giving me a hard time for doing so. You can get a surprising amount done using this method.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

I don’t know what compels me to write, but I don’t think it’s pain from childhood. My current best guess is that I write about things in order to lose interest in them. It is those things that don’t make any sense that I have a problem with. My brain is unable to digest them and they stick around, endlessly being picked over and prodded. Writing about them is the only way I know of flushing these buggers away, leaving me clear headed and hopefully a little saner.
Other writers have other reasons for writing but I don’t claim to understand what they are. Consider writer’s block, for example; being unable to write because you have nothing that you need to say. This sounds terrific to me. Imagine all the things you could do with the time! Yet other writers insist writer’s block is a terrible thing, so presumably I’m failing to understand something somewhere.

How many books did you write before you were published?

My first book was published, but then I’m a lucky beggar. That said, of course, most of the stuff I write is scrappy nonsense which is written entirely for myself and shoved away in a draw and forgotten about. Only occasionally does it amount to anything that would interest others enough to justify the process of editing, polishing and all the business stuff involved in getting it published. I’m pretty lazy and would be quite happy not to have to go through all that, but it is important to be read and to have the contents of your head peer reviewed from time to time.

Who is the greatest plotter currently writing?

I’d say Steven Moffat. TV writers tend to be better plotters than novelists or film writers – at least, the really good ones are. Novelists have too much freedom and screenwriters are too restricted by the amount of people involved and the compromises that are needed when so much money is at stake. TV writers are in a middle ground where they have to hold a general audience but can’t rely on big budget spectacles, so they have to get good at either plot or character, and preferably both.

Who is the greatest stlyist currently writing?

I recently read an unpublishable novella called ‘The Nabob of Bombasta’ by Brian Barritt, the English beatnik who you might remember from my Timothy Leary biography. I can only describe it as like literary wasabi. It is so wild and extreme that taking a little between regular literature wipes clean your mental pallette and allows you to approach your next piece with a fresh, unprejudiced mind. It is way beyond obscene and unacceptable, but it is so good-hearted, absurd and funny that anyone who claims to be offended by it is probably lying, and probably lying to themselves. Brian quite happily describes it as utterly unpublishable yet I hear it will be published next year, on Valentine’s Day. Look out for that one!

What’s the weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

You can publish anything these days, no matter how weird. The only constraint is whether there is an audience big enough, or interested enough, to justify your time. But as for weirdest idea, I sometimes hanker to re-publish the Bible in wildly unsuitable fonts, to see if it retains any credibility. Who wouldn’t want a copy of ‘The Old Testament in Comic Sans’?

What’s the best descriptive image in all of literature?

That’s an easy one. The best descriptive image in all of literature - better than “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” or “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” - is Douglas Adams’ “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

Christ no - where’s the fun in that?

On The Daily Beast’s Buzz Board, under the headline “Smart People Recommend”, Charles M. Sennott, head honcho of the innovative international news site Global Post, plugs THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET: “Matt Beynon Rees’s Palestinian detective novels reveal more truths about the ‘Holy Land,’ and I use that term loosely, than any straight journalism I’ve ever read [Sennott writes]. He is a masterful storyteller with the eye for detail of a great reporter, which he is as well. They are a collection of stories featuring the fictional detective, Omar Yussef, whose life is full of the complexities and contradictions and humanity that are the ground truth of life in Israel/Palestine. Check out The Samaritan’s Secret.”

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

I keep finding new reasons why I write my novels about the Palestinians. Usually these reasons have nothing to do with the Palestinians.

Here’s the one that may be the deepest, the one I’ve known about for a while, but have only recently been able to face up to: it’s because I’m scared of home.

Not so long ago, I read the 1992 novel “Fat Lad” by Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson. It’s a terrific book, examining Belfast’s changing political landscape through the story of a young man returning after a decade in England.

But I was struck by my reaction to the nostalgic tone of the main character’s memories. They filled me with terror and loathing.

What were these memories? Patterson recalls Choppers, which were long-handled bikes for kids. I never had one. The main character lays out his desk with a bottle of Quink, a brand name for ink which I used at school. I wasn’t happy at school. He listens to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a specific remix of the song Relax. Relax was number one in the charts when I was in high school; I chose to listen to music that no one else liked in high school, because I didn’t like anyone and imagined no one would like me.

I cite other examples of Patterson’s nostalgia, but I think perhaps you get the picture.

Patterson created a world coterminous with my own childhood in Wales. For Patterson, who went to England for graduate work and returned to his hometown, nostalgia is filled with warmth and friendship, even amid the violence of Belfast. Nostalgia doesn’t work if the period being viewed through rose-colored spectacles was experienced through isolation and self-loathing. I left home, and I’ve never been back.

I used to think: Never mind, everyone’s pretty miserable as a teenager. In a series of interviews with other writers on my blog, I started asking: “Do you have a pain from childhood that drives you to write?” Almost all of them responded that, No, they had pretty good childhoods. At first I refused to believe it. (I even told Miriam Froitzheim, the delightful German who gave me my copy of “Fat Lad,” that she couldn’t be a writer because she’d had a happy childhood and was a very well-balanced, happy adult. Well, I take it back, Miriam. It’s just me.)

I started to realize I had been pretty miserable in my twenties and early thirties, too. It wasn’t only my childhood. I left Britain and went to America. But I boozed myself into a different kind of isolation there, before I found my way to the Middle East.

During those early times I wrote stories of alienation – loners driven to acts of violence or victims of violence, troubled men stuck in unfulfilling relationships with doomed women. With the Palestinians, I came out of that darkness. It wasn’t just the exotic magic of their culture, their architecture, their cuisine. It was that their memories weren’t mine.

No Palestinian has ever said: Did you have a Chopper when you were a kid? Remember having those Quink-stains on your fingers at school? Did you grope your first girl dancing to Frankie at the school disco?

I’ve never had to say to a Palestinian: No, I was a miserable kid and I hate you for having been happy.

This freed me from the angst trap. Me, and my writing, both. I could enter the heads of characters who had been scarred – I understood what it was to have suffered. But they’d been scarred by war and occupation. That allowed me to see my own sufferings for what they were: bad, but things that could be overcome by personal development.

If you’re a Palestinian, you can go to therapy and meditate and listen to Mozart all you want. You’ll be better off, but you’ll still be living under occupation. In my case, life among a people with real problems helped me separate from the anger that clung to me all those years. Beside them, my life was a constant beach holiday. In Jerusalem I go for days on end without meeting anyone as relaxed as me. I’ve started to think perhaps this is the real me.

I’ve lived in the Middle East 13 years now. Last month it was 20 years since I left Britain (when I was 22.) Soon all the nostalgia novels will be about periods of British life of which I know nothing, because I was no longer living there. In the Middle East, I’ve been insulated, distant from British culture and not really immersed in Palestinian or Israeli pop culture. Free from all the babble, from the reminiscences of others’ lives which are supposed to be my shared experiences.

Free not to be a member of a broader society. Free to live inside my head. Which is good. Because that’s where novels are written.

Elliot will sign Exiles at:

Barrington Books
184 County Rd.
Saturday, Sept. 12 - 1 pm.

Symposium Books
240 Westminster St., Providence
Thursday, Sept. 24 – Noon

Books on the Square
471 Angell St., Providence
Friday, Oct. 16 – 7 p.m.

Palestinians and Israelis take an eternal debate into the classroom, leaving the UN stuck in the middle. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”

The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.

On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”

The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.

Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.

In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”

Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.

U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could “refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust.”

A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.

Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.

Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.

In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”

For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.

“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.

“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”

All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.

Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.

UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports the discovery of a portion of a Bible from 350 AD in the library of the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. The Codex Sinaiticus is written in Greek on animal skin and the newspaper calls it “a fragment of the world’s oldest bible.” Well, I hate to disappoint the good Fathers in the Sinai, not to mention the hacks at the Torygraph, but there’s a much, much older Bible on a hilltop just outside the Palestinian town of Nablus. The Abisha Scroll is used in the rites of the ancient sect of Samaritans. I featured it in my Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. How old is it? Read these few paragraphs from my novel to find out just astonishingly aged it is:

“Our greatest treasure was stolen, Abu Ramiz,” Ben-Tabia said. He lifted the tips of his fingers to his beard, as though he might pull it out in despair at the thought of such a calamity. “I felt terrible shame that it should be during my tenure as a priest here in our synagogue that the Abisha Scroll might be lost.”

“The Abisha?” Omar Yussef’s voice was low and reverent.

“What’s that?” Sami said.

“A famous Torah scroll,” Omar Yussef said. “The oldest book in the world, they say.”

The priest raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The five books of Moses, written on sheepskin three thousand, six hundred and forty-five years ago. It was written by Abisha, son of Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron who was the brother of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Every year, we bring it out of the safe only once, for our Passover ceremony on Mount Jerizim.”

“It must be very valuable,” Sami said.

“It’s beyond all value. Without this scroll, our Messiah can never return to us. Without this scroll, we cannot carry out the annual Passover sacrifice, and if we fail to sacrifice on Passover we cease to be Samaritans and the entire tradition of our religion comes to a terrible close.” The priest’s eyes were moist.

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

Authors are posturing, self-aggrandizing assholes. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after noting the trend for excessive “Acknowledgements” growing like mold over page on page of nonfiction books. These days they’re spreading their blight all over novels, too.

Here’s how I think it breaks down.

More than a few paragraphs of Acknowledgements in nonfiction: the author is trying to show how in-depth he went, how many experts he befriended, how much those experts and sources went out of their way to contribute to his work of genius. But it’s a sign of insecurity, a fear that the book itself won’t demonstrate any of those things.

More than a couple of lines in a novel (I don’t really approve even of that): a lonely soul who wants to reach out to his few remaining friends, or a journalist manqué who wants to prove that his work is grounded in reality by laying bare his research sources.

In both cases, it’s an exercise that’s of no use to a reader. In fact, it can turn readers against a writer. This reader, anyway.

The thanks to wife and kids which are the conclusion de rigeur of all Acknowledgments typically can be translated thus: “thank you for putting up with my utter and total absorption in my great work. I’m a genius and it took you lovely, lovely people to realize it and to make the sacrifices that give me the space to work.”

Take for example my university tutor. A delightful man. But in one of his many books, his acknowledgements ended with thanks to his wife for “keeping the black coffee coming” as he labored over his text late into the night. His wife was a major feminist literary theorist. I wondered what she thought of being cast as a good little woman. They’re since divorced, so perhaps I know now what she thought.

Among my foreign correspondent pals, there’s another element of weirdness to the Acknowledgments in their books.

First, you have to put in plenty of fellows with foreign names, so everyone will know that you got tight with the locals and didn’t get all your info from the US Embassy.

Second, you have to name all the other correspondents who hung out at parties with you. I’ve been named in the Acknowledgments of a number of books. In most cases I didn’t read the manuscript. Neither did I aid in the researching of the book. Maybe I shared a taxi with the fellow or cooked him dinner one night. I helped one of them get laid.

That gets me into their Acknowledgements pages?

Fiction Acknowledgements are even more troublesome. They started with writers thanking people who’d acted as sources. Let’s say a crime writer thanking a real-life detective who told him which donuts cops like best.

But now writers feel the need to thank their editors and their agents. Not me. My agent gets her percentage. That’s how she knows I love her. (Which I do.)

I met a good friend of mine at an Upper West Side diner in New York a couple of years ago. He’d just sent in the manuscript for his second book. It had taken him eight years to follow up on his prize-winning debut. He’d been awarded a number of fellowships in the meantime, but he was feeling pressured to add an Acknowledgements page with the names of the many people who’d contributed advice and support during that lengthy period.

“But in the end I wrote the damned book.” He stabbed at the bananas in his oatmeal with each syllable. “Just me.”

We settled on a brief, tasteful Acknowledgements in which he only thanked the universities and foundations that had given him shelter or money. Everyone else would have to make do with a thank-you note.

Why do I really dislike Acknowledgements? In fiction, in particular, I find there’s something juvenile about them. There’s a reason why rock bands fill their liner notes with chums they’d like to thank for letting them sleep on the floor, while fine artists don’t paste the names of their best buddies all over the gallery wall.

Then there’s the “luvviness” of it all. They start the music at the Oscars after 45 seconds of gushing from the winners. How many book Acknowledgements can you get through in that time these days?

Authors: If someone deserves your thanks so very much that you just can’t hold it in, just dedicate the book to them. Acknowledge no one.