Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 18

Fill your hands you son of a bitch

A custom engraved York Arms AR-15 lower receiver.

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I don’t seem to fit anywhere

One of my favorite Billy Joe Shaver songs.

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It will keep being wrong

Tom Franklin remembers William Gay.

He cut his own hair. In warm weather, he’d bathe in the creek behind his house. He hunted ginseng in the woods when the season was right. He tended a vegetable garden that grew tomatoes, squash, okra, carrots, and onions. He smoked Marlboros. He sometimes wrote in a tree house on his property. Women loved him. They wanted to take care of him, to fatten him up. He never drove. He wrote. He wrote in yellow legal tablets, one stacked on another. His favorite restaurant was Waffle House. In the ’60s, he heard Janis Joplin play in Greenwich Village, and when he requested a Bob Dylan song, she snapped, “We don’t do covers, sir.” He loved him some Bob Dylan. He lovedDavid Letterman, too, and the Cubs. He loved Seinfeld, Deadwood, William Faulkner, Bill Clinton, AC/DC. He loved movies, though he never went to a theater. Most of all he loved his children, and his grandchildren. He had high Cherokee cheekbones and small brown eyes that got lost when he smiled. The skin of his face had deep lines in it that seemed to hint at hard living. When the writer Janisse Ray met him, at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, she said, “You look like a man who’s been shot at.” And he did, he looked like a man who’d been shot at. There’d be weeks he wouldn’t answer his phone. It might be disconnected, or it might just ring and ring. If it went on too long, we’d all start worrying, his friends, calling one another. Have you talked to William? Have you talked to William?

The rest.

Bogart

Stolen from Slowboat Films, because it seemed right. Go get ‘em, Ward.

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Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado oral arguments

Taking place tomorrow before the Colorado Supreme Court as follows:

Thursday, June 7, 1:00 pm

Old Supreme Court Chambers

State Capitol Building, 200 E. Colfax

Backstory here.

Quote

From The Rumpus.

Everyone worships at the altar of Brando, but Brando never did. Close friend Jack Nicholson said that he was sure Brando considered himself the best actor alive, but Brando also once told Elia Kazan, “Here I am a balding, middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act.” It isn’t that he didn’t think he was good; it’s that he didn’t think being good at acting amounted to much. As far as Brando was concerned, he was a genius at an idiotic pursuit.

It’s more than just meth labs and single wides

A country noir primer from Keith Rawson, who is kind enough to mention Pike.

My life is good and my politics are bullshit

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The one thing I’ve learned from social media is that people love to post Photoshopped pictures of shit that scares them. And, man, they’re scared of everything. Microwaves, Republicans, voting, Democrats, not voting, plastic containers, coffee, second-hand smoke, people who own guns, people who don’t, non-organic food, the ozone layer, drinking water, but mostly, not living a full and satisfying life. I’m not sure what a fulfilled life is, but from what I hear it’s got something to do with dancing, gardening, and wine.

Thing I keep thinking is, my wife and kids are healthy and there’s food on the table every night. Meaning, I don’t have shit-all to be scared of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems in the world, of course. But one other thing I’ve learned from social media is that Photoshopped pictures posted on social media sites have exactly zero chance of changing anything at all. I’m not even scared of having an unfulfilled life, and I avoid dancing, gardening, and wine as much as possible.

Luckily, even though I’m chronically unfulfilled, I’ve lucked out with this writing thing, which is turning out to be a better mid-life crisis than I could have ever dreamed up. For instance, here are a couple of nice blog posts from readers about Satan Is Real, one from lost in angeles and one from Dislocations. Also, an interview I did for WJBC in Central Illinois with Steve Fast. And the Éditions Gallmeister product page for Pike. All good stuff, and more to come.

Speaking of good stuff, Ward Churchill’s case against the University of Colorado is hitting the Colorado Supreme Court next month, with opening arguments scheduled for June 7th. All the details are here. Unfortunately, I’ll be tied up most of the week of the 7th, but I hope to figure something out. There’s nothing I’d love more than to watch David Lane and Ward Churchill mop the floor with the same assemblage of McCarthyite liars and perjurists they dismantled the last time around.

Also, and apropos of nothing, I’m going through another round of edits on my next novel, and just as I was getting hung up on this one scene that has some political undertones — though not necessarily mine — I Googled something about Todd Snider and came up with this quote:

While Snider’s studio albums can’t hide an obvious learning curve, his songwriting stands alone with equal parts tongue-in-cheek storytelling and barefoot prophet modesty. With his finger close to the pulse of social and political issues, Snider often offers his own cathartic diagnosis. Songs like “New York Banker”, “Conservative Christian” and “Happy New Year” are ideological ballads for a generation of hippie-folk troubadours, but Snider is the first to write off the Woody Guthrie comparisons.

“I just don’t want to be one of those folk singers who gets caught up in the idea that I know something,” Snider said. “I see politics more as exploitive in that I use it to whatever degree I have to be a folk singer. It’s not a very noble thing, but I never claimed to be noble. I’m just a traveling singer. I’m just one of the guys.”

The rest.

It occurs to me that I’m just about there. That the more I concentrate on novels, the more my own politics get exposed as complete bullshit. Turns out most of my beliefs are pretty transitory things. Sometimes they’re whatever I need to get myself into the head of a character or pin down a fictional circumstance. Sometimes I just take whatever side seems most interesting. Sometimes I’ll adopt a stance just because it irritates people who irritate me. But the rest of it, all those big, noble-headed ideas about shit that I have absolutely no control over — whether we’re at war with Eurasia or Eastasia and which president started it — is starting to feel like just one more thing dribbling down my leg. And worthy of about that much attention.

To celebrate that, here’s the touching story of how psychedelic mushrooms turned Todd Snider from the score-board watching jock that his dad was hoping for to the peace-loving, pot-smoking, porn-watching, lazy-ass hippy that he became.

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And here’s a great interview, including mentions of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bill Hicks, and Garth Brooks’ songwriter.

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And here he is talking and singing a song about my other favorite songwriter, Billy Joe Shaver, and his son, guitar virtuoso, Eddie Shaver.

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Also, since I’m posting videos, and it’s Bob Dylan’s birthday, I think this one sums up my favorite Bob Dylan right now. Still no word if he’s read Satan Is Real yet, but it does my heart good just knowing he’s got a copy on his shelf.

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Anyway, just so you know, I’m vacationing next week, and will be hitting some editorial deadlines thereafter, so unless something big happens, it’ll probably be blog silence for the near future. I may pop up here and there on Facebook and Twitter, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, my advice to everyone: life’s hard enough without making it harder. If you have something that’s actually threatening you, take care of it. But stop being scared of shit that doesn’t actually threaten you.

Just my two cents. I intend on spending the next few weeks reading books, spending too much time around cartoon characters, writing, hanging out with my family, riding roller coasters, eating shit I think tastes good, hopefully doing a little shooting, taking walks, and generally enjoying myself in an unfulfilled manner.

Muzzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs

So, I come home last night and open my mailbox to find two treats. The first being an 1894-1895 Montgomery Ward catalog. And the second, the second I’ve been salivating over since I found out it existed thanks to somebody on Facebook (and, sorry, can’t for the life of me remember who): Muzzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs by Joe Coleman.

From the product description:

Muzzlers features five stories: “You Can’t Win,” which adapts the memoir of the same name by Jack Black, the notorious early 20th century con-man, thief, opium addict, convict and author; “Boxcar Bertha,” which is about the depression-era female hobo who is driven to prostitution, only to be led to salvation by an unwanted pregnancy; “Carl Panzram, #31614,” which depicts the life of the notorious serial killer and rapist who declared, “I hate the whole damned human race, including myself” and who expressed his thirst for murder right up to his own execution; “The Final Days of John Paul Knowles,” a.k.a. “The Final Days of the Boston Strangler,” which is equally a story about Sandy Fawkes, the woman who narrowly escaped being Knowles’ seventeenth victim; the last story in the collection is “The Wages of Sin,”a brief manifesto on human suffering and the people and institutions that perpetuate it (priests, scientists and military, e.g.). With the exception of “The Wages of Sin,” which serves as a kind of coda to the other four stories presented, each piece is written in the first person, putting the reader into the minds of each subject. Muzzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs is presented in a handsome, compact format that resembles a Big Little Book, though one strictly for grown-ups.

It’s a beautiful little book. And as soon as I finish with another “manifesto on human suffering and the people and institutions that perpetuate it,” Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which I realized not long ago that somehow I’d never read in its entirety, I’m digging in.

In sort of the same vein, I very much appreciated this review from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of Satan Is Real.

Whitmer’s skill is evident in the smooth flow of more than 75 years of history divided into brief, anecdotal chapters, and in the way he seems to have stepped aside and left the tape running. Everything else is pure, unvarnished Charlie Louvin: plainspoken, blunt, funny, sharing his homespun wisdom about life, love, drinking and playing country music at every turn, with language occasionally rough enough to strip paint. There are times when you can almost hear his gravelly voice and smell his cigarette burning.

Between the lines, though, we can see him returning again and again  to the Cain-and-Abel motif, determined to wrestle this big brother mystery to the ground and get it right for once. In the process of recalling the self-destructive behavior on and off stage that eventually ended his and Ira’s harmonies, both musical and fraternal, their relationship unfolds in all its affectionate, frustrating, messy, loyal and complicated glory.

The rest.

And this one from Ink 19:

Satan Is Real is a great read, full of insights that any fan of “real” country music will enjoy. Be forewarned: Charlie ain’t a preacher, and spares no salty language or ribald commentary when telling his tale. And what a tale it is. From back-breaking poverty growing up in Sand Mountain to acclaim on the Grand Old Opry and all points in-between, the Louvin Brothers’ story is a compulsive read, and in the end, as cherished as their music.

The rest.

Also, Mr. Slowboat was kind enough to send me this via Facebook (from here):

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And, lastly, I want to have tea with Alan Rickman.

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Quote

From Carlos Fuentes, who died today.

When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

The rest.

I haven’t read enough of his books, but I picked up a copy of The Old Gringo at a library sale somewhere along the way, and its become one of my favorites.