Strange Things Happen: A Life with The Police, Polo and Pygmies
By Stewart Copeland
Publisher UK: The Friday Project US: HarperStudio
Just because I write crime fiction doesn’t make me obsessed by The Police. However, this new memoir by The Police drummer is absolutely the most… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on October 30, 2009 at 6:11pm —
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Yet another report accuses Israel of human rights abuses, this time for denying Palestinians water. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — Human-rights reports condemning Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians have become so frequent of late they’re like the dripping of Chinese water torture.
Last week I zapped off the manuscript of my new novel to my agent in New York. My wife told me to get working on the next book. It’s not because she’s worried about me slacking off and failing to pay the rent. No, it’s because she knows what happens when I’m not writing.
Ever read “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”? When I’m writing, I’m Dr Jekyll. All my unloveable urges are intellectualized and subsumed to a pleasure in the creative… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on October 29, 2009 at 4:43pm —
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By now it’s no secret that the Iraq War has been a disillusioning experience for many of the U.S. servicemen sent there. The literature on the war has, so far, been mostly written by journalists. There’s plenty of it, and like most journalism it runs pretty mainstream and inoffensive, no matter how bloody the scenes depicted. But… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on October 28, 2009 at 8:01pm —
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I started to feel recently that my bio on www.mattbeynonrees.com was a bit over-serious. First of all, it was in the third person. I honestly never refer to myself in the third person (except when I'm shopping and I ask my wife "Would Matt Beynon Rees wear a shirt in this shade of pink?") Then I saw that the bio took my writing and -- worse still -- me, rather seriously. I prefer to make it clear that I can laugh at myself. So I changed the whole bio,… Continue
A parody of a nationalistic Palestinian song ridicules the intractable dispute between Hamas and Fatah leaders. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, Hamas and Fatah were on the verge of an agreement to end more than two years of civil strife. Then Hamas tore it up, and both sides went back to tearing… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on October 24, 2009 at 12:17am —
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One of the advantages of being an author in an “exotic” locale is that people visit and want to hear from you as someone who knows the place well. It’s also one of the disadvantages.
Last Friday night, I drove out to Ein Kerem to meet one such group of visitors from Reboot, a U.S. organization that brings together mostly liberal – and certainly not conventional-thinking – Jews to discuss issues related to Judaism and Israel. It turned out to be… Continue
The last couple of articles about me and my books focus on the fact that I'm rather happy. In this month's Hadassah Magazine, I'm "affable and trim." High school friends reading this on Facebook may wonder where the affability was back then...
The planned agreement goes some way toward validating Hamas control of the Gaza Strip. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Warring Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have drafted an agreement to end their two-year civil war. But U.S. diplomats oppose the deal. Here’s why.
You know the reputation. "Swiss" isn't a nationality. It's really an adjective meaning highly organized and perhaps even a little too punctilious.
That's a myth. The place is just like the Middle East... (Look, I write fiction, but I may be onto something. Read on.)
On my recent reading tour, I stopped in Basel as a guest of the superb Literaturhaus Basel. Everyone told me to go the city's main art museum for an exhibition of… Continue
A brouhaha over who can pray at the Temple Mount recalls a similar disagreement ... that became known as the second intifada. by Matt Beynon Rees on GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — I just returned to Jerusalem after a month away. Or at least I thought I did.
I suspect I entered a cosmic wormhole that popped me out in the right place — the Israeli capital — only nine years… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on October 9, 2009 at 11:47pm —
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The whole point of travel is to see Red Light districts around the world. That’s what I assume my German publisher C.H. Beck thinks. Or maybe that's what they think I'll like. Anyway, they keep sending me to Hamburg, which has one of the most famous naughty neighborhoods in the world.
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… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on September 30, 2009 at 12:36am —
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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.
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… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on September 4, 2009 at 4:50pm —
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To introduce the next of my Palestinian crime novels, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, my friend videographer David Blumenfeld filmed in New York (where the book takes place). His montages are mainly from Brooklyn's Bay Ridge and Coney Island sections. He then recorded me, looking sweaty and frankly a bit doped up, in my favorite seedy cafe in Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter.
You can view it… Continue
Added by Matt Rees on August 28, 2009 at 4:44pm —
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Since you’re reading this, you don’t care who I am. So I can be anyone I like. At least, that’s what somebody wrote here recently.
I posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago about Dashiell Hammett. I noted that, while a university literature student, I grew tired of all the post- structuralist and deconstructionist and Marxist esoterica I… Continue