Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 33

Quote

From The Rumpus.

The Help is billed as inspirational, charming and heart warming. That's true if your heart is warmed by narrow, condescending, mostly racist depictions of black people in 1960s Mississippi, overly sympathetic depictions of the white women who employed the help, the excessive, inaccurate use of dialect, and the glaring omissions with regards to the stirring Civil Rights Movement in which, as Martha Southgate points out, in Entertainment Weekly, "…white people were the help," and where "the architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American." The Help, I have decided, is science fiction, creating an alternate universe to the one we live in.

Probably won't see that one.

Update: It gets worse:

If you do bring your brain to The Help, the movie is worse than you might imagine. Seeing The Help through a critical lens was excruciating.  At one point, while teaching Celia Foote to make fried chicken, Minny says, "Frying chicken tend to make me feel better about life." That a line about the solace found in the preparation of fried foods made it into a book and movie produced this decade says a great deal about where we are in acting right about race.

My Top Ten Noirs of the Last Ten Years (or so)

Man, I can't say what an honor it is to be included on this list.

Guns, Books, Etc.

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"Like a fat something-awful: hockey-player-pumpkin-cartoon-shithead."
Francis Bean Cobain X Scumfuck.
I think I'm supposed to be upset or something by this, not amused.
"I wanted to meet what there was here to meet. But they seem to have scented my being different and excluded me, just all squares instinctively do. And these people, Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Capote, are just as square as the St. Louis Country Club set I was raised with, and they sensed I was different and never accepted me as one of them."
Riot porn, 2011.
The world's smallest pistol.
"Newly published research suggests the connection between egotism and inventiveness is more than anecdotal. Participants in a large study who consider themselves creative, and regularly participate in creative activities, scored low on a personality test measuring honesty and humility."

Subterranean Books at Bouchercon

Thanks to the incredibly nice folks at Subterranean Books, one of the great St. Louis independent bookstores, Gary Phillips and I will be signing books in their booth at Bouchercon on Saturday, September 17th from 11AM to 1PM.

You should come to see Gary Phillips, you should pretend to give a shit about me.

Pike reviewed by Evan Dempsey

Just up, a very kind Pike review from the Scottish crime fiction website, The Crime of it All:

So begins a picaresque journey through the different levels of Cincinnatti society, as Pike and Rory invade crack houses, shanty towns, rehab centres and middle-class living rooms in pursuit of Derrick. The plot lurches from confrontation to confrontation, and every one is expertly rendered. The most effective are those that pit our heroes against ordinary decent people. I found myself thrown outside the ethical world of the plot, thinking what it would be like to be confronted with a pair of hulking brutes like Pike and his sidekick. It was disconcerting to find myself coming down on the side of these bloodthirsty bottom-feeders and their maniacal mission. Like them, I was infected with contempt for the soft-fleshed wrapped-in-cotton-wool white-collar world.

The rest.

Benjamin Whitmer's 'Pike' reviewed by Evan Dempsey

Just up, a very kind Pike review from the Scottish crime fiction website, The Crime of it All:

So begins a picaresque journey through the different levels of Cincinnatti society, as Pike and Rory invade crack houses, shanty towns, rehab centres and middle-class living rooms in pursuit of Derrick. The plot lurches from confrontation to confrontation, and every one is expertly rendered. The most effective are those that pit our heroes against ordinary decent people. I found myself thrown outside the ethical world of the plot, thinking what it would be like to be confronted with a pair of hulking brutes like Pike and his sidekick. It was disconcerting to find myself coming down on the side of these bloodthirsty bottom-feeders and their maniacal mission. Like them, I was infected with contempt for the soft-fleshed wrapped-in-cotton-wool white-collar world.

The rest.

Maybe it's just me

But it's getting to the point where I pretty much equate tactical with dumb. And here's a good example as to why:

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Even if you can overlook how silly most of the exercises seem for anything even approaching reasonable self-defense training, they're dangerous. Stupid dangerous. As Tam put it:

It is only a matter of time until some chiropodist at a weekend SWAT fantasy camp gets his kidneys blown out his navel by the Bushhamster of the stranger behind him in the stack preparing to practice breaching and clearing, and somebody like 20/20 or 60 Minutes is going to have a frickin' field day with it.

To add to that, what sense does it make to run any of these goofy exercises in the context of actually carrying a firearm and preparing yourself to use it in self defense? I mean, I'm a writer. My daily uniform is jeans and some kinda button-up shirt (precisely because they're easy to conceal a firearm with). There has never been a day when I've thought, Hey, you know what would make sense? I should put on a full black SWAT getup and run over to Sunflower Market to pick up some goat cheese!

Speaking of guns, just got my 1911 back from Novak with new sights — a black wide-notch rear and a brass bead front. I haven't shot it yet, but, man, they're easy to pick up. Pictures soon.

Question

Why am I supposed to give a shit about the fluctuations of the pretend money of the rich again?

Bouchercon 2011 program

Got two panels on the schedule for Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis next month. The first will be just after the opening ceremonies, Thursday evening. Given the subject matter, rosters, and rumored existence of a cash bar, I imagine that it's liable to get a little rowdy.

9:00 P.M. – 10:00 P.M.

BAD SEED-Majestic A,B,C

Sex, Violence, and Everything That Makes A Book Great

Craig Montgomery (M), Christa Faust, Chris Holm, Craig Johnson, Scott Phillips, John Rector, Benjamin Whitmer, Jonathan Woods

My second I'll be moderating on Friday. I'm a sucker for caper novels, running all the way back to Huckleberry Finn, The Reivers, and the metaphysical grandaddy of them all, The Confidence Man (which, with enough drinks in me, I'll use as a touchstone to argue my ass off that Blood Meridian is one as well, just with very high stakes). I'm well enough aware of my own limitations to know that I'll never have the plotting chops to pull one off, so moderating this panel is as close as I'm likely to get. And I couldn't be more excited.

11:30 A.M. – 12:30 P.M.

HOT ICE-Landmark 1,2,3

Caper novels

Benjamin Whitmer (M), Eoin Colfer, Sean Doolittle, Chris Ewan, Peter Spiegelman, Keith Thomson

Otherwise, you'll probably find me holding up the hotel bar. Which, I'll admit, is pretty much my reason for attending, anyway. There's a bunch of people I've gotten to know on the internet who I can't wait to meet face-to-face, and some more that I met last year that I'm looking real forward to seeing again. And, of course, if last year is any indication, I'll come away with more new friends that I could even imagine. My plan: have a fucking ball.

You can find the rest of the Bouchercon 2011 program here.

Guns, Books, Etc.

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"In 1898, the Parisian art gallery owner Maurice Joyant photographed his childhood friend defecating on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie. The series of photos would have been forgotten, had Joyant's friend not been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the acclaimed French painter. Their intention in taking these photos — and later allowing them to be published in postcard form — was unclear, but these photographs remain the earliest photographic testaments to celebrities behaving dubiously, a century before Internet made such indiscretions well-known and widespread."
A tobacconist.
"It is oddly comforting, this horror story. The play maddens. It defies lessons, morals. There are no cracks where light seeps in. It seems to be saying, in fact actually comes right out and says: life is bloody awful, plus meaningless, and then we die. It's just that it says it so achingly well. All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. When so much contemporary popular culture exhorts us to find the upside, the half-fullness of our big wonderful glass, it's a relief to hear a trusted voice from centuries past say: well, actually, no."
Seems kinda like selling a Jesus Christ Hammer & Nail Set, but I still want one.
"I got a mean temper, I'm a big liar, broke all the laws, set the house on fire. When I stand before Jesus and he asks me to kneel, I'll tell him maybe we can make a deal."
A cocaine-fueled footchase through the desert. And it's a cartoon.
"That's how you tell a story. You gotta know how to lie and lie very well about what you you've seen, heard, read and done. Let the reader decide on what's true and what isn't."