Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 35

Robert Ward on Jerry Jeff Walker and David Allan Coe

This might be the greatest interview ever given. Crime novelist and journalist Robert Ward talks about how he got drunk and challenged Jerry Jeff Walker to a street fight,  and provides some some insight into David Allan Coe's fake biker horseshit and fake murderer horseshit. Ending with the story of how he was nearly tossed off the roof of a hotel by a biker gang.

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Speedloader

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Speedloader, a collection of six short stories by some of the best new noir voices out there, is the first offering from Spinetingler Magazine's new Snubnose Press. I just finished it, and edited by Sandra Ruttan and Brian Lindenmuth, it's just as good as you'd expect.

Existential torture, foreign combat, presidential intrigue, talking plastic Army men, and more bodies than you could haul in a dump truck — it's about perfect.

Buy it here, $0.99 for the Kindle.

Guns, Books, Etc.

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"Stories like Whitman's are not uncommon: legal cases involving brain damage crop up increasingly often. As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems, and link them more easily to aberrant behavior. Take the 2000 case of a 40-year-old man we'll call Alex, whose sexual preferences suddenly began to transform. He developed an interest in child pornography—and not just a little interest, but an overwhelming one."
Alice: Madness Returns.
"It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, 'I'm not completely nuuuuts!' Upon further consideration, a more explanative response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there."
Welcome to Zombieland kids.
"There once was this photographer from New York. 'Smile,' she always said. 'Smile!' I couldn't stand her or the whole phenomenon. Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense. So I got rid of both her and the smile."
Get the Fuck a Grip.
A dramatic representation of an excerpt of Ernest Hemingway's letter to Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950. (Someday I'll find my copy of Hemingway's Selected Letters and type out the whole thing.)

Crimes in Southern Indiana

September 7th is the date Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana hits stores, and rumor has it that you'll be able to read excerpts in Playboy before too awful long. I had the good fortune to read the book in draft form awhile ago, and it's fantastic.

As Publisher's Weekly has been saying, of course.

Do yourself a favor, pre-order it.

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Chalk another up for Hoover

Few things enrage me like the existence of the FBI. All that horseshit we pretend to celebrate on our annual day of fireworks and flag-waving are null and void as long as the Bureau exists. Free people don't have a secret political police, and it's well documented that the Bureau operated as such for most of the Twentieth century. Its role was the liquidation of political dissidents and activists from the 1919 Palmer Raids through COINTELPRO, and there's no reason on Earth to think it has changed.

But it wasn't only activists who got destroyed. According to A.E. Hotchner writing in the New York Times, you can add Ernest Hemingway to the list of Bureau casualties. See, towards the end of his life, Hemingway complained to friends and family, including Hotchner, of constant surveillance and harassment by the FBI. He was considered delusional and paranoid, a diagnosis of which led to electroshock therapy, destroying his memory, and thus, in part, his ability to write. One of the most heartbreaking things in the world is his "true foreword" to A Moveable Feast:

This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.

And, wouldn't you know it, according to Hotchner, Hemingway was neither delusional nor paranoid.

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.

The rest.

Call it another notch for Hoover. It's almost enough to make me wish I was a religious man, so's I could believe in a special ring of Hell for that motherfucker. And for everybody else who's done the Bureau's work over the last century.

There are lots of good books on the history of the FBI's war on civil rights. My favorite is Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's Agents of Repression. And if you don't find it convincing, you can see the FBI documents that led them to write the book in The Cointelpro Papers.

The Preacher

This has been living in the back of my head for a couple of years now. I was pointed at it awhile back, fell in love, and proceeded to completely forget what the hell it was, just a kind of vague memory.

Until today. A concerted effort undertaken that paid off. Enjoy.

Part one:

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Part two:

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Part three:

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Update: Here's a transcript.

God created rich people first and then showed them the world they would own and when they came to a field with thousands of headless bodies with torsos and hands like iron, God told them the headless bodies were destined to be poor workers.  The rich cried out, "But these heroes with their iron muscles will crush us."  "Don't be frightened," answered God. "I shall place very small heads and brains on their bodies so until they develop them you've nothing to fear."  Who are still the oppressors?  The rich.  Who are still the oppressed? The poor.  Your slavery is their liberty.  Your poverty is their prosperity. Priests say the poor must be content with their poverty and they'll find heaven hereafter. Idiots, cretinous rag-pickers!  My dog Georges has more sense.  Don't you know that whilst you're gazing up at heaven your pockets are being picked clean, your eyes are plucked out and you're robbed of your birthrights, blind to what is done to you?  Christ's priests seized mankind in its cradle and broke the bad news saying, "You shapeless stench. You can never be anything but filth.  Your only chance of winning a pardon for being so filthy is if you bow low in perfect humility in the face of all the afflictions, sorrows and injustices heaped upon you.  You're poor and you stay poor.  That is how it is meant to be.  Life is a bitter ordeal.  Don't speak out.  Just try and save your worthless soul.  You won't be able to but you'll give us less trouble by trying.  And when the time comes for you to die croaking, the darkness will be as hard to bear as the daylight ever was."  The Church knows its business.  It offers fear and punishment, not happiness, certainly not liberty, only servitude forever and forever.  Religion is a liar and a cheat, yet still you hunger for it.  That's why you've sent for me, Jacques Roux, Mad Jacques, Red Roux, preacher of the poor, sower of sedition, subverter of all laws, a priest who saw the light of reason and now proclaims fellowship with all who live in dark dens and desolate places.  Its fitting that I should preach perhaps my last sermon in a ruined church in the parish of St. Nicholas, summer's end.  I go before the tribunal tomorrow, charged with revolutionary excess.  Now I am, it seems, to revolutionary for the revolution.  And so it begins.  When power rested in one man, King Louis, all sorts complained of oppression, and the nobility, middle, and monied men called on the poor to help.  Together we lopped off that top branch of tyranny but the tree still stands and spreads.  New branches hide the sun of freedom from the poor, the revolutionary tribunal is one such.  I don't recognize its authority to judge me.  Only the poor of St. Nicholas can do that.  I come here, to lay the rags and tatters of my life before my peers.  Habits are hard to break citizens.  I come to confess me. Hear my confession.  Do not forgive me Father, for I have not sinned.

The rest.

Quote

Another from 2666. This from Florita Almada, a seer who has visions about the women and girls being killed in Santa Teresa. She's thinking about a poem she once read about a shepherd boy, which she mistakenly thinks must have been written about Benito Juárez.

What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren't you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd's life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd's life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we'll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you're not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it's hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don't, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you're never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you're calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shard, but an anxiousness invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing, and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it's human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd, but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere, but if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.

Guns, Books, Etc.

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"Beautiful and young, Crosher's subjects are adept at presenting themselves as images to be looked at. Surrounded by exaggerated images of female beauty in mass culture, they have under their belts seventeen years of practice at looking good in photographs."
This'll pick you up.
"If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I'd keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether."
The unhappy looking woman is Rosalynn Carter.
Why I try to repress the tolerant, post-modern father in myself and give a little room to the totalitarian.
"We encourage patrons to read up on the film before choosing to see it, and for those electing to attend, please go in with an open mind and know that Avon has a NO REFUND policy once you have purchased a ticket to see one of our films."
The best line about Ronald Reagan ever said. Bob Dylan too.

Quote

From Slavoj Žižek's Enjoy Your Symptom.

In Chaplin's films, we even find a kind of wild theory of the origins of comedy from the blindness of the audience, i.e., from such a split caused by the mistaken gaze: in The Circus, for example, the tramp, on the run from the police, finds himself on a rope at the top of the circus tent; he starts to gesticulate wildly, trying to keep his balance, while the audience laughs and applauds, mistaking his desperate struggle for survival for a comedian's virtuosity – the origin of comedy is to be sought precisely in such cruel blindness, unaware of the tragic reality of a situation.

Me and Clarence Clemons in the woods

I don't usually put much thought into celebrity deaths. Or, for that matter, most any other thing to do with them. Just me, but I find it a little weird to get worked up about shit that happens to people I don't know. But now and then it happens, and I did start thinking about Clarence Clemons a couple of days ago when I heard about his passing.

I spent most of my childhood amongst back-to-the-landers, raised by my single mother. Most of the places we lived were pretty isolated. We were always desperately broke, raising and butchering as much of our own food as we could, and there were chunks of time we didn't have indoor plumbing or electricity.

But when we did have electricity, we always had a record player, and like most kids, I liked nothing better than laying around listening to music. And though I listened to every album my mother had, there was one in particular I kept coming back to: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.

There were a number of reasons I loved it so much. It was one of very few straight rock and roll albums in my mother's collection for one thing, and I knew that's what kids who didn't live in the woods, who had functioning showers and more than two pair of pants, were listening to. (They weren't. It was pop all the time on the radio stations, and Born to Run had already been out 5-10 years by the time I really go into it.)

But another one of the reasons I listened to it so many times was that I'd been told that my father had bought it. I didn't know much about him at the time, and I was obsessed with anything that had his fingerprints on it. And one of the few pieces of knowledge I had about him was that he lived in New York City, which I was pretty sure that album encapsulated.

See, I knew absolutely nothing about cities — the nearest town to us usually claimed a population of a few thousand — but I was certain that they sounded just like the tension created between Springsteen's voice and Clemon's saxophone.

And I was just sure that there was stuff happening there that'd make my head explode. That blew away my childhood of pissed-off and dead-broke adults, farm chores, haphazard library reading, and poking around in the woods by myself. That'd fucking detonate the boredom and isolation of my upbringing.

Of course, I later learned how wrong I was, but that's what I thought at the time.

And I've been listening to this song the last few days. Especially the sax solo, starting around 4:00.

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