And the second, Voices at Wounded Knee, Series #2:

It was a great exhibit, and included a video rig by which you could see Romero talk about his process, influences, and what he does with his downtime. Which included reading comic books and shooting guns, two things near and dear to the Whitmer clan.

Anyway, if you’re around the Denver Art Museum, I highly recommend it. Me and the kids have been talking about it all week.

Media stuff around Satan Is Real has still been happening, of course, I’ve just been lazy about posting. Knoxville.com gave the book a really nice review, and Chris Mateer of the Uprooted Music Review interviewed me. There are several more write-ups to come that I know of, and I’ll post those sometime around when they show up.

I’ve also got a true crime piece in Crime Factory 9 about a punk rock star I knew who was murdered. It comes thanks to a buddy of mine, Paul Schenk, who was much closer to her than I was, and worked on the piece with me. You can download it here.

I also finally read Craig McDonald’s One True Sentence, which Charlie Stella has been recommending for a long time. And, yeah, it’s spectacular. Anybody who has read this blog for any length of time knows I have a complicated relationship with Hemingway. But not with this book. It’s beautiful. And the more so because, for all it does everything a crime novel should do, it’ll change the way you read Hemingway. Especially the story “Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

Switching topics, I don’t really know about half of the people I’m friends with on Facebook. Which is fine. I just accept anyone who wants to be friend and who ain’t obviously linked to a porn site, and don’t worry about it much.

As a consequence, I’ve gotten to know some interesting folks over the last couple of years. Like the gentleman who posted the following:

So, I became concerned about my son’s anger about a week ago. He keeps posting right here on facebook statuses of angered responses, a picture of his bloody hand, and his bad language. These are things I didn’t raise him to do. I call his mother about his issues. I ask her to monitor his online activity and to get him some counseling. By the way, his mother and I have been divorced for ten years. She kind of shuffles it off as no big deal. That night, my son unfriends me just because I love him and am concerned about his mental state. I saw him last weekend briefly and he ignored me! I want to be angry at him but I don’t want to be at the same time. I want to give up my rights to him but I don’t because I only have a year left of paying child support to him and I love him enough to reconcile with him in the future. What he doesn’t know is I wanted to leave his mother before he was born. She had been raped by a black man within days before my son was conceived. I stuck around mainly to see if the child was mine. If he would’ve been black, I could leave. He was white instead. I’ve been grateful ever since. Due to his nearly 1 1/2 years absence and his hatred for my wife and me, I sometimes want to give up on him. I love him dearly. I want him back. But, he causes me too much pain right now.

I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna know that asshole in any capacity. But, Jesus, how wonderful to have this social media world where everyone can let their ass can hang out, no matter how large or fucking ugly.

Lastly, somebody asked me recently if I’d posted a Best Of 2011 list anywhere. And the answer is no, and I’m not planning to. But I thought I would point to a few of the albums that really destroyed me this year. In no particular order:

Slim Cessna’s Auto Club — Unentitled

Everybody knows Slim Cessna’s Auto Club is the best live band in the world. But I’ll make a case any day that they’re one of the best bands in the world, period. And that Slim and Munly are the best gospel duo since Charlie and Ira, if I may say so myself.

Josh T. Pearson — Last of the Country Gentlemen

This album fucked me up pretty good. There was one research trip to the San Luis Valley, where I don’t think I listened to anything else, and I probably owe him royalties on the novel I listened to him so much while writing it. One man, a guitar, and buckets full of heartbreak. In other words, perfect.

Scott H. Biram — Bad Ingredients

Scott H. Biram’s been one of my favorites for awhile, and this is, to my mind, his best album. It’s rough, gorgeous, heartfelt, and lonesome. And if you spill beer on its guitars, it’ll get down off the stage and kick your ass.

That’s all I got.

When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people?

Morning:

Noon:

Afternoon:

Backstory from MachineGunBoards.com:

How did a Thompson submachine gun cause a big rift between Hemingway and Mike Strater during the summer of 1935 in Bimini?

Hemingway acquired the submachine gun from the International Sportsman, William B. Leeds, who was in Bimini aboard his yacht MOANA. Mike, nicknamed the `President,’ fishing aboard the Pilar, hooked a 12-foot marlin. While moving the fish towards the boat, the sharks zeroed in on it. Ernest, with his new toy, began to give the sharks bursts from the machine-gun on the pretext he had to defend the marlin from them. The effect was just the reverse. A feeding frenzy ensued. It took another hour to boat the marlin. What was left weighed 500 pounds. A photograph showed over half of the marlin was gone, and what was left was a hollow shell. Hemingway even wrote an article in Esquire Magazine in July, 1935, titled “The President Vanquishes,” where he estimated the weight of the fish at near two thousand pounds. But he failed to mention a Thompson sub-machine gun or a shark frenzy. Strater was enraged. Ernest had helped to destroy the biggest marlin Mike had ever hooked.

And this from the Wikipedia summary of The Old Man and the Sea:

While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlin’s entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.

The funny thing is, these things make me like Hemingway more. Never less.

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.

Quotes first:

On the history of what Bageant calls “Borderers.” I.e., those Scots-Irish immigrants who’ve done most of the heavy lifting in the creation of the American Empire, and always seem to be first on the front line to get their asses blown away for somebody else’s pocketbook.

Speaking of cabins, given the unceasing looting, burning, and moving, the Borderers built impermanent earth and log dwellings called “cabbins.” Within their smoky confines they lived a quick-tempered, hard-drinking, volatile lifestyle, one that anthropologists say is still evident in some American trailer courts today. So the next time you see one of us drunkenly kicking in a neighbor’s car door in a trailer court parking lot at 1 a.m., try to remember: That’s not a brawl you’re witnessing, it’s cultural diversity.

And:

We rural and small-town mutt people seem by an early age to have a special capacity for cruelty. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecrack up a toad’s ass and light it? George W. Bush and I have that in common. As nonwhites the world round understand, white people can be mean, especially if they feel threatened–and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide a certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as approval from God and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers. You get Abu Ghraib.

On self-expression in consumer culture:

The difficulties of self-expression having been neatly eliminated through standardization, adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to see, eat, wear, hear, and drive. Your baby can wave from her $400 car seat in the Volvo, perhaps drawing an observer close enough to see the “Pacifist’s Pledge” imprinted on her 100 percent hemp T-shirt. When enough of your own kind coagulate around nothing, you have a “lifestyle” on your hands. If nothing jells around your own assembled coolness, then you join some larger lifestyle. A thousand magazines give directions how to do it: Elle, Savvy Senior, Today’s Black Woman, Trailer Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Cabin Life, Town and Country, and, for the affluent, Grand (a magazine for well-heeled grandparents), not to mention good ole High Times.

Now the song:

I’ve read A Moveable Feast, the unrestored version, and remember loving it for the viciously catty masterpiece it is. (And there’s no writer as catty as Hemingway.) My favorite tale in the book is of Hemingway taking F. Scott Fitzgerald to the museum so that he might compare the size of his penis to that of the statues, and dispel worries caused by Zelda’s disparagement.

But there’s more going on, of course. And the most striking bit comes from Patrick Hemingway who provides “the true foreword” to the book, which is the last professional line by Hemingway, written after his first suicide attempt and the ensuing shock treatments. And which I can’t get out of my head.

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.

Good night.

So, in the afternoon you see the picador ride out the little horse and if the little horse gets ripped and, instead of killing him, the red- jacketed bull ring servant runs with him toward the horse gate to get him back where he can be patched up so the contractor can send him in again, you may be sure the bull ring servant has received or been promised a propina for every horse he can bring alive out of the ring, instead of killing them mercifully and decently when they are wounded.

I have known some fine picadors, honest, honorable, brave and in a bad business, but you may have all the horse contractors I have ever met, although some of them were nice fellows. If you wish and will take them, you may have all the bull ring servants too. They are the only people I have found in bullfighting that are brutalized by it and they are the only ones who take an active part who undergo no danger. I have seen several of them, two especially that are father and son, that I would like to shoot. If we ever have a time when for a few days you may shoot any one you wish I believe that before starting out to bag various policemen, Italian statesmen, government functionaries, Massachusetts judges, and a couple of companions of my youth I would shove in a clip and make sure of that pair of bull ring servants. I do not want to identify them any more closely because if I ever should bag them this would be evidence of premeditation. But of all the filthy cruelty I have ever seen they have furnished the most. Where you see gratuitous cruelty most often is in police brutality; in the police of all countries I have ever been in, including, especially, my own. These two Pamplona and San Sebastian monosabios should be, by rights, policemen and policemen on the radical squad, but they do the best they can with their talents in the bull ring. They carry on their belts puntillas, broad-headed knives, with which they can give the gift of death to any horse that is badly wounded, but I have never seen them kill a horse that could possibly be gotten on his feet and made to move toward the corrals. It is not only a question of the money they could make by salvaging horses to be taxidermed while alive so they may be reintroduced into the ring, for I have seen them refuse to kill, until forced to by the public, a horse there was no hope of getting onto his feet or of bringing back into the ring purely from pleasure in exerting their power to refuse to perform a merciful act as long as possible. Most bull ring servants are poor devils that perform a miserable function for a mean wage and are entitled to pity if not sympathy. If they save a horse or two that they should kill they do it with fear that outruns any pleasure and earn their money as well as the men do who pick up cigar butts, say. But these two that I speak of are both fat, well-fed and arrogant. I once succeeded in landing a large, heavy one-peseta-fifty rented, leather cushion alongside the head of the younger one during a scene of riotous disapproval in a bull ring in the north of Spain and I am never at the ring without a bottle of Manzanilla which I hope yet I will be able to land, empty, on one or the other at any time rioting becomes so general that a single bottle stroke may pass unperceived by the authorities. After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.