the rock-throwing instinct

The quintessential image of Palestinian resistance is a kid facing down an Israeli tank with nothing but a rock in his hand.

This is, of course, a symbolic act. No one thinks a rock is going to damage a tank. But rock-throwing, usually by children, has become a ritualized form of resistance in the Occupied Territories.

In class, I tried to explain why parents might allow, or even encourage, their children to throw rocks at soldiers who can, and often do, respond with lethal force. "Don't they realize they can get shot?" someone asked.

The answer is yes, of course. But the fact is that you can get shot doing almost anything in the Occupied Territories: crossing a checkpoint, going to school or work, participating in a nonviolent protest, riding in an ambulance, even attending a funeral. And if you spent your life dealing with the fact that you could get shot while just minding your own business, well, you might feel like you don't have that much to lose from throwing a few rocks.

When fighting a militarily superior force, part of what you are really fighting is your own fear. It takes guts to stand up against someone who seems much stronger than you. Occupiers everywhere are aware that they rule not just by violence, but by terror. Fear is a very effective means of social control, often more efficient than brute force. You don't have to kill or maim if you can terrify a population into submission.

It seems to me that rock-throwing is not really about the rock, or the tank (or the soldier, APC, Humvee, checkpoint, bulldozer, whatever). It's about learning to control fear.

Note that learning to control fear is not the same as not having fear. The Israeli military machine is fucking scary. Shit, anyone who's been to a big demonstration knows that American riot cops can be pretty scary, even when you're reasonably certain they won't shoot at you with live ammunition. But learning not to be intimidated by superior force is an essential part of resistance.

In the Occupied Territories, it's also a basic life skill. Just going about your daily business involves having to interact with armed, hostile soldiers. In order not to be completely paralyzed, you need to be capable of managing your own fear. This is what children are learning when they go out to throw rocks.

Of course, the fact that fear management is a skill Palestinian kids need to develop at ten or twelve is pretty grim when you stop and think about it. But I think there's more to rock-throwing than that. When kids throw rocks, they're not just learning survival skills; they're learning resistance.

There is something about rock-throwing that seems to encapsulate a very deep-seated human impulse. It's an expression of the reflexive desire not to be ground down, to resist oppression on principle, to fight back even when it seems nothing can be gained. It's a way of being able to stand up to power and say, "No, fuck you, I won't submit. I won't grovel just because you're stronger, and if the only thing that gets me is my dignity, then so be it."

As always, there is a price to be paid for resistance. Rock-throwing is, to this day, an arrestable offense in the Occupied Territories. (And, let's be clear, if you're Palestinian, arrest means torture.) During the First Intifada in the late '80s, it was common practice for Israeli soldiers to break the fingers of children caught throwing rocks. And of course, soldiers frequently respond to rocks with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. For a symbolic act of resistance, the price is high.

But the price of doing anything in the Occupied Territories is high. And everyone who ever won anything started out by fighting back "on principle," at a time when actual victory seemed impossible. It's the rock-throwing instinct that compelled four Black college students to sit down at a Woolworth's lunch counter, that drove drag queens to kick the NYPD out of the Stonewall Inn, and that sent hundreds of thousands of young Iranians into the streets earlier this summer.

Is this a good thing to teach your children--to stand up and fight back, to claim your dignity even when people are trying to crush you? Well, I wouldn't tell you how to raise your kids, but I certainly think so.

an image of resistance

I recently discovered this picture on a Facebook friend's profile, and instantly fell in love with it, because it seems to me to encapsulate so many things about the Palestinian struggle, and about asymmetric warfare in general. On one side, you have overwhelming military force; on the other, nothing but solidarity and defiance: a face-off between two kinds of power, staged at that ubiquitous symbol of occupation, the checkpoint.

The photograph is by Ryuichi Hirokawa, a Japanese photojournalist who has been photographing war zones for over four decades, and was one of the first journalists to get into Sabra and Shatila after the massacre whose anniversary was commemorated this week. Hirokawa has been interested in Palestine ever since 1967, when he went to work on a kibbutz in Israel as a young student, only to discover that it had been built on the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian village.

Although the black and white printing gives this photo a timeless quality, it was in fact taken in 2002, at Al Ram checkpoint in the West Bank. Hirokawa writes about the circumstances under which it was taken here, in yet another awesome feature I've discovered on The Guardian's website.

so that is a sonic boom.

Sometimes you don't quite understand things until you experience them for yourself, and thus internalize them. Here is a small example.

I was in the middle of writing a post about 9/11 when what sounded like some kind of explosion rattled all the doors and windows of my apartment building, which is about as soundproof as a cardboard box. It sounded like something HUGE being dropped on the roof, and perhaps simultaneously in the first floor hallway below me. I knew it was too abrupt to be an earthquake. The interwebs quickly informed me it was a sonic boom from the space shuttle Discovery reentering Earth's atmosphere on its way to land at Edwards AFB.

Of course all my SoCal friends were soon Facebooking and Twittering about it. Most people's first thought was "earthquake." But at least one friend, who is from Lebanon, had a different first thought: "Israelis."

I immediately thought of the notes my Gaza blogrades had written about the weeks after the war, when Israeli planes would fly over Gaza, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over populated areas. This happened in Lebanon after the 2006 war as well. I've heard this practice called "simulated bombing" or "phantom air raids." It's not bombing, but it sounds like it. (And, you might add, feels like it, because the blast wave is forceful enough to be felt in your chest cavity, like being close to fireworks or the amp at a rock concert.)

Of course the only imaginable purpose of this practice is to terrorize people. It's intentional triggering of whatever fresh post-traumatic stress these very same planes have recently created. Imagine if you'd very recently spent weeks living in terror of those sounds: the incoming roar of a low-flying plane, the deep boom of explosions that are felt as much as heard. To you those become the sounds of death, of grief, of helpless, mortal fear. Yeah, a sonic boom would have scared the crap out of me in such a situation.

Like so many things the IOF does, which seem to have no possible rationale other than deliberate torture, I have to wonder: Who thinks up this shit?

knowledge shock

So, classes have started, which means I am back to discussing Gaza Sunrise, the feature I wrote last semester, with a large number of people who may know and believe very many different things about Palestine. And it's weird. It was weird last semester, but after having actually been to Palestine, it's now extra weird.

I've been so immersed in this world for so long that I sometimes forget that many Americans (usually through no fault of their own) do not know a single accurate thing about Palestine. They may not even know that Israel was founded by expelling three-quarters of a million people to create a European-Jewish majority state in an Arab-Muslim majority land. I think this is a pretty important piece of information for understanding the current situation. In fact, one might say it is actually the WHOLE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM. And yet it's history that many--perhaps even most--Americans don't know, and that Israel is consciously trying to suppress.

Add to this a whole slew of other misinformation or lack of information about history and current events, consciously or unconsciously held prejudices against Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, confusion about who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed or just lack of admission that there is an oppressor and oppressed in the situation, incorrect or zero information about the various political actors and forces involved, and...well, you can see where I'm headed with this.

It leads to conversational difficulties. I'll admit I haven't quite got a good strategy worked out for dealing with this problem yet. It's rather like trying to have a conversation about how to best sautee a fish when your conversation partner thinks the fish is an orange.

The result is that I'm experiencing a repeat of the same feeling I had immediately after leaving Gaza. It wasn't culture shock, exactly (although seeing a European tourist with her ass literally hanging out of her short-shorts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was culture shock.) I'll call it knowledge shock.

I am trying to do as much patient explaining as humanly possible, since I do not think it's most people's fault that they are uninformed or misinformed, and after all that is a large part of why I went to Gaza--to be able to patiently explain and show and convince with greater authority because I can say "I have seen it." But it's not as easy as you might think.

The problem is that the patient explaining gets all complicated by the fact that I've developed a staggering, really almost frighteningly powerful, degree of emotional identification with the Palestinians and such an intrinsic, reflexive, visceral hatred of Zionism and the Israeli state that it's very hard not to get angry and want to scream "DON'T YOU SEE? DON'T YOU SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING?!" in the process of the patient explaining. Because whenever I start talking, all the atrocities and cruelties and injustices start rushing to the surface, and there are so, so many of them, and I feel them all so intensely, that it gets overwhelming and I become inarticulate.

I realize this is something I'll have to get over, because I don't think I'll stop talking about Palestine any time soon. I must figure out ways to bridge the knowledge chasm, because my knowledge is useless if it stays in my head.

I also realize that all this is bound up with the other reason I went to Gaza, the reason I couldn't quite articulate, which was to be somewhere where I did not feel like this. I struggled for months after returning from Gaza to explain this to people who didn't instinctively get it, to explain why being in Gaza brought with it such an enormous sense of relief, why Gaza felt more like home than possibly any place I've ever been in my life. Then I read Alice Walker's piece for Electronic Intifada, which was titled, perfectly, "The best place one could be on Earth." It opens with these words:

Coming "home" to Gaza

Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the "rez." To the "colored section." In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase....

As I read her article, I started crying, not just because it was beautifully written and moving, but because she was saying everything I had been trying to say and been unable to. Well, I guess that's why she has a Pulitzer Prize and I do not.

I also realize one other thing, which is that this feeling of extreme dissociation, of knowledge shock, must be exactly what Palestinians living in diaspora feel every day of their lives. Which makes me entirely understand why people might want to stick to their own communities, or not be engaged in politics, or go back and live in their homelands, because in certain ways it's just easier. I think I would explode with frustration if I had to live every day like this.

fiyaaa!

If you have checked the news in the past week or so you probably know that a large portion of Los Angeles County is on fire.

The fires are about 20 miles away from where I live, and, as far as I know, not expected to threaten urban Los Angeles. But they did produce this weird cloud with a pure-white broccoli top directly over downtown Los Angeles this afternoon, which I have learned is called a pyrocumulus cloud. Wikipedia tells me that it is produced by the same atmospheric mechanism as a mushroom cloud. Disasters are so fascinating from a safe distance!

On Vimeo, a filmmaker named Eric Spiegelman has created two time-lapse videos of the fires. They are kind of weirdly beautiful if you forget, you know, that that shit can kill you and destroy everything you own and such.

Yet another reason I'm never living in the Los Angeles County exurbs!

Time Lapse Test: The Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

the revenge of plot

I recently discovered that tons of writerly people are on Twitter. One of the more interesting to "follow" has been Lev Grossman, the senior book critic for Time magazine and a self-described huge fantasy nerd.

I'm sure I read his (spoiler-free) review of Deathly Hallows when it came out, but I recently rediscovered it and took note of it because he pretty much nailed, in a single sentence, everything I think is so awesome and profound and worthy-of-contemplation-by-adults about Rowling's universe: "The essential problem in Rowling's books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles and gritted teeth, and then sweep up the rubble afterwards." Willingness to engage with a book about wizards on an existential level? You've got my attention.

In any case, Lev recently wrote a great piece for, of all things, the Wall Street Journal's Life & Style section, calling for the return of plot to the literary novel, and, in a broader sense, for the breaking down of distinctions between "literary" and "popular" or "genre" fiction. It caught my attention because it was making, not an identical, but a sort of parallel argument to this article by Independent journalist Johann Hari, in which he called on young novelists to stop "ever more exquisitely describing their own navels" and go out and write about real shit happening in the real world. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Hari also recently wrote these excellent pieces.) When I read Hari's commentary, I immediately thought "That's me! That's what I'm trying to do!"

Lev makes an interesting point about why he thinks so many adults have been "cheating on" literary fiction with young-adult novels, the territory of the "unblushing embrace of storytelling," which offer the return of things like "suspense and humor and pacing"--and, I would add, of stakes.

What is it that makes YA books so appealing? Without having done an extensive literature review of the contemporary YA market, I will venture a completely unscientific guess. YA books that are going to make it big--which means they will have to successfully compete for tweens' and teenagers' attention with a myriad of distractions, not the least of which are movies and video games--are more likely to be what we'd call in the film industry "high concept." That is, they tell a high-stakes story set in a unique, original and memorable world. I would suspect that they frequently involve a life-or-death struggle of some sort--because, let's face it, when you're a teenager everything seems like a life-or-death struggle, so that's just a basic requirement to hold the reader's attention. You may notice that these are also frequently the attributes of fantasy tales; I don't think it's a coincidence that there is a large overlap in genres.

Of course, any of my professors would quickly tell you that these are also the elements of a good movie. We want to see characters fighting for something, something they desperately need or want and are having trouble getting, something that matters to us and them. Because conflict is not seen as an optional element in drama, but the bedrock on which everything else is built, paying attention to things like tension and suspense and pacing and mystery, to characters' actions and objectives, is a basic structural necessity and not a stylistic choice. I would wager that if you examined the top-selling YA novels, you'd find they were constructed a lot more like movies than most "respectable" literary fiction, and I'd argue that that is generally a good thing.

If you think about it, it should not really be that surprising that stories with people who do things and want things and fight for things that matter, and that take us to a world we don't already know, are damn compelling. And just because these elements tend more frequently to be found in "popular" literature doesn't mean they can't also be a part of great literature...or that popular literature itself can't be great literature--whoa!

So, in conclusion: pop culture win. Read wizard books. And I'm looking forward to being part of the future of fiction.

P.S. Funny Lev Grossman should mention Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, a 374-page post-apocalyptic thriller in which teenagers are forced to fight to the death on live TV in something like a macabre cross between Survivor and Battle Royale. It seems I am coming a bit late to the phenomenon (a sequel is due out this week), but I recently read the first chapter of The Hunger Games online on Scholastic's website. I was immediately sucked in by the swift and simple prose and the book's hard-bitten, not-remotely-girly teenage heroine. Something about the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which she described her brutal world struck a chord of authenticity with me, and by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. I ordered the book, and when it arrived I immediately read the second chapter, at which point I had to slam the book shut and hide it in the closet, because I knew if I read any more I was just going to have to read the whole damn thing. It's currently burning a hole through the closet door, along with Lev Grossman's own book, The Magicians, which this article pretty much single-handedly convinced me to buy.

P.P.S. Lev also recently wrote this, which really has nothing to do with anything, but which I laughed at for a slightly embarrassingly long time.

in which i hate on los angeles some more

I love planning. It's a great way to think about the future without having to actually do anything to get there. You know what else I love? School supplies. So you can imagine that the purchase of a new monthly planner is one of the highlights of back-to-school time, which is already one of my favorite times of year because, if you couldn't tell, I am a nerd.

After a slightly ludicrous amount of time spent perusing the offerings at the USC bookstore, I settled on a planner that started in August 2009 and ran all the way to December 2010--partially because it was thin and would fit easily in my bag, and partially because I just respected its slightly odd format, which seemed to say, "Yeah, I'm a seventeen-month calendar. What? That's how I roll."

And partially, I'll admit, because those pages at the end called to me--and not JUST because I could write "DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART I!" on November 19, 2010. (Although I did, post haste.)

As I lingered on the page marked September 2010, I couldn't help thinking: Surely, I'll be back in New York by then. And, imagining that, those last pages seemed to flutter with extra crispness, fresh with the promise of brisk fall breezes, October skies, black wool coats, the comforting embrace of skyscrapers, hot coffee sipped while walking at a proper pace down sidewalks properly filled with people, and excuses to wear my remarkably soft Gryffindor...er, USC scarf.

The one task I gave myself for the mostly-empty months of July and August in Los Angeles, other than writing, was to re-learn to drive. I haven't done it, and now that the semester has started, who knows when I will. But I finally realized what was behind my willingness to tolerate the limitations and inconveniences of being a non-driver in a city so car-oriented that even stores turn their backs on the sidewalk. If I learned to drive, that would be admitting to myself that there was at least a chance I would actually be living in this godforsaken city, as, like, a real, non-student adult. And clearly that is not a possibility I am inclined to face at the moment.

If you've been reading this blog you'll know it's no secret that, although I think film school is awesome, I hate Los Angeles with a fiery passion. As time goes by, you'd think I would get used to it and start hating it less. Instead I seem to hate it more. And I've become increasingly convinced that having a car, while it would certainly make my life easier, would not make me like Los Angeles one bit more.

Los Angeles is the anti-city: a vast, flat, centerless expanse of never-ending suburb that sprawls like a fungus over desert plains and clambers up into mountain canyons where no city is supposed to be, a place where people describe neighborhoods by their proximity to various freeways, a place where the urban grid is stretched to its least-walkable dimensions. (Short blocks favor pedestrians: they have more corners, which are prime real estate for both sidewalk-oriented shops and personal interaction. Long blocks favor cars because there are fewer stop lights.)

Los Angeles has no sense of urgency. LA, for all its ungainly size and various cityesque attributes, still feels sleepy and provincial to me. It has the natural energy of the beach: nice for a vacation, but rather like quicksand when you're trying to get stuff done. Even the weather begins to get old. "Oh, jeez, month after month of sunshine and low humidity, must be rough!" I can hear you East Coasters muttering sarcastically. But seriously. With a lack of seasons, time stretches out into one long, unmarked blur. There is no sense of things moving and changing, of time passing by. You're just trapped in this hot, flat, timeless pancake filled with mile after mile of strip malls of varying bougieness or grubbiness, depending on the zip code. Also, bars close absurdly early, hardly anything is open twenty-four hours, and both the density and pace of service of Los Angeles's Starbucks is criminally low.

There was a time when I was convinced I just needed to get to know Los Angeles better. The USC neighborhood is somewhat unappealing; surely there must be other neighborhoods out there in the vast sea of Los Angeles's expanse that I could call home. Every visit to a new friend's house was like a blind date: maybe this will be the neighborhood I'll fall in love with. It was only recently that I reminded myself that between September 2000 and August 2008, I was never out of New York for more than a month at a time, and realized there was probably a good reason for that.

Perhaps this is why, after nearly two months in a new apartment, I have not bothered to unpack more than the bare minimum needed for survival (which, in case you're wondering, is my computer and other media tools, my books, three plates, one cereal bowl, one all-purpose mug, a couple of utensils, some toiletries, and about one laundry load worth of clothes). I like the feeling that this must be only temporary, because the idea that it could be permanent, or even semi-permanent, is too horrible to contemplate.

Although I fully reserve the right to change my mind, if you asked me today, I would say I plan to get the hell out of Los Angeles as soon as humanly possible. Will this reduce my chances of meeting some agent's or studio exec's second assistant in some bar in West Hollywood some night? Yeah, probably. And you know what? I think I can live with that risk. The possibility of success in any creative industry is so ridiculously low to begin with that, in my opinion, there's no point in being miserable while you're trying to make it.