Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 20

Welcome Home, The Story of Scott Ostrom

Craig Walker of The Denver Post won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his series about a troubled Iraq war veteran. Hard to argue with that call.

Some of my favorite pictures below; more of ‘em, and supplementary text, here.

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Satan Is Real wrap, two book recommendations, “Hurt Hawks”

I’ve been busier’n hell gutting and rebuilding my second novel, so I apologize for the dearth of new content. But I figured I probably should update on the latest Satan Is Real doings, since I’m about two weeks behind.

So: a review from Creative Loafing Charlotte; Dish Magazine chooses it as one of their Good, Great, & Greatest; one of my favorite literary folks, Terry Teachout, has nice things to say about it on his blog; and The Hillville has a kind review here and interview here. Also, Mandolin Cafe reviews it here, and posts an absolutely gorgeous picture of a 1947 Martin 2-15 customized by Ira Louvin, which I hope they don’t mind me reposting:

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Like I said, I’ve spent most of the last few weeks trying to rattle ideas loose from my head. But I have had a little time to do some reading, and there were two books in particular that I wanted to point to.

The first is Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. If you’re into history, this is a good one. It’s the kind in which you can find references from the likes of Harry Crews to Richard Slotkin, and it isn’t above taking T. Roosevelt off at the knees, if you know what I mean. Highly recommended.

The second is Scott Phillips’ The Walkaway. I had nothing but praise for The Adjustments not too long ago, and this one, this one’s just as good, if not better. So good, in fact, that I really wish I hadn’t started reading it during that aforementioned gutting and rebuilding of my own work, in that he just makes me feel like a complete incompetent.

Lastly, I posted a link to a hypertext version of The Wasteland on Facebook a couple of days ago, and a friend of mine responded with “Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers. Which I haven’t been able to get out of my head. So here it is.

Hurt Hawks — Robinson Jeffers

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits

The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom

And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him

At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;

Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;

but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.

What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

That’s all I got.

Smoking

Stole this from an old friend of mine. To good not to share.

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Things I did not expect when I checked my site stats last night

A mention from Courtney Love Cobain.

Unbelievable

Just yesterday, I was mentioning again how the Denver Police Department seem to face no consequences whatsoever for their actions, no matter how many civilians they shoot or beat into a puddle.

Well, it turns out that they don't play that game in Arapahoe County. If, say, you're a semi-legendary retired Sheriff and you get busted with felony possession of meth and soliciting prostitution, not to mention exploiting your position as Sheriff to molest inmates and strong evidence of a predilection for sexually assaulting minors, you can face consequences.

30 days in jail and a thousand dollar fine.

From the Denver Post:

The judge had to decide whether former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick Sullivan should be treated the same as everyone else or fall under more scrutiny as a law enforcement officer in his meth-for-sex case.

In the end, Arapahoe County Chief District Judge William Sylvester chose somewhere in between.

Sullivan, 69, was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in jail, placed on two years of probation and fined $1,100 after pleading guilty to felony possession of methamphetamine and soliciting for prostitution, a misdemeanor.

The rest.

I'm not sure James Ellroy could plot this.

Update: My favorite part: the guy who sold Sullivan his meth got three years. And don't miss the mention of a tape showing Sullivan raping a 10-15 year old boy. Nor the mention of Sullivan getting kids strung out to keep 'em accessible.

That dirty little coward

One hundred and thirty years ago today Jesse James was shot in the back by Robert Ford. Let's all mourn together.

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Movies

Back in 2008 I had a very, very minor role in the protests at the Democratic National Convention here in Denver. Mainly that meant I walked around trying to act like security for the likes Ward Churchill, Cynthia McKinney, Ron Kovic, and Glenn Spagnuolo.

Of course, I proved myself the world's worst security guard in the first day of the protests by spraining my ankle while trying to run down Bill O'Reilly's man on the street (can't remember his name, and I don't watch that shit, but he was the little guy with glasses).

As would be the case for the rest of the convention, I was entirely unnecessary, anyway, in that by the time I got there about 200 anarchist kids had already surrounded the guy, and were chanting "Fuck Fox News" at him. Which made my heart sing.

My main interest in the thing was I didn't like the way the Denver Police were lining up to stomp the shit out of anyone caught exercising their civil rights. That, and Recreate 68, the organization heading up the protests, weren't backing down on their right to defend themselves against police violence, which I found laudable.

Just to give you an indication of the Denver Police mentality, this is a commemorative T-shirt they had printed up and distributed to officers working crowd control.

The front:

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The back:

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Nor did they disappoint. This is video of one of Denver's finest handling a Code Pink protester.

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Unsurprisingly, there were no consequences for the officer in the video. There never are here in Denver, no matter how egregious the offense. That's why we've got the most brutal police force in the nation.

Anyway, there was a film crew on site, and it looks like they've just released a documentary about the events.

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Also, and kinda related, saw a great crime movie last night, which took as its subject police and political corruption in Rio de Janeiro.

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Highly recommended.

Quote

Three of them. All from Harry Crews.

This one from an interview with Vice.

I like a lot of things that are really not fashionable and really not very nice and which finally, if you've got any sense at all, you know, are totally indefensible. Anybody who is going to defend much of the way I've spent my life is mad. Crazy. It's just that there's so much horseshit in the world. How can you live through it without being madder than hell?

This one taken from Maud Newton, who has a write-up of Harry Crews for The Awl.

I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

And this one from the introduction to Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader.

"We are the sum of all our moments," Thomas Wolfe said. Thank God, I believe that. Nothing is wasted on a writer. If you are lucky, somewhere in the work there will be a place for the unspeakable and the unendurable. Somewhere the bad will fit seamlessly with the good.

Look what I got in the mail

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Actually a couple of weeks ago where it went to my bookshelf and I forgot about it until this morning. It's the copy of Junk Food I ordered last month after finding this quote from a Harry Crews article contained therein. Just finished it, and it's as great as you'd expect.

That's the thing about Crews. His essays are as good as any ever written, and they're just criminally overlooked. I don't want to start a fight about, say, David Foster Wallace, but when I read the kind of accolades he gets for his and I think about Crews, I get a feeling like I've been kicked in the stomach. Not because I don't like DFW's essays, though I don't, but try reading Florida Frenzy or Blook and Grits and not coming away just a little different. Whether the subject is Charles Bronson or the hidden wonders of dog-fighting, they're never easy, they're never cheap, they're always what I think Crews meant when he wrote:

It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause — to look at them and make something of them.

The obit's up at The New York Times. It's good to see him getting the full treatment, I guess.

Shit

It looks like one of my heroes, Harry Crews, has passed away. There nothing in any official sources yet, but that's what The Georgia Review has posted on Facebook.

I've put up a lot of shit about him over the last couple of years, all of which you can find by clicking his name at the bottom of this post. More when we get a proper obit.

I think this quote from Flannery O'Connor from the Harry Crews Online Bibliography sums up a lot of what I find so compelling in his work:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

He's been a huge influence on me, including during the writing of Satan Is Real. To prepare for work, Neil Strauss told me to read classic American literature, to get it in my bones. What I read, twice in a row, was Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I read it because it was the best memoir I knew of, by anyone, anywhere. And I'll stand by that.

Also, this.

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