Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 4

Guns, Books, Etc.

“Take Strasberg. [Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio and later founder of his own teaching institute.] I went to his joint once, back when I was first hanging out in New York, doing plays. I did a ten-minute scene in his class: the guy who had gangrene in his leg in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. After I did the scene, he starts in with, ‘Well, you were going for the pain in your leg, but I didn’t see it, so you didn’t put it over and thus the scene failed.’ I told him that he didn’t know anything about gangrene. When it’s in the terminal stage, there isn’t any pain. What I was going for was that the guy was trying to feel pain, because if he had any pain, it meant he wasn’t going to die. But he couldn’t feel a damned thing. I know about that shit from the Pacific. Strasberg was furious when I corrected him. He threw me out, so I said ‘fuck you’ and walked.”
It’s not so often that I agree with the American Conservative, but it does happen.
Uno, dos, tres, quatro.
“I challenge Ronald Reagan to a duel to the death because Reagan is a punk, a sissy and a coward. He can fight me with a gun, a knife or a baseball bat. I’ll beat him to death with a marshmallow.”
Every night me and the kids have a Nerf war before homework. Every night, I lose. Wait until I unload on ’em with this.
“If ripping out a dead girl’s breast bone and hair to fashion a harp isn’t gross enough, though, Child has some even more vengeful versions in his collection.”
Matt Damon would like to remind you what life looked like during the last Clinton years.

The One That Got Away

Just a little under two years ago, I lost a book that had, to my mind, the greatest title ever: The Same to All Detectives. I’d worked on Detectives for seven years, about half of that time being spent on research. It was a historical novel, and I can’t tell you how many hours I spent on the fifth floor of the Denver Public Library looking over microfiche of and working through original documents. For awhile I was even in touch with the great grandson of one of the historical characters in the book.

I was completely inside it. Breathing it. To give you one example, the book was set in 1894, so I found a map of Denver set in 1894, and after paying to have it made digital, I recreated every single street my characters walked on using images from the Denver Public Library’s Digital Collection so that I knew exactly what was on that street, down to the street signs, and wrote them into the book.

See that picture at the top of the page? That’s of a bar on Denver’s Larimer Street named Murphy’s Exchange that the locals nicknamed The Slaughterhouse because of all the blood spilled. Got that from the long out-of-print The Wildest of the West by Forbes Parkhill, I believe — though it could be from a couple of dozen other books, or even newspaper articles. Hell, I spent three years reading nothing but novels from the 1890s to try to get the vernacular right.

See, the way I figured, Pike was an alright practice novel, but not a real book. It was me learning if I could pull off a novel, and an exercise in tone. And Cry Father? Well, the bulk of Cry Father was written several years before it was published as a framing device for Detectives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of that book, but I had trouble believing that was a real book either. And of course, Satan Is Real is a real book, but it ain’t my book.

So Detectives was gonna be my first real book. The first one where I took everything I’d learned and sat down and gave everything I had into the best book I could write. I was reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 while working on it, and came on this quote about a bookish pharmacist:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or 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.

That struck a chord with me. Those are the books I love. The messy, terrifying ones. I knew I was no kind of master, but I figured that didn’t mean I couldn’t do real combat, right? That’s what I set out to do with Detectives.

Of course, I fucked it up. Miserably. I was taking on bigger work than I was capable of. I didn’t have nearly the skills needed. I remember the day I sent it off to my agent. I posted on social media: “Good luck with that, motherfucker.” And to nobody’s surprise at all, he came back with a really nice letter that told me everything I already knew. That the characters were all over the place, the story was nonsense, and it just didn’t hang together. So I ditched it.

I’m not trying to prove what an artist I am by bragging about throwing away manuscripts. Trust me. I’d rather take my fingers off with boltcutters. It was really lousy. That was the summer of 2014, and I ain’t gonna lie, I got shitty. Real shitty. And since Cry Father was released shortly thereafter, I started to resent it for being an impostor. I was living that line from Willie Nelson: “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.” Like I said, I’m proud of Cry Father, but I couldn’t get my mind off Detectives, the one that was supposed to be my real book.

I tried to hide it, but I fucking hated talking about it. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, except for one French bookseller who chastised me because I never really talked about the book, just told bullshit stories. Which was true. I couldn’t really discuss it, nor could I talk about why. I felt too ridiculous. Suck it up, man, there’s people out there with real problems, is what I told myself. But it ate me up for more than a year.

So anyways, I just thought I’d say that to you: Don’t spend seven years of your life on something you fuck up, because it sucks. You’ll regret it.

But here’s the thing: I have a new book. And all the stuff I learned while fucking up Detectives is paying off huge. This book is miles ahead of anything I was capable of before.

It’s one that I dreamed up during conversations with Christa Faust. I’d been tinkering with it off and on while working on Detectives, and after a several months of sulking time, I started working on it for real. At first, only because I’m like a work dog: If I don’t have anything to do I’ll just tear up the furniture and shit all over my floor. But the book started growing in my imagination. And now I’m back writing hard, loving every minute, and even have a some of my old fuck-you back in my step.

What I learned is that right now the only thing that matters is that I get better. Sure, I got ahead of myself and took on more than I was ready for. But sometimes that’s important, right? I’m still a beginner, two novels in, and it’s a steep learning curve. Fucking up a project by over-reaching is a hundred times more useful to me than successfully writing the same book over and over again.

Which doesn’t mean I’m still real happy about it. But it does mean that all work is important. And that’s almost like being happy.

Quote

So the rest of y’all have Christmas, and I’m happy for you. But today’s the other JC’s birthday. (And yes, I know he wouldn’t approve of that line.) One of the proudest moments of my career was when somebody reviewed Satan Is Real and said that the Johnny Cash chapters captured him better than that movie ever did.

The truth is, and I don’t think Charlie would mind me saying this, I took on that book because I knew I’d get to hear those stories. Of course I loved Charlie, but there was nobody who knew how special Johnny Cash was more than Charlie. This is one of the many things he had to say about him:

I would fight with all I had for Johnny Cash’s reputation. I know I don’t need to now, but I would fight with everything I had for him. John was an extremely precious man, and there will never be another like him. He wasn’t a taker, he was giver. And, sure, he had his faults, as we all do. But in the end, he conquered them all.

I love that quote. And this one, from Kris Kristofferson (who, not coincidentally, wrote the the forward to Satan Is Real.)

Johnny Cash was the champion of the voiceless, the underdogs and the downtrodden. He was also something of a holy terror, like Abraham Lincoln with a wild side. He represented the best of America.

Giveaway

I don’t like having my old books sitting on the shelves, eyeballing me and judging me and shit. Especially while I’m working on my new novel. So I figure I’ll give some away, starting today.

Here’s the deal: The first person to post the answer to the following question in the comments gets a signed hardcover copy of Cry Father. Now, you have to answer the question in the way I mean it — which, yes, is arbitrary as hell, but it’s my giveaway — but a certain number of you will know exactly what I’m looking for at a glance.

It will not be in a timely fashion, I guarantee that. I hate going to the Post Office. But sometime within the next few months, you will get a copy.

So here goes:

What’s wrong with this picture?

Update: That was quick. Three way tie between Lauren, Stephanie, and Craig. That was FAR too easy.

The answer:

Quote

From Edward Bunker’s No Beast So Fierce:

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive-in movies open all year. It didn’t appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the coming robbery.

All Apologies

I’m at one of those stages in the novel where I love what I’m doing so much that I’m having trouble tracking anything else. I wake up and work on the novel, fall asleep working on the novel, take long walks so I can think about the novel, tell the kids I’m gonna use the restroom so I can sneak a few minutes on the novel. I’m not saying it’s gonna be a great novel, don’t get me wrong, but I’m seeing everything through novel colored glasses. It’s been like that a few months, and it’ll be at least a few more.

Meaning, if I owe you something, you better nudge me, and probably twice. This’d be one of those times where I forget about promised blurbs, dinner dates, housework, answering email, returning phone calls, and pretty much everything else. I mean, I’m gonna feed my kids and take care of them, but as to the rest of you, well, you may not like me much by the time we’re done.

Believe it or not, I feel terrible about it. When I come out of these patches and realize all the stuff I was supposed to do, and everybody I neglected, and all the promises I broke, I get sad. Not sad enough to say it won’t happen again, but sad. So I just want everybody to know that it’s not that you don’t matter, you do. Just a little less than my novel.

#kaileestrong

A little while ago I posted something on social media about how I was gonna start donating to every crowdfunding campaign I saw for folks with medical bills — even if it’s just a few dollars — and pass them along in case others wanna do the same. The reason being, I get furious when I think that about people having to do things like create crowdfunding campaigns to pay their medical bills. To me, that seems wrong.

Well, this campaign’s special to our household, in that it’s one of my daughter Madeline’s friends, Kailee Reese. She was hit a couple of months ago with a catastrophic illness: Febrile infection-related epilepsy syndrome (FIRES). From what my daughter says, it just came out of nowhere. One day she was fine, the next she was hit with seizures, rushed to the hospital, and put in a medically induced coma.

It turns out that’s how FIRES works. And most of the time it’s fatal. Kailee’s a survivor, though, and she fought through it. But she’s still in the hospital, has been for months, and FIRES is something that usually requires lifelong care. I can’t even imagine what the medical bills are gonna look like for this family, nor how they’re managing their jobs and day-to-day bills. But they are, and if you’d like to kick in a little to help out, this is a good one.

Donate here.

(And if you share this, my daughter asks that you use the hashtag #kaileestrong so that Kailee can see all the posts and tweets about her.)

Guns, Books, Etc.

Bob, meet Johnny.
“The best noir writer in the world is the writer who has no readers cause he’s driven them all away with his relentlessly bleak and grim view of humanity and his constant obsession with death and the fact that we’re all fucked, no matter what.”
Hippies and Cowboys.
The best Vietnam war novel written from the point of view of a dog that you’ll ever read.
For it. Especially if Trump wins.
Harry Crews: Guilty as Charged.
“I’ve suffered from my share of personal disasters: the loss of love, the death of a wife, the failure to realize in my writing the high aspiration of my intentions. But these misfortunes can be borne. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief — but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave. So, I’ve been lucky, as most people are lucky; the animal in each of us has a lot more sense than our brains.”

City Park

When I’m driving to Lighthouse from my dayjob to teach, I have to cut through the City Park neighborhood of Denver. It’s a real nice neighborhood. Million dollar homes, and cafes and little eateries and all kinds of hip stuff. Also, very big and expensive SUVs driving very narrow streets, and dogwalkers who cross wherever they’re inclined, and the afterwork cocktail crowd, and bicyclists and joggers for whom cars are kind of an afterthought.

Navigating this neighborhood I carry on a running conversation with all of the people in it. Not an angry conversation, I never raise my voice. Just a conversation.

But if a recording were ever made of this conversation, I’m sure I would never publish again. And more, that all of you would band together and hang me from the highest tree in City Park.

And I wouldn’t be able to say you were wrong to do it.

A Dream

I had a dream last night that my son was sewing together pieces of leather, and he’d developed this method where every time he made a stitch he ran the needle straight through his thumb, up through the pad and out just left of the thumbnail. It didn’t bleed or anything, and he was proud of it and said it didn’t hurt, so I was sitting there trying to just watch and not criticize.

But all this morning, making his eggs and getting him ready for school, I keep looking over at him sitting at the table, and I get a little teary and want to yell, “STOP RUNNING THAT FUCKING NEEDLE THROUGH YOUR THUMB! THAT’S THE DUMBEST FUCKING THING I’VE EVER SEEN!”

But I won’t. Because I’m pretty sure he already thinks I’m likely a little too crazy for the job.