Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 39

We hate you already

The Guardian ran a great article written by Martin Amis about Christopher Hitchens last Sunday. Of course, I hate Hitchens for almost everything but his rhetoric. Meaning, I think he oughtta be horsewhipped for about half of his political beliefs and shot for the other half, but whenever I spot an article by him, I read it. And I tend to read articles about him, too.

An excerpt:

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."

We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

The rest.

Well, I'm somewhere on that sliding scale, anyway. I sure as hell don't think like a genius, I don't write like a distinguished author, but I do speak like a child. In fact, I seem to turn stone fucking idiot the minute I'm put in any social situation. Which is, I guess, a kind of blessing, in that I avoid social situations and spend most of my time writing.

Read the article, though. It's very funny. Amis lets fly a couple of very funny barbed asides, and gives us four of Hitchens' best retorts. And a few quotes from the new The Quotable Hitchens, including two of my favorites: "Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife," and, "If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."

It also ends with a very moving plea for agnosticism, which is something that's been on my mind of late.

Seven Questions With Elizabeth A. White

Elizabeth A. White, to whom I, like a whole bunch of authors, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude was interviewed by Jeff Strand yesterday. And gave me yet another reason to owe her, big time.

3. Who are the best writers working today that not enough people are reading?

Wow. Unfortunately there are so many, some of whom haven't even gotten mainstream contracts yet. Two that have a fair amount published I highly encourage people to track down are Steve Mosby (The 50/50 Killer, Cry for Help, Black Flowers, etc.) and Duane Swierczynski (The Wheelman, Expiration Date, etc.). Mosby is difficult to find in the U.S., but BookDepository.com does free worldwide shipping. People should also be jumping onboard the trains of authors Benjamin Whitmer (Pike), Wallace Stroby (Cold Shot to the Heart), and Lynn Kostoff (Late Rain). Damn, there are so many.

Some more that I recommend are Chris F. Holm (8 Pounds), Chuck Wendig (Irregular Creatures, Double Dead – coming soon), Josh Stallings (Beautiful, Naked & Dead), Anthony Neil Smith (Yellow Medicine), Dave White (More Sinned Against – and no relation), and Brett Battles (Little Girl Gone, Sick). And authors with debuts coming in the not too distant future you should be on the lookout for are John Hornor Jacobs (Southern Gods), Frank Bill (Crimes in Southern Indiana), Stephen Blackmoore (City of the Lost), and Owen Laukkanen (The Professionals).

I could go on and on. It's sad so many great authors are either struggling just to get signed or are still flying under the mainstream's radar.

The rest.

Joe Bageant and Jon Stewart

There was a time when I'd catch Jon Stewart's show now and then, and do a little chuckling. Now I just get bored. The targets are always easy, and his particular brand of smug satisfaction and heavy-handed elitism leaves me cold.

I think the shtick that finally sent me over the edge was the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear of last October. It probably made good television and all, but it looked to me like just another way to make fun of people who are really fucking scared about the way their lives are disintegrating in the wake of our brave new economy, and grasping about for any way they can to understand it.

I guess Stewart actually stood up at the end of the event and said something about how that's exactly what he wasn't trying to do — that he didn't mean to make fun of anybody's fears. But if Stewart has one great talent, it's his ability to anticipate criticism and wriggle out from under it. Which is another reason he gets on my damned nerves.

Anyway, who cares, right? He's a cable television personality. Something that interests me just about as much as the life cycle of a fruit fly. But I caught this snippet of Joe Bageant, the author of  Deerhunting with Jesus, talking about Stewart on YouTube recently, and I thought it was a perfect example of why Bageant's fast becoming one of my favorite writers.

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Quote

Another Roberto Bolaño quote from 2666. This given us by an white American reporter in Santa Teresa — a fictionalized Juarez — where, like Juarez, hundreds of young women are being murdered.

The Spaniards, who were hot-blooded and didn't think too far ahead, mixed with the Indian women, raped them, forced them to practice their religion, and thought that meant they were turning the country white. Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping from the bottom up, when what would've made more sense would be raping from the top down. They might have gotten some results if they'd been capable of raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren. But who's going to go out raping people when you're seventy and you can hardly stand on your own two feet?

Next project

I've made mention of my next project here and there, but I've yet to go into much detail. Mainly that's because I haven't had a contract in hand, and being the pessimist I am, I kinda figured it'd fall through somehow. But I signed off on my part yesterday and mailed it out, so it's official. As of sometime early next year, I'll be listed as the "with guy" alongside Charlie Louvin, for a book called something like Satan Is Real: The True Story of the Louvin Brothers. As the title suggests, the book mainly covers Charlie's  tumultuous time with Ira, but not exclusively.

I'm still not entirely sure how the project came about, if you want the truth. My agent — and, man, I can't say enough good things about Mr. Gary Heidt of Signature Literary Agency — called me up last July saying that he'd been pinged looking for a writer for a project about a bluegrass artist. I didn't know who the bluegrass artist was, but it sounded like something worth checking out, so I put together some excerpts from Pike and sent 'em off. Lo and behold, within a couple of days I was on the phone with Neil Strauss and Anthony Bozza, who run Igniter Books.

Obviously, when I heard this project was Charlie Louvin's memoirs, I was thrilled. I first heard the Louvin Brothers through Emmylou Harris, with whom I've been in love my whole life, pretty much. I remember mooning over her album covers at five years old. (I'm not too proud to say that I still do, now and then.) And the list of artists who've been influenced by the Louvin Brothers includes just about everyone I listen to, from the country and western folks, to Graham Parsons, Wilco, Will Oldham, and Nick Cave.

And then there's the Louvin Brothers themselves, who are like some spectral reminder of the fragility of life. As Emmylou Harris herself put it, "there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers." This is exactly the music I love, and getting to sit with Charlie Louvin and talk about the origins of it has been a dream come true for me. Not to mention getting to hear first-hand stories of his dealings with Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. Say what you will, I put these songs up there with Melville and Faulkner. This is the poetry of the rural working class, and when all the Harvard and Yale scribblers in the country have turned into dust, I'm of the opinion these songs will still be around.

Anyway, in case you can't tell, I'm pretty excited with the project. Having it drop in my lap has been one of the greatest gifts I've ever been given. The folks at Igniter are just wonderful to work with — laid back and brilliant and everything you'd want — and Charlie and his family have been incredibly generous.

And anybody who knows anything about the story of Charlie and Ira Louvin, knows it's a hell of a story. Just perfectly the kind of story that plays to every one of my interests. I'm just hoping whatever I've brought to the table helps it be told in some way.

How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? — Barry Graham

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If you think about it, most crime novels don't take violence very seriously.  For that matter, neither does much of the rest of the stuff produced by our violence-obsessed culture. Folks complain about violence, lampoon it, get titillated by it — at least as represented on the page or screen — but very few seem to seriously consider it. What constitutes violence? When is it necessary, when is it not? Who has the right to use it? Those are the kind of questions you'd expect crime fiction to be all over, but instead you're unlikely to find them outside of non-fiction works like William T. Vollmann's indomitable Rising Up and Rising Down.

More than sex even, violence has been reduced to its least interesting components.  Which is in itself interesting, because there is no other human behavior with a more wide or varied range. But when you do find it taken seriously, there is nothing more thrilling. And that's the case with How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy?, an excellent short novel from Arizona author, Barry Graham, newly available for the Kindle.

Those aforementioned questions about violence come early in Graham's novel. Our narrator, Andy Saunders, is a practicing Buddhist and a practiced killer — trained by the US military — who, after a friend is raped and murdered, begins teaching self-defense classes for women. One of his first pieces of advice runs as follows:

"I'm going to teach you effective methods of taking out people who're trying to hurt you. In a life-threatening situation, the appropriate level of force is one which at least maims and preferably kills your opponent. Do any of you own guns?"

About ten hands were raised, mostly male.

"Well, I want all of you to get guns and learn how to use them. And, if anyone fucks with you, I want you to shoot them twice in the chest and once in the face. That, I assure you, will make them forget about trying to hurt you."

It's advice I couldn't agree with more, but it tends to upset our narrator's girlfriend, Jeanine, who fancies herself a pacifist.

She had a real problem with my background. She was a pacifist, and couldn't stand even the idea of violence. The fact that I'd killed people scared her, and it scared her even more that I didn't have a guilt trip about it. She told me vaguely that she'd seen a lot of violence in her childhood — a family thing she didn't want to talk about — and that consequently she'd always chosen placid or timid men who'd never even gotten into playground brawls in grade school.

I've always thought that to be a true pacifist, the kind that preaches a universal pacifism, that claims that they would never resort to violence under any circumstance, one has to suffer from an extraordinarily sheltered life. I can't begin to comprehend anyone who has, at the very least, ever opened a newspaper or listened to the conversation at your average beerjoint, but can't envision a case where they'd defend the ones they love against the seemingly inexhaustible human capacity for cruelty. Even if you've never experienced violence firsthand — and I know very few who haven't — it's not like there's a scarcity of secondhand examples out there.

Likewise, it seems to be a position you have to be a little soft on your history to enjoy. Though there have been some historical contexts where non-violent political action has made sense, there have been plenty of others where it was the worst possible option. If you don't believe me, ask Black Kettle. Or Andy, from Graham's novel:

Pacifism is a beautiful ideal, but if you say no to fighting then you say yes to concentration camps, torture, oppression. You say yes to Auschwitz and Dachau. You can't go up to an Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin and say, "Look, this isn't very nice. Why don't you knock it off?" You're going to need guns to shoot them with and bombs to drop on them if you're going to stop what they're doing.

It's true that there are some people who will live their entire life and never have to worry about violence. But those people come almost exclusively from the upper classes, where any violence they might encounter is heavily mitigated by those they hire to use violence on their behalf — like, say, the police. But holding a principled stance of pacifism is not quite the same thing as just living a life that need never actually worry about the reality of violence, because others take care of it for them. Which is another point that Graham's character Andy puts quite well:

When Mara was killed and I started the classes, Janine was disgusted. We couldn't even argue about it, it was all so black and white to her. She said I was training people to be no better than whoever had killed Mara. I told her that kind of sermonizing was the indulgence of a well-fed, overprivileged white girl. She got angry and said that we shouldn't discuss it any more.

Of course, there's nothing quite as disgusting as that sort of attempt to conflate all forms of violence. I can't hear that kind of horseshit without being reminded of this striking passage from Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology.

It is obscene to suggest that a woman who kills a man attempting to rape her becomes like the rapist. It is obscene to suggest that by fighting back Tecumseh became like those who are stealing his peoples' land. It is obscene to suggest that the Jews who fought back against their exterminators at Aushwitz/Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor became like the Nazis. It is obscene to suggest that a tiger who kills a human at a zoo becomes like her captors.

However, with all those objections to pacifism in mind, I usually find myself somewhat wary of those on the other side of the argument. You can't read, say, Theodore Roosevelt or Francis Parkman's railing against the Quakers without getting a little fearful at the red-blooded American hostility to non-violence that always seems to precede an extermination campaign. And unless I'm reading the novel wrong, that's a discomfort Barry Graham shares.

So lest I make the novel sound like a monograph on the errors of pacifism, that's exactly what it isn't. I can't make much of a case here without providing spoilers, but this is not a book that'll leave you feeling real comfortable, wherever you happen to stand. If violence is its subject — and it certainly seems to be so, at least in part — than it's an honest consideration. Which is probably the rarest compliment I can give a book in this day and age.

It's also immensely entertaining. Which is not a backhanded compliment. Not only are there, y'know, themes  and ideas and all that good shit, should you happen to want to look for them, there's also a helluva plot, and a wonderful twist. And it's stocked with lines that'll make you want to stand up and smack somebody. Like this heartbreaking description of a fourteen or fifteen-year-old boy getting shot: "The killer's bullet took him in the throat. He sat down on the floor and silently cried himself to death."

Or this very funny description of the upscale burg of Scottsdale, Arizona: "[T]he area is a suburban maze of identical streets and houses, barely any stores. I've never been able to figure out why rich people create such horrible neighborhoods to live in."

It's a damn good book. And at exactly four bucks on the Kindle — one of which I need to get for exactly this kind of purchase — you can't go wrong.

Quote

From 2666, given us by a fictional founder of the Black Panther Party:

[P]eople knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you're driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it's the oil or the radiator, maybe it's a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you're done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That's a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave…Really, when you talk about stars you're speaking figuratively. That's metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You've used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he's seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. But really, there's just one star and that star isn't semblance, it isn't metaphor, it doesn't come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It's the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star.

I was really struck by that passage, and just this morning figured out why. It's a riff on passage this from Moby Dick, which takes place after Ishmael becomes confused in the night and mistakes the harpooners working the Try-Words for devils, before nodding off at the helm:

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp–all others but liars!

Or, anyway, it seems like a riff to me. But, then, there are times when everything seems like a riff on that passage.  It comes from a chapter titled "The Try-Works," and it's one of my favorite pieces of writing ever set down anywhere. I've even got a tattoo to prove it.

This, by the way, is also from that same chapter, immediately following the above.

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity". ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave- yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; — not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (i. e. even while living) "in the congregation of the dead". Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

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. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

When I first read Moby Dick I was leveled by that passage. I remember thinking that it was the truest thing I'd ever seen on the page about books or life. The fifteen years since haven't done much to convince me otherwise.

Pike by Benjamin Whitmer

Nik Korpon, author of Stay God, has a new review of Pike up over at Spinetingler Magazine. It's the kind of thing I could quote all day, and though I'll try not to, just because it's not fair to you poor bastards who have to live near me, here's one:

They say that great work begets great work, and this is a book I read not only with pen in hand to scribble in the margins, but also with my notebook beside me. Pike so inspired me that I must've written half a dozen pages of notes, just hoping to keep up with the lean, mean, nasty-ass poetry of Whitmer's prose.

The rest.

Update: I think this has to go on the back at some point. Or maybe on my arm, tattooed.

Imagine Postman, but with a heavy Appalachian vibe, and written on a Underwood forged from the melted revolver of every cut-throat cheat on the east side of Hell.

Who would dare?

The New York Review of Books Blog has posted an essay by Roberto Bolaño about stealing books. It's excerpted from a book of essays called Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003), to be published in late May.

I used to be a fairly good hand at shoplifting books, at just about the same time in my life that he was doing it. I think some of it was even inspired by Camus, starting with The Plague. In fact, after finishing The Plague, I distinctly remember stealing The Rebel. Never finished the fucking thing, but I carried it around for about two years.

I don't do it anymore. For one thing, I'm not nearly as desperately broke as I was. For another, I've got access to a good library now. But I'm not ethically opposed to the idea. Sure as hell not in chains, anyway. I guess I'm against it in independent bookstores. Real independent bookstores, anyway, not the kind that act just like a chain.

Chris La Tray wrote this on his blog recently:

I see a lot of calls to support independent bookstores, local businesses, etc. Sometimes I think the call to support independent artists gets overlooked. Support your independent artists, people!

Not gonna name names, but I get sick of that call from book and music stores that don't do shit for independent artists. They're fine to steal from, go nuts. Somebody even told me about one bookstore around here where they charge writers to let them give readings. I'd say that'd be a good place to steal from. Or even set on fire, your choice.

Anyway, the essay:

The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt.

The rest.

Quote

From 2666, after Amalfitano talks with a pharmacist who prefers "Bartleby the Scrivener" to Moby Dick, and "A Christmas Carol" to The Pickwick Papers:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.