Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 16

Good morning from Denver

Let the Denver massacre Rorschach game start . . . now.

My favorite theory so far being that these shootings have something to do with the rise of the morally ambiguous protagonists you find in crime fiction and on television shows like Breaking Bad.

Got a chuckle out of that one, as last night my daughter and I saw Richard III, and just about the time the shooting started, we were listening to Nigel Gore answer a question from the audience as to whether he found it difficult to play a character as reprehensible as Richard. “No,” Gore said. “I mean, he killed children and such, but I absolutely love him.”

Anyway, I’ve got the feeling that I’ll be taking the same three lessons from this one that I took from the last one. To whit:

Don’t try to make sense of the senseless.
Practice Jeff Cooper’s states of awareness.
Carry a gun where you can.

Update: A good, quick writeup of Jeff Cooper’s awareness color codes can be found here. It’s the best tool you can have when it comes to self defense, whether or not you choose to carry a gun.

Sven Lindqvist; Crime, love, and rebellion; When singing is the only way out; Growing Up Dead in Texas; My little Smith & Wesson

Sven Lindqvist is one of my favorite writers. And that’s based on only two books, Exterminate All the Brutes and A History of Bombing. I should have read more, and can’t imagine why I haven’t, except that I never seem to run into his others when I’m in book buying mode. Or when I think of him, I’m broke. But still, those two books own me. Not many conversations pass that I don’t quote one or the other. So, man, was I happy to see The Guardian giving him the full treatment recently.

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In the Swede’s favourite and perhaps best book, Exterminate All the Brutes, first published in 1992, Lindqvist writes that “the Germans have been made sole scapegoats of extermination that are actually a common European heritage … The ideas he [Hitler] and all other western people in his childhood breathed were soaked in the conviction that imperialism was a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.”

This, to put it mildly, is a controversial view. For example, Jewish philosopher Steven T Katz in his 1994 book The Holocaust in HistoricalContext argued for the “phenomenological uniqueness of the Holocaust”. And during the historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) in 1980s Germany,Ernst Nolte provoked fury among fellow intellectuals with his contention that the Holocaust was Hitler’s “distorted copy” of Stalin’s extermination of the Kulaks. For Lindqvist, Nolte’s mistake was to look east for Hitler’s inspiration. He should have looked west. Lindqvist writes: “When Hitler sought Lebensraum in the east it was a continental equivalent of the British empire.”

“There are very substantial differences between the Holocaust and other genocides,” he says. “These other genocides can still be reasons for, and causes of, the Holocaust.” In Exterminate All the Brutes Lindqvist suggests that we have airbrushed our past: “We do not want to remember. We want genocide to have begun and ended with nazism. That is what is most comforting.” Now 20 years after the first Swedish edition, he says with some pride, that thanks to his book there is a thriving field of historical research on the effect of colonial atrocities on Nazi crimes.

The rest.

Also, I missed this when it first hit, but Briarpatch Magazine ran a review of Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! earlier this month. They had nice things to say about everyone, but I, of course, really enjoyed this.

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Benjamin Whitmer’s “Cincinatti Lou” features the collection’s most compelling character, and also its most despicable: the racist, sexist and brutally violent Officer Kreiger. Whitmer chronicles the downward spiral of Derrick Kreiger in tight, wicked prose as the cop hunts a black radical through burning Cincinatti streets, set alight by rioters. While Kreiger finally fails, it isn’t clear that the radicals have won.

Indeed, many of the stories fall within the noir tradition that noted crime author Dennis Lehane defines as working-class tragedy. “In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops,” he writes. “In noir, they fall from curbs.” Even when the characters successfully resist oppression, their victories are slight or fleeting.

The rest.

Another one I missed, though only by a couple of days, is a beautiful article about the Louvin Brothers and Satan Is Real by Terry Teachout in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

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Two months before his own death in 2011, Charlie Louvin finished work on an autobiography that was published earlier this year. “Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers” (Igniter/HarperCollins), which has the rough-hewn sound of a real person swapping stories after hours, is one of the most important and illuminating memoirs ever written by a country singer. Not only is it as readable as a first-rate novel, but “Satan Is Real,” which is named after the Louvin Brothers’ best-known album, a 1959 collection of gospel songs, offers urbanites a joltingly vivid glimpse of what it was like to grow up on a Depression-era farm.

The rest.

And, since we’re talking memoirs, I just finished Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones.

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It’s incredible. Whatever you’re reading now, just put it down, and pick Growing Up Dead in Texas up instead. It’s not only a fantastic crime novel, but also the best memoir of a writer since Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.

From the publisher:

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it’s still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas’s cotton.

Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what’s stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction.

And nobody was ever caught.

Greenwood just leaned forward into next year’s work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn’t start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it’s another thing, though.

Now Stephen’s going back. His first time back since he graduated high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can’t go back. For the ones who never got to leave.

Part mystery, part memoir, Growing Up Dead in Texas is packed with more secrets than your average graveyard. Stephen Graham Jones’ breakout novel is a story about Texas. It’s a story about farming. A story about finally standing up from the dead and walking away.

Lastly, thanks to shael, this (with careful attention to the engraved grips).

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If you’re having trouble tracking what’s so special them, well, try here.

My favorite patriotic country song

Since it’s the day for that sort of thing.

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Legalizing drugs vs. global peace

From an interview with Charles Bowden at The Rumpus.

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If drugs were legalized in the US, the Mexican economy would collapse since the earnings from drugs bring in more hard currency than its largest licit source, oil sales. Mexico is a corrupt state that has now become dependent on the earnings on an illegal product. But inevitably, the product will become legal and then Mexico will retain its corruption but must face the needs of its citizens now employed by the drug industry who have become steeped in violence and conditioned to higher incomes.

Legalized drugs would cause dislocations in the US economy–the prison industry for example and tens of billions spent annually on drug enforcement. But because the US economy is so large, this would be a minor blow, hardly as severe as the ultimate nightmare for the US economy, global peace, which would shutter its death industry commonly called the military/industrial complex.

The rest.

A f*ckload of Scotch tape

Trailer for a short movie based on short stories penned by Jedidiah Ayres.

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Even better, there’s a book of short stories to follow. I’ll have more to say about that, no doubt. Can’t wait to get it in hand.

To the motorcyclists of Colorado

I like your toy. It’s a good looking toy, for sure. I’ve got an affinity for expensive toys myself, although in my case it’s mostly guns. But your toy is far cooler than any of mine, as I’ll be the first to admit. None of my toys necessitate a special uniform, for one thing. And, hey, even though I think you look ridiculous, I can see the appeal.

But here’s the thing. You’ve chosen to ride a toy. And, because it’s a choice you made, I don’t owe you any special consideration at all. Not even a little bit. If you’re zipping in and out of lanes, pretty much ignoring all the rules of traffic, and I don’t notice your dumb ass, and you nearly get pasteboarded to my grill, that’s all your problem and none of my own.

In fact, I’m kind of for it. Because, see, you’re riding a fucking toy.

Sincerely yours,

Ben

p.s. That goes double for you bicyclists, too. Please get the fuck on the sidewalk if you can’t keep up with traffic.

You should keep giving Christa Faust money

So she’ll keep writing what she wants to. Because then everybody wins.

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I want to turn lesbian readers on to hardboiled pulp and I want to get hardboiled pulp enthusiasts to identify with a lesbian protagonist. I want to mix it up and make people think, entertaining the hell out of them along the way.

I published the first Butch Fatale novel as an e-book, just to gauge interest and see if it could find an audience despite the naysayers who told me it was a waste of time. I did it all on my own, paid for out of my own pocket, and was pleasantly surprised by all the glowing reviews and positive feedback. Now that I see I’m not the only one who thinks these are stories worth telling, I’d love to continue the series.

That’s where you come in.

Your donation will not only help me write the next book in the Butch Fatale series, it also allows me to publish a special Ace Double style print edition of both books for those without e-readers or who just prefer old-school paper.

So thank you all for your generous support, for believing in this project and for giving the collective finger to those who said nobody wants to read about a butch private eye.

The rest.

Well, that was quick

Turns out I do have to something to say. And it’s that the Hunter Hauk piece about Satan Is Real that came out in July’s issue of Cowboys & Indians has now been posted.

Before losing his battle with pancreatic cancer in early 2011, Charlie spent the better part of the prior year sharing his stories with cowriter Benjamin Whitmer — about growing up under a slave driver of a father, dreaming of and finally succeeding at playing the Grand Ole Opry, and dealing with his brother’s infamous volatility.

Whitmer cobbled together the comments from those interviews to fashion a biography of Charlie and Ira Louvin that reads more like an oral history. Hearing Charlie tell all those stories instilled in Whitmer a strong sense of responsibility to stay true to his subject’s voice and style — salty language, colloquialisms, and all.

“I took a lot of time organizing and finding ways to make it a narrative while trying to keep his voice as strong as possible,” Whitmer said during a phone interview from his Denver home. “Once I heard [Charlie] talk, it was obvious that his voice would be the heart of the book.”

The rest.

 

Pinterest

I created a Pinterest account, and I think it’s a dream come true for random internet links. Which, really, is about 90% of my interest in the internet.

It’s on the sidebar now under the heading “Guns, Books, Etc.” Click on any of the thumbnails to be taken to the item, click again to access whatever site I stole the image from.

If it all works out, I’ll probably be posting most of my random stuff there, and save this blog space for when I actually have something to say. Which these days ain’t very often.

Quote

Two of them, actually, variations on a theme.

The first from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

I could tell her, and may have to, that if there is one thing above all others that I despise, it is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

The second from Billy Joe Shaver’s “Texas Uphere Tennessee.”

Won’t you roll me another one, don’t try to mother me

I know I can’t see the forest but I think I feel the trees

And anyway, goin’s where I guess I’m always gonna be

I declare I feel like Texas when I’m uphere Tennessee