tv Book TV CSPAN March 27, 2010 11:00pm-12:00am EDT
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said -- >> guest: national testiculate i said we would never have and because conservatives would be opposed to anything with the word national and the eritreans would be a testing it. but we ought to be able to come to some agreement about the common standards. the math is the same. you can read or you can't read and the problem without having national standards or common standards and this was a problem and no child left behind without getting too much in the weeds is when you look at each state set its own goals and standards -- >> host: it becomes a race to the bottom as they define. >> guest: since the enactment of that legislation and the expenditure of a lot of the federal money, 18 states have lowered their standards and this isn't what it was about. crusco that is why you need common standards. by the way, it seems you also need, and testing. >> guest: you do need, and testing and that is perfectly fine. when i was the secretary of education i beefed up the
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so-called national system of educational progress naep and some people were reacting hard to the people appointed as the chair and co-chair, hillary clinton, wife of the governor of arkansas lamar alexander, governor of tennessee at the time. they turned out to be very good people for that job and this is one of the best assessments we have for measuring whether our kids are doing the math. now this issue is i can get is crunch time. i think it is sputnik again because we know what it costs just if we are focused on our fiscal house and economic recovery, we know what it costs not to have good sound educational practice. it costs a ton of money. ..
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>> host: we started the show by telling about competitiveness in china and america and education, and understanding in history and ending with education. let me sum it up and away in what worries you and what incur you about the notion of america being competitive in in the 21st century the way it was in the 20th? how do we educate our kids and not fall behind the way we seem to be falling behind in our k-12
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education? >> guest: alright, what encourages me? i will tell you what discourages me. i know you have seen a million assessments and have heard all the panels, many of them very good. i've sat in on a few. here's what discourages me. when we tester kids in the fourth grade in math and science, we are in the top third and when we tester kids in the eighth grade we are in the middle and that is really discouraging. the longer you stay in our system the dumber you get relative to kids in other countries. that just won't work, not in this economy. i talk to kids at harvard who are graduating with good gpas, losing jobs to kids from other countries. tom friedman talks about, what is the-- flat. the world is flat. sometimes it is let in terms of competitiveness, the share value dollar of intellectual capital has never been more important. what encourages me is that there is some common ground on
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education or go what also encourages me as we know what works. we know what makes for good teaching now. there is a lot of research in that and apart from the family, the home, the teachers the single most important person in the education process. doesn't matter bao class-size. so we know something about that. now that we have a a good state-of-the-art in our knowledge maybe we can do the right thing. that is the part that encourages me, if we keep bush. i've been pushing for 30 years. >> host: i am involved with teach for america and i think if we can bring teachers into the new process and hold them accountable is the most important thing we can do to make sure 21st centuries are the same as the other centuries you write about. >> guest: look at the interest in these talented kids. >> host: the book is "a century tus." bill bennett, thank you very much. >> guest: appreciate it.
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>> in this book, "footnotes in gaza," american book award member joe sacco talks about a 1956 incident in rafah in the gaza strip during which 111 palestinians were killed by israeli soldiers. the brooklyn public library in brooklyn, new york hosts the hour and -1/2 talk. >> thanks all for coming tonight thanks is always to the brooklyn public library especially gabe kaplan and meredith walters for hosting this event. my name is matt weiland, and this is the fourth installment of a series of events called true to life, the art of nonfiction. in recent years they lines between fact and fiction have grown blurry. journalist, historians in memoirists have increasingly incorporated novelistic techniques into their work and in turn increasingly have been
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challenged on the voracity of their nonfiction. meanwhile novelists have sought ever more tricky ways to capture on a page the way the world looks and feels, leading some readers to wonder just what it is they are reading. to celebrate and explore this turn we have invited six acclaimed writers whose work is often right on the knife's edge between true and not true, to read from their latest books and to talk about the many ways a rider stays true to life. is part of this theory so far we have had michael save on, padgett powell and the later events we will welcome the distinguished writers maryland johnson and david shields. i hope you'll keep an eye out for those events in the next couple of months, but tonight i am delighted to say we have joe sacco here with us all the way from portland, oregon. truly the brooklyn of the
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pacific northwest. [laughter] the new york review of books have said this of joe sacco's work. there is virtually no precedent for what he does. sacco is legitimately unique. in fact, his work is so singular that there isn't even an agreed-upon word for what it is he does. he is in called a cartoon journalist, a graphic novelist, a narrative cartoonist, a comics reporter and he has been called a lot of other names to match. but whatever we know, whatever he is we know this about him. said through his born in malta in 1960 and move to australia and then to america where he grew up largely in los angeles. before attending the university of oregon and graduating with a degree in journalism. like most young journalist he started producing his own work and his own comics. he lived in berlin for a couple of years where he drew loads of record covers and posters for bands there and then in 1991 east and a couple of months in the middle east.
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in the years since then he has published for extraordinary books of reportage, palestine in 1993, which received the american book award, "safe area gorazde" which was in 2000 the new york times notable book of the year in "time" magazine's best comic book of the year, the fixer, another dark foray into bosnia published in 1994 in his new book, "footnotes in gaza" just published by the good folks at metropolitan books. his books have been translated into 14 languages and his work has appeared in the "new york times" magazine, time, harper's and many other places. as joe will tell you, "footnotes in gaza" is about footnotes to history, to bloody incidents that took place in gaza in 1956 but have been almost completely forgotten since. in the course of recounting those stories he weaves in an account of his own time researching them in palestine.
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in the introduction to the book sub-- sacco writes the past and present cannot be easily disentangle. they are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur, perhaps it is worth our while to freeze that churning forward movement and examined one or two events that would not only a disaster for the people who lived them but might also be instructive for the rest of us. joe sacco is going to talk about that new book tonight and together we will look at some of the pages from the book and discuss them and talk about his own way of making nonfiction true to life. them i hope and trust you will have a few questions of your own for him. there are books for sale in the back, way back there and i am sure joe will be happy to sign them afterwards. on behalf of brooklyn public library, please will come joe sacco. [applause]
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>> thank you map. and thank you for being here. i appreciate your coming out. >> we thought we would start maybe, you could tell us generally about how the book came about in what is in it. >> okay. my friend, chris hedges, another journalist were at a party and we were, the second intifada had just broken avidly for he would like to go into a story together. he is a writer and i am an illustrator so harper's magazine sent us to the gaza strip where we decided to focus on one particular town. before we went, i recall something i had read in a book by noam chomsky. of the book was a fateful triangle and i went back looking through the book and i found this passage that referred to to a large-scale incident that took place in november of 1956, where about 275 were killed.
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that was almost the only reference to this that i could find but i told chris when we were in gaza, we should have filled the people if they remembered this incident or coast so we did. and they told us some stories. chris wrote that into his article, but it was cut before it was printed. the historical part about 56 was cut and i can't really say why. at night have been for space considerations, but that was the genesis of the book. i basically thought, i don't like the idea that these stories are cut and it made me feel like okay, i will go back and talk to these people again, get more people to talk to and also i decided to put look at another incident that place a few days later in the town of rafah, which is close by. that is what the book is about her goat is about going back and talking to the people that were there and survive survived these
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incidents. >> you know, the fact that it it is called footnotes i think is an important fact about it. i may not be alone in thinking initially that it is footsteps, and i realized in reading it that in fact, it is very important that it is footnotes and it seems to me, and tell me if i'm wrong, it seems it is footnotes in two senses. it is the sort of bits of history that are consigned to footnotes or shoved off the page entirely and then about individual people, people that we maybe don't hear from so much or who likewise don't take up as much room on the page often as others. that title, was that there all along in your mind? were footnotes important to you in outweigh? >> was there there all along the people told me it was a lousy
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title. i felt it was appropriate because i feel like you know, these were large incidents. if you put the two incidents together we are talking about almost 400 deaths. i am sort of a student of that history and i've spent a lot of time there but i didn't really know anything about this. i realized a lot of people who seem to know about the middle east and the palestine israeli question also didn't know about it. and it was curious to me that here was a large event that was basically, it could have easily just dropped off the page, the page of history at some point. and that is why i call that foot notes. it is a reference to that but it is also true-- i actually edited out out of line i should've left in. a lot of the book is also about the time i am there. it is about the process of getting this story. what a historian thinks or what you leave out. it is about memory.
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it is about all these things, but it seemed to me that the people i was meeting sometimes would get a little flustered with what i was doing. they would say why are you concentrating on what happened in 1956? why don't you go out 200 meters away where homes are being bulldozed? why don't you write about that? sometimes i would in a wake try to convince them that your history is important until you realize what day you are going to be a footnote too? it's sort of seems that is come that way. now the demolitions along the egyptian border where i was, it is not going on anymore. that is going to be forgotten also. >> lets look at at some of the images, if we could. i believe they are lined up. may be the one that is on the screen now. you can tell us a little bit about who the two people there are and why they are together on the page that way. >> i wanted to show sort of a continuum of palestinian
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resistance. the guy at the top was with a group of guerrillas in the 50s and he was an old military man. the action started his military career with the british army in world war ii. the guy below was with five top at some point, and as a militant later he was with a group called the popular resistance committees. he was also a fighter. he was a wanted man, meaning the israelis for whatever reasons had decided that he could he caught or killed at any time and he had actually escaped out of gaza for a while and then snuck back in when he decided he just needed to come back home. the top guide, the old guerilla -- i used him in a way to tell some of the context of the story because these incidents have their context and part of it was a guerrilla war that was being waged against israel from gaza by the egyptians.
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the egyptians put together a guerrilla group that went out basically to draw blood from the israelis as a way of getting back at the israelis for embarrassing the egyptians in gaza because the egyptians seem to have total control. whenever they wanted to make a conversion they could just go and. so what does a very bloody guerrilla campaign in that gentleman, who was a very difficult interview to get to-- i interviewed him four times and i was always trying to get him to tell me some of the stories. i wanted to get an idea of the ferocity of the guerrilla campaign and finally he told me that the egyptian guy who was basically running their mouth into israel wanted proof that they were killing israelis, so he ended up coming back with the ears of dead israelis. >> that actually, as strange it is a sound, there was a moment
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when you were speaking with him and he has many things he wants to tell you but am i right that you are trying to focus on this one story and of course your sources don't realize that all the other stuff isn't apropos or doesn't matter to you. how do you deal with that as a reporter, as an interested hardy, someone who wanted to write about it with people wanting to go off in many different directions? >> it was pretty frustrating. there was a time i was just basically going to give up and finally, his son realized that i wanted to concentrate on one period and not hear about 57, not hear about 48 and not hereabouts early 70s. i did, and i realized this guide knew more about the stuff and if i didn't get it down probably no one else would get it down. but i just had to concentrate and i tried to show that sometimes in these situations you have to sort of cut something list to get to the main point. his son basically told him
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listen that, you have got to tell them something. that is what he is here for. then he concentrated a bit. >> the other reason i found it interesting to see this image and talk about it a bit, you probably can't see it but there is a line in the text that is written the battle has been inherited from the figure on the top to the figure on the bottom and it seems it is a big part of the book. how the feeling of oppression or the sense of patriot has been passed along from one generation to another. can you talk a little bit about your experience with that? the people you talked with in how the memory of events like this went on? >> what was interesting, when i was in gaza we met a guy who was one of the major leaders of hamas, later assassinated by the israelis but his uncle had been killed and hung u.s. on the day
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of this incident. he told us at that moment, hatred was planted in his heart. it demonstrated to me that one generation was sort of brutalized and became brutal in a way or some part of it became brutal just as, if you look at the book there are many instances where there is an us bombing in israel and you are talking to people and they want to hear about it bus bombing. it's pleased some people but i want to show the context of that which is there is always a reason they were pleased. because today's ago there was an attack and someone was killed or a pregnant woman was killed. basically you see this kind of thing happening where people are brutalized and they become brutal. that is some of what i'm trying to show. it happened than in the 50s and it is continuing now. it is unfortunate because there seems to be no letup in it for them. that cycle needs to be broken.
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people talk about cycle but they don't understand the concept sometimes a bit. >> these are random so we don't know what is coming next. speaking of brutality. >> yes. this is the castle wall in the town, a 14th century castle that still exist today. what happened on november 3, according to the u.n. document the israelis contended that palestinians were resisting and according to the palestinians they were not so wise folks if with some people there. the figure down below was a child at the time obviously and his relatives were marched out of the home by israeli troops, male relatives said he ran off to them and the israeli shoulders shoot him away. later he came to the castle wall and found a long row of dead
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palestinians. i heard this story from a number of sources but i told his in particular. >> one of the things that i think is striking in the book and i think we may be able to see it, joe, you go back to such places and draw and described them as they look now or at least at the time you were back there. which i think if iam-- part of your point is these things we may think are very much in the past live on in the memory of those who are around those places. is that right? des and they tried to show that visually to because there is a facing page. >> we will find out if it is next. >> it is the castle wall as it is today and it is a bit different. i got that first image from archival material. it is much like it is today
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except there are many more buildings in the back round and where the bodies are-- so i showed the exact same scene from the exact same angle with my guide, myself and this gentleman walked in there. you can do that with comics. you can show the past and the president seamlessly take a reader into the past. >> in a way that raises-- elsewhere in the book you have a line about saying you were a newspaper man at heart. which i certainly think is true. would you be able to do anything like this in a newspaper? i mean do you feel to capture that refer to a sense of history or whether or not in a newspaper in just pros? >> i think rose has its own power. and i think every medium has its own power. maybe the power of prose is that they put these things together in our heads. the power of image is that you are confronted with them immediately.
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you know, i mean sometimes i think about documentary film and how that works with the past. i always prefer to see a talking head talking about the past that i do to see reenactments. reenactments is something i feel like i can do well because i can draw thousands of people but sometimes you will see a documentary film where it is talking some battle like the battle of waterloo and they will show five people with swords and bayonets and that is the end of that because they just don't have the budget. [laughter] >> battles were smaller than. >> not waterloo. my budget is basically time so i can put as many people into something as need he. >> is it true that you spent almost seven years on this? >> yes. speedy right. let's but see the next image. i thought this was a really striking image and page, because much of what you do in the book is you talk to a lot of
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different people about the same event, and try to get the truth of it based on what comes through their overlapping memories. you are very forthright in the book about what you feel as though you established as truth and what you happened and what you feel you happened. and you know, it raises often that on the mental question of well, what is real? can you trust based on memories that are after all 50 years old, often by people who themselves are speaking in second or third hand india there is something very powerful i find anyway and presenting, as you say talking heads and documentary films who you can see in the repetitions and overlaps between what they say that there is no doubt that they have established some
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things as actually having happened. what was that like and what do you feel like when you are talking to people, trying to get what is real? with the truth was? >> of course i am trying to get something as accurately as possible and get as close to the truth as i can get. this was a real interesting case to me and what i was confronted with was, as you suggested, memories that were 50 years old. there are certain people that remember offer way well if they are very particular and very sharp but others not so much. now in this case, from this page, it was a story of four brothers in a refugee camp in hanunis. they were marched out by israeli soldiers and three of them were shot, and one of them pushed over a soldier and jumped over a wall and brand and escaped. i heard this story in three separate interviews. the guy who escaped, the wife of one of the men who died and a
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guy who was a young boy at the time that watched all happened in front of him. they all told the same story about the guys coming out, getting shot. even had where they were standing and basically in the right order. but there was one major difference. the oldest described one of the brothers dying, like basically slowly dying and fading. the woman and the guide with the young boy described it very well , but said that the other brother, the one who survived was not there. when i talk to the surviving brother, he said he was there any watched all this happened. so i began to reflect-- i was not sure who remembered what correctly but to me i began to wonder about him, that perhaps it would be unlikely he would return to something like that. in fact all of them that i talked to who escapes didn't come back for a wild.
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it is possible i think that he imagines in his head to this day that he was there. he almost needed to be there. so that is where i try to get to. sometimes it is not clear what is clear and what is true is that three brothers were killed. so in other words i wanted to show the scenes of the story and the lone senate but i also want to show the there is an essential element that is true in the stories. >> that is well said. the scenes and bumps are part of what them make the book feels so true to life. the next slide please. so, this is an image that rings us back to our own time or at least a time when you were there doing your reporting. maybe you can set this up and explain a little bit about what it was like when you were there in 2002 and 2003. >> this was the town of rafah. on the right you will see rafah, palestinian rafah but in the 80's, rafah was divided and a
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border was put across right through it so there was an egyptian side of rafah. in the middle at the time was what the israelis called a military installations on. and, what the israelis were doing was destroying homes along the border where they said that there were tunnels, tunnels from those homes to-- you effort have heard of the tunnels. the problem existed when i was there too or go there with smuggling of arms and smuggling of other goods to be sold. they also destroyed homes when they said that they were, israeli troops or their vehicles were being fired upon by militants from those homes. there was a large swath of homes. that holes in the area would have been home so we are talking about hundreds of homes. in this scene, and we heard about a bulldozing. you can see the dust in the background perhaps. we heard about it although singh and as a shortcut we were running over this kind of errand
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area to get to it to see what was going on. >> this is the very southern border. >> this is the southern border with egypt. this is another thing i like about cartooning. you can sort of higher your own helicopter and just bring yourself up. but this is all based on photographs. >> it is incumbent upon you all. the next slide please. so, here is one of the slides about what we were discussing before about how you speak to a lot of different sources to try to get the story of one particular episode. the announcement was a very important part. why don't you tell us a little bit about that. >> this was from the incident that took place in rafah which was quite different from hanunis.
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the israelis wanted to take an capture the guerrillas and also they wanted to capture palestinian troops and the egyptian army who had taken off the uniform and just gone back home. so they ordered all men of a certain age, basically-- the men told me 15, 16 but a sickly you get the idea, made teens up to 50 or 60 depending on who you talk to but hasek men of military age to report to a school so that they could the screen, so the israeli soldiers could decide which of them were militants or soldiers. in this case yeah, i had actually, most of the men remembered as well. they remembered how they heard because that sticks in their head. the loudspeakers telling them that they had to go to the school. some of them didn't hear the announcement and only knew because they saw people running and some went late and apparently were killed before they could get to the school. >> i am curious about a craft issue.
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seeing this right after that last extraordinary helicopter shot in effect. clearly, each of these pages must have taken you a great deal of time. at least to my eye, the previous image, incredibly detailed, down to the level of rubble, individual bits of rubble and here, people drawn so detailed with really their personalities and their characters delineated. this look is 400 pages. there are many examples of this. do you have a preference? do you feel like drawing people, you can really get into it and you have to do that kind of landscape large, you know, deep level of magnification over a big span of space? is it harder or is it the opposite? it seems than usual i think to be able to dupe both so well.
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>> thanks. >> i heard you have approach them differently. is there anything different about drawing people and drawing places? >> i find drawing humans more difficult because they never studied art and i sort of have to figure it out. drawing buildings, i actually took a couple of classes in drafting in junior high school. their obvious things like the vanishing points and things like that that you can figure out. drawing a lot of doublings and trying to be true to the place is important to me. i want someone from rafah and say yes, i know this area. not every window might be in place but important buildings are generally correct and we can make maps to show where buildings are so i can drop them from different angles so they will be in the right place. >> you mean as preparation? >> knowing i have to draw a scene in a certain place, i map it out so i knew how to shape the building because another thing you can do in comics, you have a photo rafted you have a
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couple of images, you can twist it around in any shape. >> it is striking to me and i mentioned the four main loucks of joe's. they'll have a place, except for the fixer, they'll have a place in the title. you do feel as you get to know these places. at least for me, i wouldn't know otherwise and it does seem like that is a big part of how you can see these projects. >> the highest compliment for me as if someone who has spent time there says that is like how it was when i was there are that feels right or go. >> can we have the next slide? this is the very end of the book, and i thought this would be interesting to talk about because i thought it reflected ambivalence, which is a tough thing in a book that is trying to establish truth about a pretty grim historical event.
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maybe it is hard to read the text but i think you can see in joe's drawing at the end there, reflecting on your own reactions to what you are hearing and ability to capture the whole story. did you feel-- i don't no, maybe you can talk about whether you feel gratified at getting the story, learning so much from so many different people and capturing it or is it the case that seem to me reflected here, some ambivalence about what what you are hearing and how true, how much you have been able to capture what people said? >> what i noticed is, obviously i care about these incidents. i wanted to get to the bottom of it and i want to do it well. there's a funny thing that happens is you are trying to do it well. you have to sort of look at the component parts of let's say a day in rafah where people are screaming. you are looking at what do people remember about the
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loudspeaker? what do they remember about running down to the school? what do they remember about going down to the gates. what do they remember about the screaming itself, which won him for hours. you are asking these questions and you begin to get very focused on very minor details in a way and at the end of this period, i think perhaps other journalists feel this and maybe even historians, you begin to get so focused on the small details that you forget that people were involved. even the people you were talking to where they are. you want something from them, and you are going to do a good job with it, but you have a common clinical. you have to be clinical to get this right. you can't be too emotional and all that. in this case, finally, there was this older guy that i had been trying to interview for a a while and by the time i got to him ready much covered that part of the story and i was onto other stuff.
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almost a sort of just a-- i accepted the invitation to go and meet him. we went and it was kind of a mess. he was sick in his memory wasn't very good. he seemed really emotional. when i started talking about what happened to him in november 56 he started to break down. as clinical as i am, i am professional about it. if you are going to break down and cry, that is okay, we can stop. his grandson was there and his grandson would have none of it. his grandson wanted his grandfather to tell the story. when it was clear he really couldn't go on, his grandson just sort of said tell me what was the one thing, the worst thing you remember about that day? the man said, fear. it was almost like he had forgotten about it somehow in the process of constructing the story of the really hit me that
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what this was really about, it really is about human story budding getting it you have to detach yourself to get it right, to get the details right. >> it is nearly at the end. do we have another? so, here is a lighter moment in the book and i think a very funny one. there are other journalists. this is right on the e. but the american invasion of iraq, and the irony here is that all these other journalists are rushing off to the big story that is happening right then and joe here is going the opposite direction. he is going back into history. you can say what you say, it is a funny comment on where the
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real story is and what they sure thing is. >> over time, it has become a lot of fun to hang out with other journalists in places like this. ifrs i sort of avoided them completely. they are generally pretty smart and you can bounce ideas off of each other and you can also share your humor with them. it needs to come out somehow. it was clear to everyone else, once we ran around the table, who believes america is going to attack iraq and i was the only one that said it was not going to happen. i guess i was proved wrong but they have course were just a bit smarter. they could see the writing on the wall and they were all planning, how are we going to get to iraq? i was definitely headed in the other direction saying. [laughter] >> seven years later.
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next slide these. here is an enormously striking moment, a contemporary moment in the look where you are taking, being driven through check point and maybe you can describe just how that worked and in what happened in the car. i think you get some sense of seeing the anxiety in the book. that is an extraordinary moment. >> this is the check.. it doesn't exist anymore because the israelis have left gaza but at the time it was at a point where the israelis, if they wanted to separate the northern part of gaza from the south, and there were also jewish settlements. there was an overpass, and sort of the israeli only overpass, so whenever is previously-- israeli
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settlers were going home from israel they would pass over the check point and then all the traffic, all the palestinian traffic would stop. it would often stop for maybe five minutes before they got there, maybe five minutes after they had gone by but there were other reasons for to stop and sometimes the check.would be, it would be closed for a day, a week. you never knew. you got to the check point and, let's see if we are going to get around that is what this was about. fewer often in these long lines. there are boys who would that time would say the israelis had announced he had to have at least three people in the car. if you want to cross the check check.so they were boys that the patrol up and down and if you had to people in the car they would knock on your window and for one shekel they would get in the car with you. they were called shekel boys. they were going around selling tea in all of this stuff. it was a place where people were
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stuck. i never took a picture of this because it is just a mistake to pick-- take it picture of a military position because they forbid it. since i had passed to this check .any times, i would try it on my lap onto my pad and over many times i got the full picture of what it looked like. >> next slide please. this is where you first get there and the reason i thought this would be interesting to hear about joe is that, when you get there there is some discussion about where you are going to stay. >> this is in rafah. i had already spent time in hanunis at my guide's place but i knew the rafah story was more involved and i would need more time there. so i wanted to live in the refugee camp. it became-- there are a number
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of reasons why they didn't want me -- meg and i wanted to live with a family so i could see some dynamics that there were a lot of reasons that that wouldn't be appropriate. it is a conservative society and if usa westerner are there you are going to make it difficult for them to just have the family interactions. it is not really appropriate to come across a woman and a household, so it would have been physically impossible to do that. i wanted to stay in the camp because that was where things were really happening. and it would give me a good sense of the story also. but as i was told, there were areas of resistance in the camp and maybe i would find something out that i shouldn't. and maybe it wasn't safe. and there wouldn't be the amenities in the camp. but i've rested and finally i got to stay in the camp, but when you think refugee camp you are bright in taking it is some very old decrepit places that
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are falling apart, but the camp set run a lot and there are some nice buildings. i basic we stayed in maybe a six room building, a six room apartment with three bathrooms and four balconies. i mean it was really unusually big, magnificent plays. >> basically you were on a junket. >> i was on a junket. it was a guy that was sending money home so when he retired he could stay. they didn't want to see me be sort of put out and have to undergo, to live the way they lived. >> did you feel safe while you were there? >> i did feel safe. what is funny is a few months later the israelis had an excursion into that particular area and a place where i was guaranteed by the militants they could never possibly come into. and of course the israelis came in. this place was a place i stayed
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at that was hit by machine gun fire at that time. so it was safe while i was there. >> next slide please. so here is an example of what we were speaking about the four, a drawing place and there are several pages like this in the book. did you start with an image like this? is this something that became over time? how did this affect how you did your reporting? >> well, i want to show, give people a real sense of what the camp is and where the streets are. for example, the refugee part of it, i even named the blogs. i wanted to show the main israeli positions, where they were located and these are the ones that often make people quite afraid. so i wanted to give people a sense of where they were. if i mentioned them, if they wanted to they could refer back. just something you could do pretty easily.
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>> next slide. so, here it is like the book hopscotch where you go back and forth in time. this is what joe was speaking about before. take us back to the events in november in 56. here is an attempt to draw what you have been told happened. speedy right. this takes place at a school. you don't see the school building here, but i tried many times. the school building still exists. it was built by the addition dirty so i walked around, to pictures to get that part of it right. some of the men who were there that day in november of 56 to me to the school grounds and said, this wall wasn't here. this was a big open area at the time so based on these recollections i was able to piece together what it was probably like in those days.
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but, this is during the screening and this is one of those parts of the story where memories begin to, they begin to lose something because we are talking about a long. matt. it is easy for people to remember like i said a-- but an aide our period where they are sitting down waiting to be screened, they didn't remember certain component elements like the collaborator or when the village notables, the mozart's stood out to identify who was a militant or when an israeli officer appeared to make the soldier stop shooting over the people's heads. they got a lot of that mixed up. again, trying to show the reader that there was a problem with some of the stuff but the essential thing is the truth. >> that raises a good.. what if you were able to go back in time, a fly on the wall, to
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see that moment, that episode and it didn't look like you drew it? do you feel as though there is something true about what you have gotten on the page even if the combined recollections yield you know falsehoods and-- i guess i would be curious, how would you. >> i feel disappointed. i know that there are elements that i have had to sort of extrapolate from something. basically i would be disappointed. for example would became impossible to get people to describe the barbed wire entanglements. some people would say this around area and some people would say it is a square area. is that important or not? it kind it is when you are drawing. you are trying to get to that added point of truth and it is problematic. i actually have photocopied a
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map that i made up a school in those days and would give it to older men and say, can you show me where you were sitting or where was the barbed wire and where was the jeep? some of the stuff was matched up but some of it didn't. so you recognize even when you are trying to make it really easy that it is not going to always match up but i feel this appointed. >> i can't remember the exact words but in the introduction you speak about you are feeling both set designer and director of the film of that moment, of that time on every page. that has its benefits in being able to imagine and combined with what you are told that there is an element of invention. >> yeah and i don't want to plead artistic license. i try to be as true as possible
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to what either archival photographs or descriptions but i know i am never going to draw anything exact liam place. that is unfortunate but as i they say in the introduction, there is a measure of refraction we cannot get around. i guess i try to think of it is like a film director making a film about a historical episode. he or she probably tries to get some elements right but then lets the viewer just basically sink into it and be overwhelmed by the whole thing. speedy can we have the next slide please? here is the opening of the book very early. in the book we talked about how important footnotes as an idea are. should we go to the next one? here, this is early on when you
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are speaking with your fixer, your early sources and you really-- it seemed to me you were kind of enjoying the fact of planning out the day and figuring out who you are going to talk to and who you haven't and infect your main initial sources became part of that and took on your quest. is that right? is that part of it? >> journalism is fun. i like doing this, so what was interesting is my guy, i'll bet is from hanunis said he would take me around. at a certain point you could see it wasn't just a point of translating and being with me so everyone knew i was okay. he became very interested in the story himself and sometimes he became kind of, how am i going to put this, he became sort of a filter.
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he would sometimes say i don't believe that guy's story. i think he is exaggerating part of it. i really appreciated that that i began to see him as a veto on anything. because he could, he knew arabic and i don't speak arabic. he could sort of sense things i couldn't sense and i was glad for that. in some ways the book to a large part is his to map. i should have cut him another world is perhaps. >> the wendy helicopter comes perhaps. >> has he seen the book? >> i am trying to figure out how to get the book into gaza. maybe i will build a tunnel. >> i wouldn't be surprised. have you heard since the book has come out -- making it only just out but for many of the israeli soldiers who lived in and had been witnesses to the original it dents or like in the sources of the book, new those
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in families or others who were involved? have you had any reactions yet from those who may have had different views about what happened? >> i did speak to one soldier who was a comrade of another who had since died led britain an article about his experiences in hanunis in the soldier called it a human slaughterhouse. the guy that wrote that died. i spoke to his widow who put me in touch with the soldier who was still alive and this guy told me he saw nothing like this. i read an ap article about the book. it was an israeli historian, who he said he was there in hanunis apparently. there weren't that many people killed. there were no murders. it was not sure what i wrote.
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and of course i am not going to discount, if he is an israeli historian, that is the sort of thing i wait up to. i went through my notes and i have actually talked to him in israel. perhaps on the phone because i don't remember meeting him personally but i had quite a long entry from him. he was a brigade commander in 1956. i had asked him as i have asked other military people or historians, israelis, if they knew about this. he told me he hadn't heard about it. this is all he said to me but he did mention what he called, he called security service people israelis who went in and eliminated specific individuals, perhaps people who they felt were guerrillas and felt some of that was going on but it was small-scale and he hadn't heard of any large-scale. >> let's do one more and then i want to open it up to the russians. i am sure you have plenty for joe. here is what we were speaking
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about earlier, another drawing of holdings brick by brick and bit by bit. >> yeah, i mean i feel what it is incumbent on me to do is to actually give you, the reader, essentially of what it looks like. this was juxtaposed with an image of what the camp look like in 1956, which i got from archival photographs in gaza city at the u.n. archives there. then when you turn the page you see see this and you see how the campus developed, so it is not just-- there are some very-- like the buildings with corrugated roofs and stones to hold the roots still on exists. large structures where people build on their original homes but there was no where else to build but up. it is kind of a pleasure doing these drawings actually.
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i enjoy it because it conveys something. >> the narrative from the library has a mic. we will take any questions. we will start here in the front and then i see lots of hands. i will come around to you all. wait for the microphone so we can all hear. >> i loved the book. it was incredible and i have many questions, that i would love to hear you talk a little bit about the way in which you kind of, if we think of this as being a film that you speed up the film and slowdown the film with your editor, the editor in the cutting room who helps you make decisions. there is a moment, i don't remember all the specifics about it, in which he went he kind of discount the story that you are eating told and kind of, zero wait a second, maybe that is true and then moments in which you really slow it down and almost have people saying this
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exact same thing next to each other, next to each other and you are actually quoting them very specifically, citing who is giving the quotes. so i sort of like this idea of the speed. i don't know if you can talk sort of about it. >> you know there are different ways of speeding forward and slowing down and i don't know if i will address your.exact way, but with the comic book form, you can slow someone down. for example of this image here, there are a few words that will take more time to read it than a lot of other pages with a number of words on them or plenty of words on them because there is so much information here. i imagine this is going to make the reader stop and look. there is that physical way of slowing things down. but i don't know if i am
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addressing your question exact way. >> instead of just saying x happened, you say each person gets to say this happened and then each person is almost repeating almost verbatim with slight variation. you talked about a little bit with the announcement but it happens in other places too and you almost get this feeling like you are watching a replay in slow motion and seeing it from-- you know, like seeing it from all these different angles. >> right. i want big reader to get a sense of, like i said, these bumps and everything but what he realizes when you are seeing it through one person size you are seeing the truth kind of out of the corner of their eyes. when i put all those faces together where they are all saying something at a different but you you are seeing another person, the corner of the eye to the truth and it is that idea of triangulation in a way. by showing all these different
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versions, which might be a different version in confronting the reader with the problems i had, and you do still see the truth forming their between these men and a way. >> right here, yes, second row. >> first i just want to thank you for the work you are doing to document the conflict including the footnotes and fragments. i was doing a little bit of research. i haven't read the book yet, this one. it is described in amazon as a graphic novel, and i found that surprising. because i was thinking really is the more graphic journalism? to me there is a big difference on the question of artistic license between it being a graphic novel, where you would have license versus being graphic journalism, which is, would conform to the strictures of journalism. so i was just wondering if you
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could say something about that. >> i hate the term graphic novel. i don't like it at all. first of all, a novel means fiction. that is the first thing that comes into my mind. to me the word, the term is a marketing term. it is a term to make adults feel not so childish picking up the comic book, which is what it is, a comic book. it might the along comic but-- comic but it is a comic book. i have no problem with those words. i say that that i take my journalism very seriously. i don't mind if people say it is graphic narrative for graphic journalism or something like that. that seems maybe more accurate but the word novel never seems to fit most of my work, so i don't like it. >> here, and then. >> another illusion of the
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