Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 17

Deeper well

I used to joke that the only reason I signed on to work on Satan Is Real is on the off chance I’d get to meet Emmylou Harris. Except I wasn’t joking. Somewhere, in a perfect world, there’s a process by which boys become men, a coming of age ritual, and it consists of kneeling before Emmylou and her putting her hand on the crown of your head if you’re worthy, approving you to venture forth in the world and act in accordance with her heart.

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One more off her latest album, Hard Bargain.

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Quote

From Tam, who has been considering those smart phone apps that some people install to keep everyone around them apprised of their exact location at all times.

I mean, seriously, unless your name is Chris Hansen, the only use for these programs is to basically yell “Yoo-hoo! Beastie! Come and eat me!” I toyed with the idea of setting up a bogus profile as a 22-year-old named Tiffani-with-an-”i” myself, but figured that I’d run afoul of the Department of Natural Resources for hunting over bait.

The rest.

Satan Is Real in Cowboys & Indians

I had the good fortune to talk to Hunter Hauk of Cowboys & Indians a couple of months ago about Satan Is Real, and the results made it into this issue:

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Right now you have to buy a copy to read the article, but I’ll post a link if it becomes available. Mr. Hauk did a hell of a job, I think, but it’s worth picking up for the article about Woody Guthrie, too.

Father’s day score

The chair, that is. And it reclines. To soon be situated in the bookshelf room of our new home.

It explains last night’s insomnia, I think. I mean, with a chair like that, who wouldn’t wake up at 3:30 and read until sunrise? (Especially if the book they started at 3:30 is Stephen Graham Jones’ Growing Up Dead in Texas.)

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Something happening here

From Creeping Irrelevance. Unrest at the University of South Carolina, 1970.

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33 revolutions per page

Another great review of Satan Is Real, this one from The Austin Chronicle.

Satan Is Real is plainspoken in its prose and penetrating in its wisdom. Louvin’s ability to recollect specifics makes it a historical read, and his talent for contextualizing events makes it profoundly human. Unforgettable cameos by Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Bill Monroe aren’t name-dropping: They help you understand what the Louvin Brothers meant in their day.

The rest.

A man on the gallows can afford to tell the truth

A very nice review of Satan Is Real from Oxford American. This is one of those that means a lot to me, given the quality of writing they continuously put forth. I particularly liked this, because I don’t think I ever found Colonel Loudermilk as unsympathetic as a lot of folks do.

There are the shenanigans of the brothers as children on a farm in Sand Mountain, Alabama, where their stern father, though presented as a strict disciplinarian, becomes quite sympathetic considering the stunts the boys pulled in a time when a tenant farmer earned maybe $200 a year: ruining his hound; ruining a heifer; taking sharecropping money meant for singing lessons and spending it on candy and tobacco.

The rest.

Hell is other artists

First Thursday Art Schlock and Hey, Author.

Ward Churchill background

As I mentioned recently, Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado went before the Colorado Supreme Court last week. In a stroke of great timing, the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom has published two pieces germane to the case.

The first is the “Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill” by the Colorado Conference of the AAUP, which, as expected, vindicates Churchill of all the plagiarism horseshit trumped up by UCB administration.

The second is a piece by Ward Churchill himself, entitled “In Response to Ellen Schrecker’s ‘Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain’”. It’s specifically a response to a really bizarre piece by Ellen Schrecker that appeared in the same journal in 2010, but also stands as a pretty good summary of the problems with the UCB’s process, and a breakdown of the trial which is now up for appeal at the Colorado Supreme Court.

Because, lest we forget, Ward Churchill won that trial. As he writes:

Any lingering doubts that the charges lodged against me by the UCB administration were pretextual, or that the investigative committee’s findings were fraudulent, should have been dispelled by the verdict obtaining from the 2009 trial of the First Amendment and wrongful termination lawsuit I filed against the University of Colorado Board of Regents (in its official capacity) the morning after my firing. As Schrecker observed in this regard, the jurors were unanimous in concluding that I’d been fired illegally, in retaliation for my constitutionally protected expression of political views. As she also observed, the jury split regarding the amount I should be awarded in compensation for damages sustained as a result of the university’s unlawful actions, with five of the six jurors voting to bestow a “generous financial settlement,” and the sixth refusing for ideological reasons to award me anything at all. Rather than end with a hung jury because of an issue I’d told them was of no particular concern to me, the five compromised by awarding me $1.

So far, so good, but the verdict addressed four questions, not two. Schrecker, in common with the university’s public relations personnel and the Denver-area media, offered no hint that this was so, or that the jury found unanimously in my favor regarding both of the other issues. The first, that I did in fact suffer tangible damages as a result of the university’s illegal course of conduct, is in obvious ways implicit to the discussion of compensation, so they can perhaps be forgiven for not having bothered to point it out. The same does not pertain to the second, however, given that it consisted of the jury’s determination that the university had failed to show any legitimate grounds for my firing.

Why I shop at Walmart

Besides the ability to buy beans and ammunition in the same place. From The Guardian.

“Like when you buy an organic apple, you’re doing it for ideological reasons, it makes you feel good: ‘I’m doing something for Mother Earth,’ and so on. But in what sense are we engaged? It’s a false engagement. Paradoxically, we do these things to avoid really doing things. It makes you feel good. You recycle, you send £5 a month to some Somali orphan, and you did your duty.” But really, we’ve been tricked into operating safety valves that allow the status quo to survive unchallenged? “Yes, exactly.” The obsession of western liberals with identity politics only distracts from class struggle, and while Žižek doesn’t defend any version of communism ever seen in practice, he remains what he calls a “complicated Marxist” with revolutionary ideals.

The rest.

Also, this. Hard to argue with this.

“For me, the idea of hell is the American type of parties. Or, when they ask me to give a talk, and they say something like, ‘After the talk there will just be a small reception’ – I know this is hell. This means all the frustrated idiots, who are not able to ask you a question at the end of the talk, come to you and, usually, they start: ‘Professor Žižek, I know you must be tired, but …’ Well, fuck you. If you know that I am tired, why are you asking me? I’m really more and more becoming Stalinist. Liberals always say about totalitarians that they like humanity, as such, but they have no empathy for concrete people, no? OK, that fits me perfectly. Humanity? Yes, it’s OK – some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, 99% are boring idiots.”

The rest.

Of course, I’m probably one of the boring idiots. In fact, I’m pretty sure of it. But all the better reason to avoid parties.