Why a literary journal returned to the 2008 Mumbai attacks

From Nov. 26 to 29, 2008, 10 gunmen wielded guns, grenades and terror in the Indian city of Mumbai. Acting in five teams of two, they killed 163 people and wounded 300 others in attacks on sites including a train station, two elite hotels, a Jewish center, a hospital and the city's streets. All of the gunmen were young Pakistani Muslims; all but one were killed by authorities. The lone survivor, who has pleaded guilty, attends his trial, which continues a year after the attacks.

All this happened far away from the offices of the literary magazine the Virginia Quarterly Review, but when editor Ted Genoways talked to contributor Jason Motlagh about the attacks, he felt there was a story to tell that went deeper than the TV news stories we'd seen. Motlagh, a journalist working in South Asia, had previously written for VQR about India and had a wealth of contacts there. What the two decided should be written about Mumbai would go beyond standard reporting, "something that would be closer to literary nonfiction than traditional journalism -- or even 'new journalism.' " Genoways writes. "This would not be the story of Jason’s journey in the wake of disaster but a straightforward narrative of what happened in Mumbai."

That it is -- in four online pieces (1, 2, 3, 4), each close to 5,000 words, the narrative has been laid out in a straight and comprehensible chronology. Motlagh has cut through the chaos and confusion, moving from one group of gunmen to another to police, victims and military, pulling together a compelling narrative. He combined on-the-ground reporting with the challenging task of comparing the many conflicting, multilingual accounts to provide a clear story of the horrific events Indians have come to call 26/11. It is a tremendous achievement.

Yet the piece isn't perfect: The chronology can't be everywhere at once, so it's hard to tell how many lives have been lost, or how those in charge did or didn't respond to the emergency as it unfolded. The bigger issues -- of conflict in the region, of the violence a small, determined group can inflict, of how a fervid militia could be better armed and trained than the police they challenged, of the failures of intelligence, of what a major attack on Mumbai means -- are squeezed into the margins, even as the moment-by-moment account provides an excellent understanding of the attacks themselves. 

If the report is of the kind we might expect to see from a handful of larger-circulation magazines such as the New Yorker, other venues have been retreating from this kind of extensively researched international writing. That a magazine like VQR -- esteemed, yet with a modest and distinctly literary circulation -- has undertaken such an effort demonstrates an enthusiasm for significant nonfiction storytelling.

Of course, this kind of thing is expensive. To run such a piece again, they'll need the help of foundations and other financial supporters. "I think we’ve proven that we can undertake this kind of ambitious reporting successfully and shown that there’s an audience out there for it," Genoways says in an  interview. "We need to find a few altruistic supporters of journalism who see this kind of work as important, whether it’s profit-generating or not. I’m optimistic that such people are out there."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Taj Mahal hotel burns on Nov. 29, 2008. Credit: David Guttenfelder / Associated Press

CIA secrets revealed -- like magic

The Cold War made for strange partners -- including the CIA and a well-known magician named John Mulholland. In 1953, Mulholland was hired by the C.I.A. to adapt his craft for its agents. The documents he produced, long thought destroyed, were discovered in 2007 by two C.I.A. historians, who have recently published "The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception."

What could a magician teach spies? Much sleight of hand, apparently, that could be used for dosing drinks, passing pills and exchanging messages. And then there were the covert signals, including some that could be sent by tying your shoelaces in special patterns. The Boston Globe has illustrated some of the tricks in this marvelous slideshow.

In an accompanying piece at the Globe, Tom Scocca writes:

In the superpower struggle for power and influence around the world, the CIA was secretly funding and engineering everything from literary journals to coups and armed rebellions. It was total warfare, but with creeping breadth in place of nuclear intensity. Both the ideas and techniques of secret war pervaded the culture -- the corrosive belief in hidden conspiracy and the nifty thrill of spycraft itself, the codes and disguises and miniature cameras....

Today Mulholland’s account of real-world stagecraft amounts to an etiquette manual for a lost moment of history.

That moment is lost, as he says, because many of the methods used depended on the context of the tricks. In those days, men could be counted on to wear suit jackets, which had predictable internal and external pockets. Enough people smoked so that a matchbook could be used as a prop without attracting attention. If there might be contemporary cognates for these -- jeans, say, or Blackberries -- the social context back then was different as well. Performing a trick depends upon expected behavior, and how men and women interact has changed since 1953 -- in a few ways, at least.

If the tricks in this book no longer apply, exactly, they do illuminate a mysterious interlude in our country's past: When a guy who'd made his living pulling a rabbit out of a hat showed C.I.A. agents how to do their jobs.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

How far will our memoir fascination go?

Decades ago, real life became the stuff of novels -- everyone knew "The Bell Jar" was taken from Sylvia Plath's own experience, but nobody wanted to call it a memoir. Flash forward to James Frey and reverse it -- he couldn't sell "A Million Little Pieces" as a novel, but it got snapped up as a memoir (novelistic liberties notwithstanding).

"Memoir" by Ben Yagoda is an "incisive exploration" of memoir, its history and its popularity in our reality-TV era, according to our reviewer. In its review, Salon writes:

Truly provocative is Yagoda's assertion that the rise of memoir shows how "authorship has been democratized"; everyone has a story to tell and who better to tell it than the one who lived it? We put less faith in expertise and objectivity, and more in what's spoken "straight from the heart."

Today in the Daily Beast, Yagoda elaborates on this idea. "Any intelligent, self-aware person with an interesting story can write a decent and readable memoir," he writes. But where do those three things intersect? Can a really, really interesting story make up for a lack of self-awareness? Can someone smart and self-aware write a good book about a relatively boring life? Would anyone want to read it?

Perhaps the biggest question is where the publishing industry fits in. It's perhaps too easy for publishers to say yes to celebrity memoirs, and hard to get them to amount to something anyone would want to read. Take this excerpt from "Still Standing," the memoir from Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean about her big moment at the pageant:

I knew if I told the truth, I would lose all that I was competing for: the crown, the luxury apartment in New York City, the large salary -- everything that went with the Miss USA title.... Suddenly, it hit me that the long months of planning, dieting, exercising, and practicing were on the verge of paying off. If I won, I would become Miss USA, headed for the 58th Miss Universe Pageant in Nassau, Bahamas.

The prose is hardly electric. Whether or not the form has hit its peak, he writes, "it is becoming evident that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped." And he never even got to these guys.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Carrie Prejean at the Miss Universe pageant. Credit: Eric Jamison / Associated Press

Is there a story in California City?

Not far from Edwards Air Force Base lies California City. In 1958, a developer envisioned it as the state's next big metropolis behind Los Angeles and San Francisco, bought thousands of acres and laid out a grid of streets in the desert. Now, the place is home to just about 10,000 -- several zeroes shy of the hoped-for population -- and an automobile test track. But the streets remain.

Geoff Manaugh of the smart design/architecture/planning site BLDGBLOG wonders if there's something more there.

I can see an amazing article being written about this place for GOOD magazine —"California and its Utopias," say—or The New Yorker, or, for that matter, Atlas Obscura. The large-scale spatial remnants of an economic downturn, decades in advance of today's recession.

The L.A. Times has found some stories in California City: environmentalist concerns over the racetrack, which threatened tortoises and squirrels. A place in the desert where 1,000 people gather on the 13th of each month to wait for a vision of the Virgin Mary, said to appear in the sky.

And in 1999, we read about some of the plans that went awry in California City: Early on, with no phones, the few residents communicated by CB radio. An herb farm lost its crops to rabbits and a sandstorm. A hydroponic tomato-growing enterprise was a front for marijuana growers. "It's been a scam town," then-Mayor Larry Adams said.

But as for the complete story of the city that didn't happen in California City? There may be more left to tell.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Satellite image of California City via Google Maps

Retro career advice from the author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat'

Have we gone back to 1959? Mireille Guiliano, the author of "French Women Don't Get Fat," has written a book of career advice, "Women, Work and the Art of Savoir Faire: Business Sense & Sensibility." With a business manifesto that includes "bad hair is a branding catastrophe for women," it's hard to tell if she's writing advice for today or for the "Mad Men" era.

In a piece on WOW, which was founded by women who blasted through stereotypes and glass ceilings, including Leslie Stahl, Lily Tomlin and Marlo Thomas, Guiliano writes:

Many women who aspire to reach the top of the corporate ladder don’t realize that simply being a woman is a powerful tool. View your femininity as a selling point of the brand that you market to the world, and your gender will almost always be an asset, not a liability.

Fair enough. But exactly how does one use her femininity to sell her brand? She writes thank-you notes on stationery. She asks questions. She is a team player. She never uses profanity. She smiles. A smile is, Guiliano writes, "the ultimate accessory."

Before Guiliano became an author, she was the chief executive of Clicquot Inc., the Champagne company, where she worked for two decades. She certainly knows the business workplace; maybe her formula is exactly the way to get ahead. Still. In 2009.

But wouldn't it be nice if she was dispensing her advice to the men in the office, as well as the ladies?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Peggy Olson (actress Elisabeth Moss), Betty Draper (January Jones) and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) have limited career options in the 1960s work environment of "Mad Men." Credit: Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Safran Foer Q&A: You gonna eat that?

Jonathan Safran Foer asks, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? A take on that truth can be found in his occasionally inspiring, occasionally gruesome book "Eating Animals." It's the first major work of nonfiction by this award-winning novelist; he spent three years exploring the realities of animal husbandry in America. In her review, Susan Salter Reynolds writes that Foer has "a kind of fearless modernity: one part 'whatever,' one part descendant of Holocaust survivor (we've only got this one life, if that, to get things right) and one part soaringly beautiful, annoyingly entitled liberalism.... Think your way through it, Foer warns. Define the terms. Choose your priorities. You have that luxury."

Foer will be in Los Angeles this weekend, appearing at the Santa Monica Library on Saturday at 7 p.m., at a sold-out appearance at the Skirball Center Sunday afternoon and Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. He spoke to Jacket Copy by phone.

Jacket Copy: In "Eating Animals," you really bring to life how horrifying factory farms are. I wonder, as a writer, what it was like to write that horror story.

Jonathan Safran Foer: I don't really think of it as a horror story, for a couple of reasons. One, it might very well have a happy ending. Two, there's plenty of moments of not only levity in it, but also joy, whether it comes in the form of my own memories of happy meals – not Happy Meals, from McDonald's, but meals that are happy – or days that I spent on really good farms. Obviously the book is about an industry that is almost entirely horrific, but the story is bigger than just that industry.

JC: You open with a story of generations – what food meant to your grandmother, your family growing up, and now you with a new son. Is choosing to be a vegetarian  a break from tradition, or can tradition accommodate change?

JSF: There are different kinds of traditions. My grandmother was not a vegetarian, and my parents are not vegetarians. On another hand, there's the tradition of wanting your actions to reflect your values. Or wanting to make good choices even when they're difficult or against certain instincts or cravings. Traditions happen on all sorts of levels, and sometimes we have to lose one tradition in order to maintain another.

JC: When you started the book, did you realize how important turkeys and Frank Reese's Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch  would be to telling the arc of the story?

JSF: No, I didn't know very much about Frank Reese. I mean, I'd read a bit about him, mostly because he wins all these taste tests – that's how he became a famous farmer, because he makes food that apparently is the best that anybody is making now. I was really moved -- I was moved by him, his story, his farm, the way he thinks about raising animals, the way he thinks about feeding people. If there's a hero of the book, in a certain way, he's it.

JC: You're going  on Martha Stewart right before Thanksgiving – are you going to talk turkey?

JSF: Presumably – I don't know. I don't boss her around, she bosses me around.

JC: Have you been on Martha Stewart before?

JSF: I was once, with my first book. I've gotten to know her a little bit just because she's very concerned about these issues. She's not a vegetarian herself, but she's a very very strong advocate of family farming, small farming.

JC: In the story you tell, factory farms are growing more and more powerful, to the detriment of more humane small farms. What lesson do you think we should take from that?

JSF: There are a lot of forces that are encouraging the growth of factory farms; they're enormously profitable precisely because they externalize all the real costs. We pay for it through subsidies, we pay for it through environmental degradation, that we are the ones who have to clean up. It's in their business model to destroy the environment. All these forces encouraging the growth of factory farms. It's very hard for small farmers, because it just costs more to raise animals the right way. Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat – to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it. And that's not something that's easy to tell everybody.

JC: How much do you see the book as an exploration, and how much as a call to action? 

Sully's memoir: a good in-flight read?

The memoir from everyone's favorite airline pilot, Capt. Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger, was released earlier this month. In "Highest Duty," Sullenberger, working with co-author Jeffery Zaslow, recounts his personal history, seeded with bits of details about January 15, 2009 -- the day he successfully landed US Airways Flight 1459 in the Hudson River.

Sullenberger seems like a serious ("grounded" just isn't the right word) man. It's charming to read about his lifelong fascination with flight, and that he was more comfortable in a cockpit than with his high school classmates. When he finally got around to asking a girl for a date, what did he do? Take her flying, of course.

That wasn't the woman who would become his wife, although he writes about their romance, their daughters, and the challenges they've faced. He also details his pre-family life, training at the Air Force Academy, getting a master's in "industrial psychology (human factors)," becoming a fighter pilot in the late '70s, and even sharing the salary earned in his first commercial airline job in 1980 -- just $200 per week.

But other things fed into his skill as a pilot. He is fascinated with flying history, and shares his knowledge of plane crashes and water landings. He tells of friends he lost to accidents, his own closest call, and explains what it's like to be a volunteer crash site investigator.

So... do you really want to be reading this while flying on a plane?

The bird strike, engine loss and remarkable landing of that Airbus 320 jetliner take up several chapters of the book. They include Sully's perspective, of course, and mix in the stories of some of the passengers -- although he couldn't have known those things then, all their lives were in his (and his co-pilot's) hands. In places, it'll take your breath away.

It even includes transcripts of the cockpit recorder:

Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System synthetic voice:
     "Terrain terrain. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up..."
Sullenberger: We're gonna brace!

Sullenberger writes it was "awful and beautiful at the same time." Indeed -- could you read that at 30,000 feet?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Steven Day / Associated Press

Rick Moody's Merritt Parkway

The L.A. Times reports today on Connecticut's Merritt Parkway, one of 93 sites added this month to the World Monument Fund's watch list, alongside Machu Picchu in Peru, Shackelton's hut in Antarctica and Sarajevo City Hall. "They are as intentionally designed as the gardens of Versailles," Amy Freitag of the World Monuments Fund told The Times. "They just happen to be roadways."

Although I've driven on the Merritt Parkway a few times, I hadn't given it much thought until I read Rick Moody's essay in "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America." For Moody, who writes about Connecticut, the parkway was an essential part of his youth -- he even references people by their exit -- but he saw, last year, that it was threatened.

The Merritt, in all but a very few places, is never less than verdant, always quaint, always old-fashioned. It suggests a Connecticut of myth, a green and pleasant respite from the high velocity of city life. ...

Recently, however, the parallel 150 feet of green space that runs alongside the Merritt, procured back at the time of the original land acquisition, has come to the attention of the Department of Traffic planners, who'd love to get their hands on it in order to add some more lanes. The state is chipping away at every feature of the Merritt's original design. There's even legislation afoot to permit longer vehicles to drive on the Merritt, thus ending the passenger-cars-only rule that has been on the books since the parkway was first opened. What's to become of this beautiful and iconic roadway? And what becomes of the old idea of Connecticut if the Connecticut that was once visible from the parkway no longer exists?

In our article, reporter Tina Susman writes of the conflicting interests of commuters, preservationists and safety officials. Although the roadway has an accident rate on par with other state thoroughfares, a $67- million safety and rehabilitation project is set to begin before year's end. "Where federal officials see higher guard walls as protection for drivers skirting rivers, preservationists see them as blocking views," Susman writes. "Where federal officials see wider shoulders and lanes as safeguards against hitting trees, preservationists see them as destructive to the forest." And where a writer like Rick Moody sees the parkway, he re-imagines his past.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Balloon boy story is right out of Edgar Allan Poe

The Balloon Boy story may have been a hoax, but it if was, the Heene family is in good company. No less than Edgar Allan Poe had an entirely fictional account of a balloon voyage published in 1844 in the Sun newspaper. The Guardian writes:

The New York Sun published a breathless account of a great step for mankind: "The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind . . . The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon . . . and in the inconceivably brief period of 75 hours from shore to shore!"

In a precursor of the reality shows to which the Heenes apparently aspired, the Sun ran excerpts from the faked diary of the Victoria's navigators, which ended just after their "sighting" off the coast of South Carolina. (In reality, the Atlantic would not be crossed by a balloon until 75 years later, when the rather less romantically named British dirigible R-34 landed in New York City after an 108-hour flight.)

The account was cooked up by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax-lover in an age of hoax-lovers; he perpetrated five others. Poe seems to have rather enjoyed the fuss: "On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement," he later wrote in the Columbia Spy, "the whole square surrounding the Sun building was literally besieged, blocked up from a period soon after sunrise until about two o'clock PM . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. . . I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy."

Edgar Allan Poe's relationship to the Sun may not have always been so amicable. In the book "The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York," author Matthew Goodman recounts tension between the now-famous author and the editor of the Sun, Richard Adams Locke. Locke published a report of supposed moon discoveries: Apparently it was home to poppy fields, unicorns and creatures that were part-man, part-bat. The city, except for Poe, went wild. Our reviewer Jim Ruland wrote:

Apparently, Poe's short story "Hans Phaall -- A Tale," which recounts one explorer's unintentional visit to the moon, was printed shortly before Locke's series ran. Upset that Locke's story became an international sensation while his did not, Poe -- a notorious plagiarist -- was convinced that Locke had stolen the idea from him.

It seems as if fiction and hoax creation are not-too-distant cousins: Hoaxes are just fictions that people don't know are untrue. Maybe it's not surprising that Poe tried his hand at both.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Ed Andrieski / Associated Press

Dave Eggers heading to L.A.

Author, publisher and literary nonprofit guy Dave Eggers is heading to Los Angeles to read from his new book, "Zeitoun." He'll be at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Aug. 20 at 7:30 p.m.

"Zeitoun" is a nonfiction book that follows Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American, who chose to stay in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. And then, as they say, there's more.

It's not the first book to use individual stories to delve into -- and look at the bigger issues around -- Hurricane Katrina. One notable novel is Tom Piazza's "City of Refuge," which climbed to the finals of the Morning News' Tournament of Books in March. Monica Ali wrote, "It paints on a big canvas in the most vivid detail, it’s passionate and yet restrained, and it tells a story that needs to be heard."

Hitting shelves next week is Josh Neufeld's "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge." Originally serialized by Smith magazine, it follows seven New Orleans residents before, during and after Katrina -- and it's a graphic novel. As he was putting the finishing touches on the book, Neufeld told L.A. Times comics blog Hero Complex that he was aware of the other high-profile narratives of the storm: "It's a history that I hope can stand alongside a canon of work that includes Michael Eric Dyson’s 'Come Hell or High Water'; Douglas Brinkley’s 'The Great Deluge'; Spike Lee’s 'When the Levees Broke'; or Tia Lessin, Carl Deal and Kimberly Rivers Roberts’ 'Trouble the Water.' "

Michael Eric Dyson has blurbed Eggers'  book. He writes:

"Zeitoun" is an instant American classic carved from fierce eloquence and a haunting moral sensibility. By wrestling with the demons of xenophobia and racial profiling that converged in the swirling vortex of Hurricane Katrina and post-9/11 America, Eggers lets loose the angels of wisdom and courage that hover over the lives of the beleaguered, but miraculously unbroken, Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun.

Eggers told the Rumpus, "I still have that instinct that says to follow a story if it seems like it hasn’t been fully told." He ended up following this one from New Orleans to Syria. And next week he's bringing it to Los Angeles. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Dave Eggers signing at Book Soup in 2002. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times