Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 34

ONE Part II

M.A. Littler, the maverick filmmaker behind The Kingdom of Survival, which just got picked for the Montreal World Film Festival, is taking over today with a poem.

ONE Part II

Do not give yourself to them

Whoever they may be

Unless they give themselves to you

All part of ONE

Do not rage at their ways

Your rage fuels their fire

And extinguishes yours

Let life and work be ONE

Do not separate

Or divide what is not separable

Separation makes the entity incomplete

And causes

Sickness of the mind and body

Let the woods teach you about life and death

Not scholars

Of ever changing theory and ideology

Dance naked in the woods like Blake

Jump naked into winter streams

Like the man they locked up for his feeble mind

Don't forsake pleasure and adventure like I have

For too long

Remove ambition

It has brought us nothing but wars

And broken hearts

Breathe

Breathe

Breathe

Don't reject the mystery

No one ever knew

The ones who said they did

Dug their own abyss with a silver spoon

Don't detach mind from body or body from mind

Remember the holy number

ONE

You can't defeat death

But you can defeat the life not lived

Strip

Expose your heart

Expose your mind

Expose the spirit

Thy enemies will scatter like horrified death birds

Nothing is as blinding as a courageous soul

Forget everything but

ONE

All is ONE.

The Kingdom of Survival premier

Per Variety, M.A. Littler's latest, The Kingdom of Survival, will be premiering at The Montreal World Film Festival as one of their Documentaries of the World. Full lineup here.

I had the good fortune to watch the movie a couple of months ago and loved it. M.A. Littler also took over this blog a little while back to try to compress some of the experience of the movie into verse.

And there's a new trailer:

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It's an amazing film, and if you get a chance to check it out when it tours the US, make sure you do so.

Fiction notes

I can't do reviews anymore, I don't think. It's partly a matter of time — I just don't have the time to do an adequate job — and partly that I feel weird about it now that I'm actually getting more writing of my own out there. I think you've gotta pick a side.

But I'm reading a lot, and there's books I really really want to point to. So, in no particular order:

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I've been saying this everywhere, but read Megan Abbott's The End of Everything. I finished it in one day last weekend. Pretty much did nothing that day but read, leaving my kids to do whatever the hell they wanted. Which it turns out was to watch the History Channel's Haunted Houses, read scary books, and have my 5-year-old boy mount a remarkably efficacious campaign of terror on my 7-year-old girl. She didn't leave my lap for twelve hours, and it was a very long night, but, shit, what a book. I haven't read one that moved me like that since probably Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

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Read Allan Guthrie's Slammer. Len Wanner recommended this to me during a conversation we were having about the way an aesthetic of violence makes some readers, and writers, uncomfortable. It pretty much ensures I'll never try my hand at a prison novel, ever. For the same reason I'd steer clear of, say, writing a novel that featured a melancholy Dane as the protagonist.

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Okay, I haven't read Seven Spanish Angels yet, because I don't have a Kindle and reading on my cell phone is starting to hurt my eyes. (Related: just sent my carry gun off to get a new wide notch rear sight and a brass bead on the front, more on that coming.) But I need, badly, to figure out a way to read this one. Here's a summary from Stephen Graham Jones' website, where he discusses the nigh epic route to getting this book published:

Life isn't easy in El Paso, Texas. Neither is death. Caught between them is crime-scene tech in-training Marta Villarreal, trying to work a case that may very well be her last. And she's having to work it without her assigned homicide escort, who's also kind of her boyfriend, and would look a lot more innocent if he would just come in, answer some questions about all these dead girls. Have the Juarez murders come north of the border now, or is it a copycat? And, why these women, why now? For as long as Marta can remember, the El Paso sun has baked the ground into a hard shell, so the dead can't climb out. Not this week, though. This week the dead are all over town. And Marta may be among them.

I'll read it one way or another, and soon. I don't believe I have a choice. And then I'll say more.

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Lastly (and speaking of the need for a Kindle, since I feel kinda like I'm stealing by downloading the .pdf) Crimefactory #7 came out today. Haven't read it yet either, but that's another sure thing.

All right, back to doing whatever the hell it is that I do.

Update: Changed the title of this post from "Crime fiction notes" to "Fiction notes." Because I'm sick of pretending that making a distinction between crime fiction and literary fiction makes any sense at all.

Update II: Also:

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Got bored

New theme.

King Automatic — There Is No Truth In The Night

Video by Slowboat Films. Probably watched it six or eight times now, probably won't stop at any point today.

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Running Down the Walls 2011

Denver Anarchist Black Cross is holding a 5k run to raise money for stipends for American political prisoners. Obviously, I ain't gonna run. But if you're running, I will be somewhere along the route passing out water. So I hope to see you there.

Running Down the Walls 2011

Saturday July 30th

9:30 am- 1:30pm

Starting at La Raza Park (38th and Navajo)

Over the last weekend of July, hundreds of people across the country will participate in solidarity 5k runs in communities and prisons. This collective event, known as Running Down the Walls, has been held annually since 2002. Each year, Anarchist Black Cross chapters, prisoners, and allies, participate in these runs to raise funds for the Anarchist Black Cross Federation Warchest (a fund that sends monthly stipends to political prisoners across the country), and other support efforts for political prisoners and prisoners of war.

The rest.

Guns, Books, Etc.

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"'The history of literature' should not be synonymous with 'the evolution of literature,' because to think that way seems to me to be narrow minded, flawed, and Jonathan Franzen."
The Adjustment .
"For even the best of them (with a few rare exceptions) devote their entire time to work which has no more possibility of distinction than a Pekinese has of becoming a Great Dane: to asinine musicals about technicolor legs and the yowling of night-club singers; to 'psychological' dramas with wooden plots, stock characters, and that persistent note of fuzzy earnestness which suggests the conversation of schoolgirls in puberty; to sprightly and sophisticated comedies (we hope) in which the gags are as stale as the attitudes, in which there is always a drink in every hand, a butler in every doorway, and a telephone on the edge of every bathtub; to historical epics in which the male actors look like female impersonators, and the lovely feminine star looks just a little too starry-eyed for a babe who has spent half her life swapping husbands; and last but not least, to those pictures of deep social import in which everybody is thoughtful and grown-up and sincere and the more difficult problems of life are wordily resolved into a unanimous vote of confidence in the inviolability of the Constitution, the sanctity of the home, and the paramount importance of the streamlined kitchen."
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED.
Bob Dylan's grandson is now rapping.
"Ignore the jailers' talk. There are of course bad jailers and less bad. In certain conditions it's useful to note the difference. But what they say—including the less evil ones—is bullshit. Their hymns, their shibboleths, their incanted words security, democracy, identity, civilization, flexibility, productivity, human rights, integration, terrorism, freedom are repeated and repeated in order to confuse, divide, distract, and sedate all fellow prisoners. On this side of the walls, words spoken by the jailers are meaningless and are no longer useful for thought. They cut through nothing. Reject them even when thinking silently to oneself."
"You don't pull the trigger, you squeeze it."

Arthouse

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There's an incredible interview with Jeffrey DeShell on Colin Marshall's The Marketplace of Ideas. I just finished DeShell's latest, Arthouse, which is a retelling of William Faulkner's Sanctuary set in a meth lab compound in Pueblo, Colorado. From the FC2 website, which does a better job of summing it up than I could:

Arthouse is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell's inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor's journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.

The podcast has one of the greatest lines to ever come the internet. After DeShell mentions that Arthouse was based on Sanctuary, Marshall says, "Now, Sanctuary, not usually the Faulkner novel you see assigned in school."

DeShell laughs, and says, "Well, yeah, for a number of sort of, I guess, corncobberies."

That sense of humor is everywhere. Along with the stuff that ain't so humorous. Or maybe is, I dunno. There's an argument about nostalgia in there that had me shifting in my skin, suddenly entirely uncomfortable (I listen to pretty much exclusively +30 year old country music, and spend half my reading time buried in books about 120+ year old Indian wars). And another about film and architecture which set me to hunting down a copy of The Conformist.

It's a brilliant novel. One that doesn't violate or rupture the formulas and conventions of noir, but explodes them. Like the best of Jim Nisbet's work, upon finishing you kinda just stand back and wonder at the thing. Right before you read it through a second time, notebook close at hand.

Cheap at twice the price

If you buy the Kindle version of Pike for $2.99 I will not come to your house and piss in your sink. Ever. You can consider it Ben-coming-to-your-house-and-pissing-in-your-sink insurance.

Pike on the Kindle

I just heard that Pike is now going for $2.99 on the Kindle. I don't want to start a war about ebook prices, but I think that's very cool. I don't actually have a Kindle, but I have the app on my smart phone, and that's about what I'll happily pay.

Right here, if you want it.