Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 38

Criminal Independents

Literary Kicks is gonna be spending the next few months introducing independent crime presses and highlighting some of their titles. And they started with New Pulp Press and PM Press, including a nice short review of Pike.

A stand-out for the sheer urgency of its narrative drive, Pike is a stark examination of the boundary beyond which redemption becomes impossible. The title character is a former bad man living in comfortable anonymity in small-town Northern Ohio. His quiet life is endangered when a daughter he wasn't aware he had tracks him down in the aftermath of her mother's murder. Soon a crooked Cincinnati cop comes nosing around, and Pike's suspicions lead him back to the bottom-barrel slums he once haunted to investigate. While Pike takes a few questionable detours, it manages to find its way back – moving forward with the inevitability of a runaway freight train. Rarely do debut novels pack such a punch.

The rest.

It occurs to me that if I didn't already have a name for my blog, Questionable Detours would be just about perfect.

Individualism

In my review of Kingdom of Survival the day before yesterday, I made mention that I found Sasha Lilly's arguments against individualism less than compelling. And a commenter on the post asked this great question:

I'm curious about Sasha Lilly's anti-individualism perspective you find so uncompelling. I often find that in conversations about living life outside of the mainstream, it is women who come back to our communal needs. Perhaps this is because women are oft saddled with the obligation of caring for offspring which is perilously difficult to do alone? I wonder to myself at times if the impulse to limit individualism comes from people whose individualism has been limited due to biological reasons…females, the disabled, etc.?

So I've been thinking about that, and I thought I'd try to type something coherent about it. But first I thought it best to bang out a short transcript of what Lilly actually said so's I couldn't misrepresent it entirely. So here goes. It's rough, but hopefully not too inaccurate.

I'm skeptical of individual solutions, situated as I am in the United States. Where there's a very deep strain of individualism historically. Often times when society feels oppressive to people they withdraw and take individual action. The joke is that in the United States you can find fifty people doing anything you can think of.  Y'know, whatever it is, fifty people somewhere in the US are doing it.  And I think actually, although this tendency runs very strongly throughout US history, I think its become particularly pronounced over the last quarter century, a bit longer too. Because in the last period of real collective social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s there was a sense that you could change society together.  And yet at the same time there was a very strong ethos of the importance of individual freedom, of self expression, and so on.

But I think the way that kind of unfolded – I mean, it's no surprise that social movements ebb and flow, that there are moments of upheaval and then moments of entrenchment – but unfortunately what we've seen in the last quarter century in this country is a quarter century of entrenchment.  And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that although there was this collectivist spirit in the 60s in the new left, there was also this very strong individualistic strain that I will define freedom myself, I'll find my own personal freedom, I'll go off and do my own thing.  And unfortunately I think that ended up giving heft and momentum to the new way that capitalism reorganized itself starting in the 1970s, which, y'know, often times gets turned to neoliberalism.  Very much based on the free marked, on individuals maximizing their self interest leading to the greatest satisfaction for everyone.

What someone should do now when they feel the oppressive boot of society upon them is to resist that impulse to pull into one's self.  To go off and join that fifty other doing their one esoteric thing, and think about social change in collective action.

What I rankled at there is, well, I'm a writer. And I don't believe in collective actions when it comes to writing. I once heard one of my favorite writers, Jeffrey DeShell, comment that a community of writers is impossible, and that really struck me.  I'm thankful for all the folks I've met recently through writing, but the fact remains it's only a community in that we'd all like each other to do well at what we're individually doing.

Nick Mamatas, another writer who I have a world of respect for, wrote a great piece recently arguing against craft that includes a line I've had on my mind a lot lately: "Writing . . . is a matter of deploying a relatively small number of tools from a toolkit of infinite size in order to solve problems that don't exist until they are solved through the use of the tool."

I think that's as good a definition of the process of fiction writing, at least how I do it, that I've ever heard. And it follows that the problem at stake is solely one writer's problem. As are the tools to be used or ignored. If there's any kind of real community it comes only from other books. As Cormac McCarthy once said, "The ugly fact is books are made out of books." But that doesn't make that community of other books anything like a collectivity. In fact, if you're anything like me, other books do nothing but help construct the problems you end up with.

Now maybe Lilly and I are talking about two entirely different things. Writing novels ain't necessarily about creating social change — though they can do so, and I often use Melville's books, particularly White Jacket, as an example — but even then, the writer has to withdraw into individual action to write the book. Because that's what writing is.

When it comes down to it, I have to be one of those fifty people Lilly talks about, else I can't do what I do. Maybe other people can do it differently, and God bless them for it, but there are no other options for me. That may be entirely my problem. And it may make me a selfish prick. (In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.) But I spend almost all my free time alone in a small space, either writing, staring at walls, or reading. And I can't do it any other way.

That's why I buck at arguments against individualism. And why I have no interest in any kind of collective action that precludes individual action. Because pretty much everything I do is contingent on individual action.

I hope that makes sense. And I hope it doesn't sound like I'm taking much exception with Lilly at all. Hell, I think she's probably right in everything she says. But because of who I am and what I do, I find her argument against individualism uncompelling. Not wrong, not even unconvincing. But something I absolutely can't live with.

Kingdom of Survival

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I finally got a chance to sit down and watch M.A. Littler's latest movie, The Kingdom of Survival recently. I was a hugely impressed by his last film The Folksinger, a meditation on country music, making art when you ain't millionaire, and the America that I love but can't always define; the one that's getting run over by globalization, mall culture, and our ever-expanding security state.

In many ways The Kingdom of Survival is a similar meditation, but this time on American skepticism. And not the self-indulgent, anti-religious kind which passes for free thinking among the left these days. (I tend to think that the main reason folks on the left love to rail against religion so much is because they understand there's nothing at stake in doing so.)

No, this is the kind that takes aim squarely at what's taken for granted in the mainstream. The kind, for instance, given us by Noam Chomsky, who opens the film by reminding us that hierarchy and governmental control should never be considered self-justifying. And that the argument usually given in support of centralized government — because that's the way its always been — is no argument at all. After all, up until only a few decades ago it had "always been" in most places that women were considered property of their husbands or fathers.

And then there's Joe Bageant. Anybody who's talked to me in the last month knows how obsessed I am with Bageant right now. Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of the best books I've read in years, and Bageant doesn't disappoint here. The first words out of his mouth are:

I don't like middle-class people very much. I just don't like 'em. And it's because of my background. They tend to get smug really fast.  Their 401ks are on the backs of my brothers and my father and people like that, is the reason they make money in the stock market. Because these people suck shit and beat themselves into the ground every day to make value that other people keep.

I'm pretty sure I couldn't have said that better if I had ten years and ten thousand words. I never knew Bageant, but, man, I can feel the hole in the fucking world left by his recent passing. He wrote the kind of shit I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to read.

The movie ain't all politics, though. Some of the most poignant stuff comes from folksinger Willy Tea, and his ruminations on baseball and living outside the mainstream. I kept being reminded of Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture and Hakim Bey's concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, both of which I've been thinking hard about for my almost-completed second novel.

As with The Folksinger, The Kingdom of Survival is an honest consideration of its subjects, if you know what I mean. I found Ramsey Kanaan's arguments against capitalism and for anarchism just about as compelling as it gets. And I found Sasha Lilly's arguments against individualism less so. Though I get they're the natural conclusion of much that I liked about Kanaan's. And I'm self-aware enough to understand my dedication to individualism verges on the pathological.

Meaning only that it's a jumbled up thing, and I have no fucking idea how to answer most of the questions raised by this movie, questions that often seem to boil down to one: how in the hell can one be free in a country that consumes and co-opts everything? Is skepticism enough? That's a question that's at the heart of most of my thinking these days. And I don't have any more answers now than I had when I first started asking it.

But when I come across a work like this one I'm incredibly thankful. It's the kind of thing you almost think can't exist until you see it: a rich and beautiful movie that leaves you satisfied, without ever trying to give cheap answers to the unanswerable. Unlike The Folksinger, it didn't make me want to jump up and give testament to the instant fellowship I felt; it made me want to take a walk in the mountains and maybe try to stare a fencepost down. Which is to say, I loved it.

But you should decide for yourself. So here's the trailer and some clips.

The trailer:

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Noam Chomsky:

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Joe Bageant:

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Ramsey Kanaan:

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Will "The Bull" Taylor:

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Apaches65

A documentary about author Jim Harrison. Mainly posted here for myself, so it's all in one easy place for me to watch it.

Part one:

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Part two:

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Part three:

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Part four:

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My Top Ten Crimewaves in '10

So I was looking for something entirely different here — namely a review of The Road I wrote awhile back (and found) — and came across this Best Of list from one of the writers of The Mentalist. I've never actually seen the show, because I watch very little television — and that's not bragging, I'd love to watch more, I just don't have time — I'll take a look now, of course.

Is it right to call Pike noir?  I'd say no.  It's dark pulp, too explosive and lurid to make it as noir.  But that's no slight; Pike is brutal good fun, with more interest in the beauty of hard language than any other recent crime fiction that I've read.  Pick it up.

The rest.

Update: Also, noticed this really nice mention in a great interview with Eric Beetner, whose One Too Many Blows to the Head I just started last night, oddly enough.

Two guys who push the fringes of style and brutal beauty are Benjamin Whitmer whose novel "Pike" has been winning awards and high praise all over and Frank Bill who will have his debut, "Crimes of Southern Indiana" in print very soon. Both those guys really stretch the language and write compelling and extreme crime stories.

The rest.

Willie Nelson's 4th of July picnic, 1974

So I was surfing YouTube looking for a version of the Billy Joe Shaver song "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me" as sung by Waylon Jennings that I'd come across before. And, after finding it, I noticed that it was from one of Willie Nelson's infamous 4th of July picnics. And I thought, well, shit, I wonder if they've got any more songs from it.

And look what I found. The whole goddamn thing.

This internet shit, it's the best.

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Quote

From an essay entitled "Pass It Down" by Nick Bowden in a fucking remarkable literary magazine by the name of Burnt Bridge, which I just got turned onto.

I grew up a part of a group who disliked police, judges, bosses, politicians, bankers, and bill collectors. These were people grouped together on the other side of a line from us. They were people who could evict you from your house (this happened to three families I knew of growing up), could arrest you for having a little fun (my father's uncle, who distilled his own corn whiskey, six months in jail), or just make your life miserable by hassling you for your last buck, always adding arbitrary late fees, penalties, surcharges. They were all in on it together, working against us at every turn.

"If you're in trouble," my father had always told me, "call me and your brother first, and we'll come running. Then call the cops." If we drove past a state trooper writing a ticket, or three or four black and whites flashing blue lights while the policemen that drove them cuffed people, my father would always say something like "Pig sons of bitches." If we saw a police chase on television, we cheered for the crooks, no matter what they had done. And they always got caught.

The rest.

The great darkness

About a month ago, I posted about a line I ran across in Sarah Watts' Rough Rider in the White House. It was a striking sentence by Owen Wister about how the holocaust of WWI laid waste to the blood-and-thunder fantasies of he and his fellow red-blooded American authors.

I had trouble believing it, to be honest. Wister's The Virginian is one of the Western novels that sorta laid the ground rules for all those that followed. But following is the full passage, from his Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, which is long out of print:

The great darkness and the great enlightenment proceeded. Four years of it drew a line between all we had known and what we had come to know. Our new selves could never return to our old selves; not because we had lost a brother, a husband, a son, an irreparable friend; some of us had lost no one very near or dear. It was not grief that taught us anything unknown, it was having myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true. We had read the words in histories, poems, plays; we did not doubt that Joan of Arc had been burned, and that Attila had been known as the Scourge of God. Books, nothing but book, romance, far away and long ago, that is all it meant to us. It can never mean that any more, unless to those whose lack of imagination insulates them from emotional currents.

Turn back to the newspapers. Look at their front pages. The spy is no longer Cooper's hero, no longer Mr. Gilette thrilling us agreeably on the stage in his Secret Service. Secret Service, enemy secret service, is in our streets and homes, opening our trunks and letters, listening to our table talk. Secret service is blowing up du Pont powder mills; attempting to wreck communication between Canada and the United States. I am watching the Missouri from the rear platform as my Burlington train crosses the river at Plattsmouth. A train main tells me to come inside; no one allowed out there; secret agents drop bombs on bridges. Boys you last saw in tennis flannels or dinner jackets are in the Foreign Legion, or with the English, enlisted by way of Canada. You hear of their deaths. You hear of a new word, shell-shock. You hear of London houses wrecked by zeppelin raids. You hear of gas at Ypress. You hear of submarines.

Of course, I don't think Theodore Roosevelt himself was affected in any such way. As WWI approached, he was trying to trump up another volunteer cavalry regiment to relive his Rough Rider glory days. But then, I'm not sure there's been enough industrial warfare made that could satiate Roosevelt's bloodlust. Even the death of his oldest son, Quentin, who was shot down behind German lines, didn't seem to give him much pause.

I find Roosevelt endlessly fascinating. As I've said before, and will say again, part of that is because he seems to me the figure through which American Indian policy becomes American Imperial policy, if you know what I mean. Which suggests an interesting dynamic in itself. After all, the horror of indiscriminate butchery which WWI represented to Wister was hardly new.

The Wounded Knee massacre which marked the final stage of military extermination of American Indians wasn't that long ago. And Roosevelt was directly involved in the total warfare that the US  visited upon the Philippines, which included calls for the complete extermination of the Moros by Roosevelt's hero and military mentor, Colonel Leonard Wood — and which Wood enacted at the Moro Crater Massacre.

What was new, at least to some degree, was that in WWI, as in WWII, Europeans were engaging in massive and total warfare against their own. That's what Wister is objecting to here. Wholesale slaughter can be romantic when it's Indians or Moros on the receiving end; not so when it's Europeans.

You've got to almost respect the lunatic purity of Roosevelt's vision. In a way, he's the most egalitarian of madmen. He doesn't really give a shit who's on the receiving end: war is always pure.

2011 Spinetingler Award Best Novel: New Voice – WINNER

Well, this is sure as hell not something I expected, but somehow Pike won Spinetingler Magazine's award for Best Novel: New Voice. Of course, it may be because I was offering to buy drinks for anybody who voted for it over on Facebook, but, still, I'll take it. I'm just stupid happy that enough people cared about the book to bother.

As always, I'm incredibly thankful for the generosity of the crime fiction community. Pike has been read by more folks and treated far kinder than I ever expected, and I can't say how grateful I am for that. Nor would it be possible for me to say how much I appreciate the folks at PM Press — including Andrea Gibbons, Ramsey Kanaan, and Gary Phillips — for taking a chance on a novel that pretty much every crime fiction publisher in America said was unpublishable. The same goes for my agent, Gary Heidt, who stayed the course through all that rejection.

Maybe All It Takes Is Patience

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The following was written by M.A. Littler, as an attempt to compress the experience of his new movie, Kingdom of Survival, into verse.

Of course, Mr. Littler is the maverick filmmaker behind Slowboat Films, which made The Folk Singer, one of my favorite films. I haven't seen Kingdom of Survival yet, but I have a copy, and am chomping at the bit to do so.

Maybe All It Takes Is Patience

The government, the state, the law, Jack it ain't no building you can wreck

It's an idea

A stubborn sonumabitch of an idea, that metastases through our organisms like the Big Bad C

The rulers and the ruled alike are high on that sacred phallic trinity – authority, hierarchy & power.

Well Jack, they claim I am a prophet of chaos

Comparisons to the plundering hoards of the Mongol empire

Roll of the tip of their purple tongues like black honey

They've breastfed their children two myths:

The fear of death & the fear of anarchy

They are helpless containing the first

The latter they've built gulags for, concentration camps, hospitals, asylums, prison systems and schools

They've raised their spawn in fear of their neighbor – the neighbor, Jack is the enemy

Without organization orchestrated by the selected few, chaos will befall our world like a rampant wild fire

Repeat the lie and it becomes the truth

The bestial masses must be governed, not by themselves, Jack but by others – government by the few over the many

Rape, murder, plundering, insanity

Let's take a look at it, shall we Jack?

Let's take a look at Nicaragua 'round about 1981

Only a dead Sandinista is a good Sandinista!

Or how about Bergen Belsen, My Lai, mass bombings in Laos and Cambodia that never happened…

Now you tell me Jack, who did the raping?

Who did the murdering?

Who did the plundering?

Who's insanity made Bosch's depiction of hell look like a Norman Rockwell painting?

The bestial masses?

Yes and no, Jack

The masses pay for the wars

The masses fight those wars but they do not wage those wars

They merely pay their blood tax on the battle field for imaginary nation states

Sacrificing themselves and theirs as if executing an ancient prophecy

Why do the bestial masses consent to be governed, Jack?

Slaves embrace their slavery, since they know nothing else

The concentration camps of the future will be voluntary

Pop a pill, listen to your teacher, every man needs a trade, connect your brain to the cybernetic spider web and nod off into oblivion

Forget the physical world – the physical world is pregnant with pain

Follow the direction, follow the feedback

Make sure to share the values of your kings, even though you'll never touch a sliver of it

Why work for yourself if you can work for others?

Why not build the prison walls that will hold you captive?

Why not accept crime and punishment inflicted upon you, imposed by others?

Why not enjoy the complete lack of control until they place you in a pine box 6 feet underground at Potter's Field?

Maybe man shall be merry on the other side, Jack

Maybe all it takes is patience.

Here's the trailer. I'm buried in writing projects, but I can't wait until I can carve out two hours to sit down and watch the damn thing.

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