Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 3

New Pike

Today’s the release of the new Simon & Schuster Pocket Star e-book edition of Pike.  I love everything about this release. Pike was my first novel, one that I never actually meant to have published. It was supposed to be a practice book to help me learn the craft. It’s a personal book to me, written when my daughter was first born. She was colicky, and I thought up most of the book up while walking her all over Cincinnati, because walking was the only thing that would calm her down. I’d talk to her the whole time, often telling her the story that would become the book.

It’s a tough town, Cincinnati. We lived there not too long after a series of riots set off by the police killing of an unarmed black kid. Everybody was on edge. We didn’t live in any of the worst neighborhoods, but we lived one neighborhood over, and I always took a handgun in the diaper bag on our walks, because we walked everywhere. Ever since she was six years old, my daughter would ask me if she could read Pike, and I would say, no, not yet. But you’ve been everywhere in the book.

Anyways, the new version’s out today, and I’m thrilled with it. I love the cover, I love the fact that I got to fix some stuff that always bugged me, and I love the fact that it’s out there at a price point where pretty much anybody could afford to give it a shot.

If you’d like to, you can order it from Simon & Schuster, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Kindle, Nook, or Google Play.

Guns, Books, Etc.

East Edge of Atomic City, Idaho.
“I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them. It is a vicious emotional cycle.”
Not the Townes Van Zandt cover I was expecting, but hey, new Hayes Carll.
“Somebody asked Roger Miller that one time. He said, ‘Don’t carry your picks and your pills in the same box‘ [laughs]. Willie has some wisdom about that. He says, ‘Do what you want to do. In case somebody likes it, then you have to go do it again.'”
Given enough time on the internet, it happens to all of us.
“To say that ‘nothing happened to them’ is stunningly wrong. Over the past 35 years the working class has been devalued, the result of an economic version of the Hunger Games. It has pitted everyone against each other, regardless of where they started. Some contestants, such as business owners, were equipped with the fanciest weapons. The working class only had their hands. They lost and have been left to deal on their own.”
Keanu Reeves just became my favorite actor.

Chris Ochs

This is another crowdfunding effort from somebody who can’t pay their medical bills. And I’m still donating where I can and passing them along. Because I’m still angry that folks have to turn to crowdfunding efforts to pay their medical bills.

This one is also for another person who means a lot in our household. Ochs is a real good friend of a real good friend of mine, and somebody I’ve been lucky enough to have a few conversations with, and always looked forward to seeing. He’s a working guy, who I’ve mostly known to take on hard, physical jobs without the means to put anything away in savings.

This is from the gofundme page:

As many of you know, about a week ago Chris Ochs suffered a seizure and collapsed. The seizure is believed to be the first for Chris and his collapse caused a traumatic brain injury that has had Chris in intensive care to this day. He has had three brain surgeries, a tracheotomy, and countless other procedures but just a couple days ago he was taken off a ventilator and is starting to wake up from this devastating accident.

Many of you around the world have grown to know and love my little brother these past few years as he has traveled around always looking for new adventures. It was during this travel that he found his love, Suzi Colpman. Just two months ago, while living in England with Suzi, Chris proposed and they were engaged and planning a soon-to-be wedding for this summer. Not finding any work in England, Chris returned home to get a job and fund this wedding so he and Suzi could be back together. It was at a job interview that Chris suffered his accident.

Throughout the years, Chris has helped out many of us. He loves traveling and meeting great people and carries a lot of lasting friendships with him. He’s hard working and intelligent but also stubborn and the last one to ask for help. I know he wouldn’t like me asking others to help him but he needs it.

Because he is unemployed he isn’t under an insurance provider, his recovery is expected to last several months and he will have a long road even after that. Two people that love him most, his mother Mickey and his fiancée Suzi have traveled here from North Carolina and England to be by him 12 to 24 hours a day putting their lives and jobs on hold. They will probably have to fly back and forth several times over the next few months which will add to expenses.

Whatever assistance you can provide to Chris would be greatly appreciated and allow his family to concentrate on getting him back to the carefree, fun-loving guy we all know him as. Thank you for all your prayers now and in the future.

I’ve already put my household’s donation down. If you’d like to do the same, I can vouch for this one. It’s a real guy, a great guy, in great need.

Donate here.

Saudade

If you’ve ever talked to me about books at all and what they mean to me; about saying “fuck you” to everything called literary in the centers of power and deliberately moving elsewhere; or about why I write the kind of characters I do; or, come to think, about my own character, about that isolated and melancholy sense of being left behind that comes of living in a world that never did seem to fit right; about growing up in the kind of rural lifestyle that was already anachronistic when I was living it, and left me with a ghost sense of authenticity that, now gone, makes me distrust the idea of authenticity altogether; hell, about country music; or about the huge importance of walking outside, preferable alone; about the spiritual worth of a certain kind of hedonism, not to mention of deliberately pushing yourself to the fringes; of rejecting everything that you can’t carry; of refusing as much judgment from your life as you can possibly handle for a kind of radical humanism based on the appetites and John Bradford’s old saw, “There but for the grace of God go I”; of the necessity of lonesomeness as well as joy, because, like Melville says “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces”; of bourbon and heavy reading and fucking in the great outdoors; and all the BIG romantic nonsense I’ll talk about after one too many cups of wine or coffee, well, then you’ve probably heard me quote Big Jim Harrison.

And especially this from his memoir Off to the Side:

The trouble is that over fifty years later this life still lives within me and has presented unpleasant difficulties, including claustrophobia that is occasionally acute. It isn’t the hokum Daniel Boone-Robert Frost, city-country, civilization-wilderness thing, which is far too simple for actual humans, though it occurs regularly in our mythology, especially the aspects of the “mythos” that arise in television and movies. And low-rent fiction. You know, the guy has a pooch, a pet bear, says “darn it” a lot and can’t “abide womenfolk.” I mean something closer to the Portuguese notion of saudade, a person or place or sense of life irretrievably lost; a shadow of your own making that follows you, and though often forgotten can at any moment give rise to heartache, an obtuse sentimentality, a sharp anger that you are not located where you wish to be, an irrational and childish melancholy that you have cheated yourself of being married to a life essence that you have never been able to quite gather to yourself.

Giveaway

Another giveaway, because I still have copies of Cry Father lying around, and I want ’em gone. This one should be even easier than the last, and the last ended in a three way tie after about two minutes.

But that said, here we go:

What’s wrong with this video?

Leave your answer in the comments. First one to get it right gets a copy of Cry Father.

(And just a reminder: If you actually want your copy of Cry Father, you have to message me, email me, tweet me your address. Else I’ll forget. And trust me, I’ll never remember to remind you.)

Update: The answer should be: The video does not show Luke Bryan being handcuffed to a chainlink fence and horsewhipped.

But really, any answer would do, because everything’s wrong with this video. So the winner is Jerry.

Quote

From Black Wings Has My Angel. Good Lord, this book.

“But about the gentleman thing.” She waved her glass. “I want to make it as plain as the nose on your face. I can stand anything in the book but gentlemen. Because I’ve spent a lot of time, too much time with them, and I know why gentlemen are what they are. They’ve decided to be that way after they’ve tried all the real things and flopped at them. They’ve flopped at women. They’ve flopped at standing up on their hind legs and acting like men. They’ve flopped at being individuals. So they say to themselves one fine morning: ‘What can I be that’s no trouble at all and that doesn’t amount to a damned thing, but yet will make everyone look up to me?’ The answer’s simple. Be a gentleman. Take life flat on your back, cry in private, and then in a well-modulated voice.”

Guns, Books, Etc.

“He’s not judgmental, he doesn’t have a savior complex, he just knows the spots that hurt and how to pick at them in plain but inventive song.”
United & Divided: The Songs of the Civil War.
Walt Whitman’s letter for a dying soldier.
Semi-related: Seriously considering one of these to teach the kids to shoot. And, yeah, only because I’ve always wanted a single action revolver with a birds head grip. For no good reason I can think of whatsoever.
Well, it ain’t country, but it’s hard to complain.
“‘Scuse me. You telling me the sun’s burning out? I gotta shine my shoes, be here on time, do my homework, and the fucking sun’s burning out? From that day on, that’s the way he lived his life.”
In a U-Haul North of Damascus. 

Insomnia

I get hit with insomnia now and then. I can go to sleep just fine, but then I wake up around one or two in the morning, and I’m up for hours. I can’t really do anything. I’m too dumb to read anything more serious than a magazine, and I can’t really write. So I just make tea and sit around waiting on it to go away.

It’s usually the sound of my own wheels spinning that wakes me. I’m dreaming, and some part of my mind starts working with the dream, and turns it into an idea or line for my novel.  And, in my sleep, I’m convinced it’s the greatest idea or line ever, and that snaps me awake. So I’ve taken to writing ’em down in my little notebook, in hopes that if I get ’em off my mind I can go back to sleep. It usually doesn’t work, because then I notice how what I wrote is absolutely not the greatest idea or line ever.

This is last night’s line: “They were both look at me and grinning, my wife and this other guy. Not friendly grins, either.  The kind of grin you might get when you pass a guy sitting on the curb, eating his own shit out of a shoebox.”

I have no idea what the dream was, but it cost me two hours of sleep. Obviously worth it.

Spring

This’ll probably be my only post for the week. Gonna fly down to Panama City, Florida with my brother, pick up some stuff, and drive back through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and etc. I’m taking my computer for writing. And We Deserve The Gods We Ask For, Black Wings Has My Angel, Ghost Alphabet, Abbey’s Road, Where All Light Tends to Go, and the Field Guide to Tracking Animals in the Snow (they’re all short, shaddup).

Apparently, it’ll be spring break in Panama City, so I’ll be avoiding everything in the above picture. But it is spring. I don’t know when yours starts, but mine starts right now. I’m not teaching nor doing nothing except for LitFest and a reading or two until August. Nothing but finishing this novel.

So here’s a poem. I’ve undoubtedly shared it before, but it’s my spring poem (even though it’s set in August).

Drinking While Driving – Raymond Carver

It’s August and I have not

Read a book in six months

except something called The Retreat from Moscow

by Caulaincourt

Nevertheless, I am happy

Riding in a car with my brother

and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.

We do not have any place in mind to go,

we are just driving.

If I closed my eyes for a minute

I would be lost, yet

I could gladly lie down and sleep forever

beside this road

My brother nudges me.

Any minute now, something will happen.

Help

I was gonna do this as a giveaway, but it isn’t really. It’s more a plea for help. I’m just hoping somebody knows the answer to this, because it’s been eating me up for nearly a year, and the internet’s of no help.

So . . . in the jail episode of Bob Dylan’s radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan plays a snippet of Merle Haggard saying, “It’s funny, all ex-convicts have something in common — they’ve got their time in, and the rest of you still got yours to do.”

This is the complete transcript of what Haggard said (it’s the sixth episode in season one, for you completests):

“Sing Me Back Home” is a popular song because there’s a lot of ex-convicts in America that form a troop of fans that want to hear that song. It’s funny, all ex-convicts have something in common — they’ve got their time in, and the rest of you still got yours to do.”

If it’s of any use to anybody, here’s the song:

Here’s the thing, I need to find where that damn quote came from. I don’t need a recording of it or anything. I just need to be able to pin it down.

Anybody who can tell me gets a signed copy of Cry Father, and a copy of the new book when it comes out, because that’s what I need it for. You’ll also get my undying gratitude, forever and ever.

You can message it to me, post it here, email me, throw it through my window taped to a brick – I don’t care.

Update: Speaking of which, I’ve already given y’all one gift. Every single episode of Theme Time Radio Hour is online.