Hotel Zero

Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore

A USA Today reporter called me a couple years ago to ask, “Which of the 300 books published about the Iraq war”—and this was 2005, just two years into the war—“are going to last like Jarhead and Baghdad Express seem destined to do?” Setting aside the assumption that either my book or Tony’s was going to “last,” the question struck me as ridiculous: “No one knows,” would have been the only proper answer to both her assumption and her question. But you know—you have to play the game, right? I mentioned Generation Kill as a likely candidate, but then said there were two big problems inherent in any book coming out so quickly after its author had served in a war (or a journalist had covered it): “Did they know how to write a novel or memoir?” and “Could they get their head around it—all the way around: morally, aesthetically, and so on?”

I looked back at how it had taken Hemingway and Remarque ten years or so to digest World War One and how, with the exception of Mailer—who had won the Story competition while still at Harvard prior to his WWII enlistment, most of what we now consider the classic accounts—especially in memoir—had taken decades: With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge came out in 1981; Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang in 1979; Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier—out in 1967—was almost precocious by comparison.

There are always exceptions, it’s true, but in general: the longer you wait, with war, the more likely you are to have developed your chops as a writer and cleared your head—and prepared your heart—for the journeys you have to take through your experiences & the even more difficult one of preparing it in such a way that others might take that same journey.

Now, along comes Matthew Eck with The Farther Shore & we’re lucky he took his time: he’s delivered a small masterpiece.

Joe Sacco at The Walker

Joe Sacco, author of the amazing Palestine (out in a new special edition) and Safe Area Gorazde, is giving a talk at The Walker Art Center tomorrow night. The event is co-hosted by Rain Taxi and starts at 7:00 PM. I'll be going & the event is also being webcast live.

I'll give a report here after the event. In the meantime, there's a good interview with Sacco at the Walker website:

There is a moment in Safe Area Gorazde where Riki continues to sing after he eats breakfast with you and Edin; he’s leaving to join the battle lines. You wrote, “at that moment I came as close as I ever had to bursting into tears in Bosnia”. What was it about that moment that got to you, when you have heard so many brutal stories about the war?

I think the answer to that question should lie in the pages you mentioned and not in any exposition I can make now. Like many other writers or artists, I've fallen into the bad habit of explaining myself in interviews and at talks. I am beginning to understand that the work needs to speak for itself, and that the reader's imagination has to be allowed to put things together. I realize that will be an unsatisfactory answer for people who are unfamiliar with the work, but...

Marlboro Marine

You may remember this iconic photo of a Marine catching a butt during the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah—but its aftermath is another story altogether. L.A. Times photographer Luis Sinco stayed in touch with James Blake Miller after the war. His story of their relationship—and his attempts to reach out to a Marine suffering suicidally severe PTSD—is chronicled in a moving series of print and multimedia essays in the L.A. Times. I think this is the most powerful thing I've seen—in any medium—about the war in Iraq.

Bonus Army and the G.I. Bill

Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel wrote an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday calling for a new, expanded G.I. Bill as comprehensive as that passed at the end of World War Two (and which lasted until the end of Vietnam).

Here's 2:38 on how we got the first one:

IDP Voices

There are some 24.5 million internally displaced persons worldwide. Now, thanks to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, a small number of them have been given a voice, thanks to the IDP Voices project. Their first publication is Book of Life Stories: Let It Be Known, chronicling the experience of 19 internally displaced Columbians. Each individual story is also posted to the IDP Voices site, presented in both English and Spanish, as both audio and text—and all accompanied by maps showing the paths of each narrator's displacement. It's a bold and beautiful project. You might start with the narratives of Blanca, a 64 year-old former government official, or Juan, a 20 year-old peasant.

Polar Disorder

I don't care to enumerate the magazines and journals we get at our house--but it's probably either too many or not half enough. Either way, shit gets buried and disappears--sometimes forever. But occasionally a pal will write or call on a sort of cultural mudslide rescue mission and ask, "You see _____ yet?!" Got such a call today about Nicholas Johnson's interview with "Nero," comparing Nero's experience contracting in Antarctica with his more-recent stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the November Harper's. Luckily, the issue was resting right there on the kitchen table, just beneath the fourteen new credit card offers and alumni letters and cable TV pitches we get every day.

The version in Harper's is edited down some, but whether you get Harper's or not, go check out the longer interview at Nicholas Johnson's Big Dead Place: it's unbelievably funny and tight and all the things killer writing should be.

Twin Cities Book Festival

OK, have to check out for the week: a few notes until I return...

1) Am introducing Chris Abani at the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday. Chris is an amazing human being, a terrific writer, and a fantastic speaker. If you get a chance, come out to MCTC this weekend. If you can't make it? Check out Chris's stunning TED lecture from this summer. Then go read his books.

2) Spoon concert at First Ave. tomorrow night. Will be great. Hope to see some of you there.

3) Wanted to share this great line from one of my editors (more about this soon): "Make clarity your God; the riff a minor deity." Of course, my early mentor Bill Kittredge put it somewhat more colorfully: "Keep the bullshit to less than 10% of anything you write."

Hitchens in Hell

They are going to have to cut him into many slimy pieces to spread him around the Malbolge, but extensive preparations are no doubt underway for Christopher Hitchens in the Eighth Circle of Hell. His hysterical support of the war in Iraq has been bad, but for this self-serving, sanctimonious piece of shit in the November Vanity Fair alone he's earned his wretched place.

The piece reads, on its surface, as a mea culpa of sorts on Hitchens' behalf following the death of a young man who reversed his anti-war stance after reading Hitch's many op-eds about the need to fight, joined the Army as a second-lieutenant, and then died in Iraq on January 15th, 2007. His name was Mark Daily. Hitchens learned about Daily's death after a friend forwarded Teresa Watanabe's moving L.A. Times piece on Daily, written on February 16, 2007. There is very little factual difference between Watanabe's piece and Hitchens' piece concerning the life and death of Mark Daily--but a moral gulf that may just be large enough to fit Hitchens' enormous ego lies between them.

Makiya's Regrets.

I see from this weekend's NYT Magazine that Kanan Makiya now has regrets. One of the weaknesses of George Packer's Assassin's Gate was when, toward the end, he just couldn't bring himself to say: "My pal, Kanan Makiya--the man who convinced me more than anyone else that we should go to Iraq--was just flat-out wrong." Dexter Filkins seems to have a much milder case of the same disease in his profile, one symptom of which is this little nonsense, with which he ends (he's quoting Makiya) the first section:

“You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong.”

Some Not-So-Final Thoughts on Burns' The War

The War as Memory and as Theater

Because I am who I am, I had certain expectations of The War--it met some of them. War is not a vehicle of hope, it is not enobling, it is full of disaster and death and compromises of the soul. Ken Burns more-or-less gets this across, sometimes powerfully. But other times the film dithered in a kind of nostalgia that drove me nuts. It happened, however, that my expectations in this regard were tempered when I met a woman who had grown up in Worthington, MN--right next door to Luverne--when I was half-way through the series. She had been old enough during World War Two to remember her afternoons carting scrap metal around in her Radio Flyer, her mother collecting maps on the kitchen wall, the conversations her father--the football coach at Worthington--had with his best friend, who happened to be the football coach at Luverne. "I remember paying twelve cents every Saturday to go see the movies, the thrill of seeing the newsreels of the war," she said. "To see it come back now, after all these years, was very powerful." I nodded and she continued, "I guess we didn't really know how horrible the war really was--they showed a very little bit of the shocking stuff in the newsreels. I was only a little girl, but even after that, after the war and after everyone came home, I never really knew. We didn't talk about it."