The Try-Works

• Oh, Christ, I might not have the heart to fuck with Mr. Martin for awhile.  I mean, there ain’t nothing wrong with watching Lost, but good God, couldn’t any of you Ballerinas spare the man a plate at your table?  Laurie?  Mr. Paine?  Did you need to shun him so that he felt compelled to share his loathsome and lonesome little existence with the rest of the world?
• “Santa died for your MasterCard.”
• Ugly gun Sunday.
• Christopher Hitchens: “His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts. One is too few. Three is too many. Two seems somehow superbly right.”
• And, with that in mind: “What one realizes about Hitchens is that he is essentially a two martini queer. He came up with what he imagined was a Wildesque dictum, by saying that martinis are like breasts — one is not enough while three is too many. Mr. Moderation all the sudden. And this former Marxist just loves his bourgeois drinks. On the ‘Negroni,’ he writes adoringly, ‘a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won’t work in cold or gray conditions).’”
• And speaking of Mr. Hitchens, looks like he’s confirmed his first kill.
• You call it vandalism, I call it Art Sabotage.

It goes without saying that there’s no way in hell I’m letting the Daily Camera slide for their horseshit lies. Clint Talbott, Heath Urie and Matt Sebastian have all claimed, in one way or another, that Mr. Dillabaugh and I assaulted Heath Urie. They’re fucking liars, and I will be demanding an apology; I’m just contemplating the form of that demand.

As I predicted, all charges have been dropped against Mr. Dillabaugh as regards our ejection of Daily Camera hack Heath Urie from Ward Churchill’s guerrilla class. The Boulder DA’s official stance is that it would be impossible to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

I’ll agree with that.

Y’know, because Heath Urie’s a lying little asshole, as evidenced by his coverage of the non-incident, as well as the inane police report he filed. (Oh, yeah, and his bosses, Clint Talbott and Matt Sebastian, are lying assholes as well.)

As I’ve said from the get-go, there was no physical harm done to Mr. Urie. Nor was there any violence. Hell, there was scarcely an incident at all. There was only a lying little asshole working at a barely literate small-town rag who attempted to make his own news with a stupid fucking stunt, and then, when that didn’t work, tried to intimidate Mr. Dillabaugh and I to cover his ass.

The best part is that Mr. Urie and his dipshit bosses over at the Camera have been repeating ad nauseum that they wouldn’t comment on the case, insisting that our vaunted judicial system would prove the truth of their story.

Well, it has. You’re a fucking punk, Mr. Urie, and you’re all fucking liars.

Merry Christmas.

I learned something about myself this past weekend.  Something that a man more in touch with himself probably would’ve figured out some time ago.  And that is, I rather like X-mas.  Yeah, I know, one is supposed to get all fucking exercised about the crass commercialism of the holiday.  But, hell, I rather like excess, and an entire holiday devoted to it in the middle of dead fucking winter always smacks to me of exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.

What’s not to love?  The God-given right to eat an obscene amount of rich food and burn through cocktails by the gallon?  Hell, there’s even singing, and the occasional recitation of a literary work.  And, to top it off, everyone seems wholly aware of the casual crassness and wholehearted fakeness of the entire shtick.  One can get away with the sort of flip remark that usually leads to a thorough drubbing by family members, and even the fundamentalist aunties with the pinch-mouthed crucifix leers start coming across like Jean Baudrillard after a spot or two of rum in their coffee.

In other words, I love X-mas for exactly the reason we are always cautioned not to love X-mas: to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, exactly because it doesn’t mean anyfuckingthing anymore.  I love the holiday for the same reason Robert Anton Wilson loves it.

As Weston La Barre pointed out a long time ago in his classic Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion, you can find remnants of a primordial bear-god from the bottom of South America up over North America and over the North Pole and down across most of Europe and Asia. This deity appears in cave paintings from southern France carbon-dated at 30,000 BC. You can find him and her (for this god is bisexual) disguised in Artemis and Arduina and King Arthur, all unmasked via canny detective work by folklorists — and etymologists, who first spotted the bear-god when they identified the Indo-European root ard, meaning bear. You can track the bear-god in dwindling forms in a hundred fairy tales from all over Europe and Asia. And you can find the rituals of this still-living god among the indigenous tribes of both American continents.

And Santa, like Peter Pan and the Green Man of the spring festivals, and the Court Jester — and (in an odd way) Chaplin’s beloved Little Tramp — all have traits of the god that walks like a man and acts nasty sometimes and clownish sometimes and who was ritually killed and eaten by most of our ancestors in the Stone Age, who then became one with their god and thus also became (if the ritual worked) as brave as their god. See Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough for the gory details.

And I swear the same god-bear tromps and shambles through every page of Joyce’s masterpiece of psycho-archeology, Finnegans Wake. If you don’t believe me, consult Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census of Finnegans Wake.

Most folklorists recognize “the cannibal in the woods” as a humanized relic of the bear-god. The heroine, in 101 tales, meets him while on a mission of mercy. He generally sets the heroine to solve three riddles, and when she succeeds, instead of eating her he becomes her ally and helps her reach her goal. One variation on that became The Silence of the Lambs. Another became Little Red Riding Hood.

What? Hannibal Lecter another of Santa’s uncouth family?

Yes, indeedy.

In some rustic parts of Europe and probably in Kansas, Santa retains traces of his carnivorous past. Children are told that if they are “good” all year, Santa will reward them, but if they are “bad” he will EAT THEM ALL UP. Yeah, the Boogie Man, or Bogie, or Pookah, or Puck, are all of somewhat ursine ancestry, although other animal-gods got mixed in sometimes.

As Crazy Old Uncle Ezra wrote in Canto 113, “The gods have not returned. They have never left us.”

Jung might state the case thusly: Gods, as archetypes of the genetic human under-soul (or “collective unconscious”), cannot be killed or banished; they always return with a new mask but the same symbolic meaning. Related example: Young ladies in ancient Greece were often seduced or raped by satyrs; in the Arab lands, we note a similar outbreak of randy djinn; it India, it was devas. In the Christian Dark Ages, it began happening to young men, too, especially to monks. They called the lascivious critter an incubus. Now it’s happening all around us, and the molesters come from Outer Space. The sex-demon, like the Great Mother and the Shadow and our ursine hero, and the three brothers hunting the dragon (recognize them in Jaws? Spot them doing their Three Stooges gig?) — these archetypal forces always come back under new names. Sir Walter Scott called them “the crew that never rests.”

And the bear-god seems wakeful elsewhere. He has appeared prominently in other bits of pop culture — the movies Legends of the Fall and The Edge (both of which, curiously, star Anthony Hopkins, who also starred as Hannibal Lecter) and snuck into Modern Lit 101 not only via Joyce but also via Faulkner’s great parable “The Bear.” He also pops up to deliver the punch line in Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?

We will see more of him, methinks.

Meanwhile, Santa, the Jester/Clown/Fertility God aspect of Father Bear, is doing quite well also, despite getting the bum’s rush by some grim, uptight Christers. He has quite successfully stolen Xmas from X and brings pagan lust and pagan cheer to most of us, every year, just when we need it most — in the dead of winter. His beaming face appears everywhere and if we have a minor cultural war going on between those who wish to invoke him via alcohol and those who prefer their invocations per cannabis, we all share the pagan belief, at least for part of a week, that the best way to mark the solstice and the year’s dying ashes is to form a loving circle and all get bombed together.

As a pagan myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The rest.

There are two days a year that seem to bring out the unabashed fucking dumbest in our local hacks.  Like some kind of boxer on an insane workout regiment, they forgo their impulse to the worst kind of gruesomely hackneyed sentimentalism 363 days a year, but come September 11th and December 25th they just can’t help but spurt their worst all over their greasy keyboards.

So I nominate the following for the My Just Invented Title of Newspaper Hack(s) Most in Need of a Crucifixion.

In third place, Paul Campos, for a stiflingly dull attempt at contrarianism, wherein, in his eternal quest to appear mildly relevant, Mr. Campos give us his take on a rightfully forgotten nineteenth-century nonsense piece by William Dean Howell.

In second place, The Daily Camera editorial staff, for this wonderfully condescending, tacky, viciously classist headline, which, as one of their readers points out in the comments, fucking nukes the contrived feel-good horseshit being peddling in the story.

And in first place, The Rocky Mountain News, editorializing for Christ and George Washington.

To the more than 2 billion Christians around the globe, most of whom will gather today in everything from cathedrals to mud huts to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Christmas has always stood for hope amid despair - a miracle of light out of the darkness and a promise of liberation from the bondage of sin.

To Americans - of every stripe, not just Christians - Christmas should also forever be celebrated as a beacon of hope and liberty. For it was on this day 231 years ago that a small band of Americans, against all odds, turned the tide of history and saved this republic in its darkest hour.

The rest.

Ah, the Rocky, closing 2007 by mixing clichés with all the subtlety and grace of a double penetration.  Excellent work, Mr. Carroll.  When your paper finally tanks, there’ll always be a future for you over at Hallmark.

Meaning The Proposition.  Your official Try-Works recommended holiday viewing.

Word has it that after seeing The Proposition, Russell Crowe called Nick Cave, asking him to wrote a sequel to Gladiator.  Mr. Cave’s script was an anti-war epic with the Gladiator as an undead warrior, fighting in Vietnam and ending up in the halls of the Pentagon.  Needless to say, the project was immediately abandoned.

I may post more over the weekend, but it’s doubtful.  For one thing, it seems my reputation precedes me, meaning I have acquired an unconscionably good bottle of Scotch for X-mas.  And when that runs out, I’ve always got a supply of Sterno and Jim Beam stockpiled just for this hellish little bit of joy to the world.

So, fuck it.  Merry Christmas.  From the drunk tank.

The aforementioned best bluesman in Denver has a fucking MySpace page, where I’ve spent most of the evening.

I’m a prick, hate me.  But love Derrick Terrabell.

• The fucking idiots at BCC Radio 1 have removed the words “faggot” and “slut” from Shane MacGowan’s “Fairytale of New York” this Christmas season.  Thus defiling one of the greatest songs ever written and pissing on one of the few reasons to even bother pretending to care about holiday feeling.
• Speaking of holiday feeling: season’s greetings, piggies.
• Impeach the motherfuckers.  Okay, just Cheney in this case.  But still, let’s get his fucking boss too.  And let’s start working on petitions to impeach Hillary right now.  Why wait? (Thanks to Nixon.)
• Inside the CIA’s black sites.  Y’know, disappearances, secret prisons, torture rooms.  They Hate Us for Our Freedom.
• Ziggie’s Saloon has new ownership, and they have a new website, including some music.  That’s a heartbreaker of sorts.  I used to live in the joint, it being the only place in Denver where you could hear non-yuppified blues music.  In fact, back then you could catch Denver’s best bluesmen, Derrick Terrabull and Johnny Vaughan, for a three-dollar cover charge, three nights a week.  The owner, as I recall, was a wonderful woman named Chucky, who was always kind enough to bring me a sampler of her pickled green beans to enjoy with my beer.  I haven’t been out to the bars much in the last four or five years, but I’ll have to check out the new feel.
• Nation in frenzy about little wizard boy and all his little wizard friends.
• Chechen self-made weapons.  (Thanks to David Codrea, who runs the best gun blog out there.  And who is a conservative whom, as far as I can tell, acts like it.  Meaning, I like him a lot.)

Russell Means is declaring a withdrawal of the Lakota nation from treaties made with the United States. Which has all the usual assorted bigots and idiots alternately grinding their teeth and guffawing.

Leading one to wonder: given the fact that the US has refused to honor a single treaty it made with the Lakota nation — in indisputable violation of not only every professed property right principle of all ye so-called conservatives, but also the US Constitution — how long should the Lakota wait for said treaties to actually be honored?

Just a question.

And is the argument from said assorted bigots and idiots that all treaties made with the Lakota should be honored? Y’know, considering that to do so would be to actually, gasp, honor the Constitution. Which is, after all, what I thought was meant by being a fucking conservative in the first place?

Or, in this case, are the so-called conservatives — meaning bigots and idiots — in question only concerned with those property rights that, well, they and people who look like them happen to enjoy. Making them more than willing to consign the wogs to a sub-Saharan Africa life-expectancy for their own gain.

See, that’s kind of my take.

Which is why I’m calling ‘em fucking bigots.

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely “worthless words on worthless paper,” the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been “repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life,” the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

“This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,” which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

“It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,” said Means.

The rest.

By the way, you probably know this, but bigot and long-time Ballerina commenter William T. Sherman gets his name from General William Tecumseh Sherman, who negotiated the last treaty ratified with the Lakota. And then, when the US violated said treaty, lead the army against the Lakota in the infamous winter campaigns, attacking Lakota villages when the Lakota were least mobile and most prone to decimation by the elements. The intent of these campaigns was to force the Lakota to accept the US’s absolute right to violate its own treaties at will.

Sherman was never shy about expressing his final solution to the so-called Indian problem. In his own prophetic words after Captain Fetterman’s dunce-work, “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case.”

Bigot is rather the nicest thing one could call most of these racist motherfuckers.

Anyway, though Russell Means seems to be the spokesperson, at least in the above article, he is by no means the sole originator of the movement. For more, see the Lakota Freedom Delegation’s website.

As you’ll recall — I keep saying that, don’t I? — I busted another one of the Ballerinas’ favorite lies last week, by pointing out that Ward Churchill has indeed been published in peer reviewed journals.  More than two dozen of them, in fact.  Mr. Paine, to his credit, conceded the point.

And then, as usual, began waffling.

His latest idiot little trick has been to post the list of 25 peer-reviewed journals which Mr. Churchill has been published in — including, for some unfathomable reason, another eleven journals and/or magazines which reprinted the original article, and which Mr. Churchill has never claimed were refereed.  Mr. Paine has then performed some sort of investigation, and tagged each journal with either “refereed,” “unknown,” “currently,” “peer-reviewed,” “possible” or “unlikely.”

So I kinda wondered what the hell his methodology could be?  I mean, I know he didn’t wander down to a university library and inquire, so I figured he musta performed some kind of Google search.

And, hell, I thought, I can do that.  So, I took the first five journals Mr. Paine has listed as some variation of unknown, and, like, Googled them with the word “refereed.”

So, to begin in no particular order, let’s take Cultural Survival Quarterly, which Mr. Paine lists as “not likely”.  Is it refereed?  Well, other certainly think so.  All you have to do is Google the name of the journal with the term “refereed,” and you get flooded with vitas claiming it in their own list of refereed articles.  Take, for instance, this overview of Dr Larissa Behrendt, Harvard graduate and novelist, in Australia’s Vibe magazine.  She claims it as such.

So, why “not likely,” Mr. Paine?

How’s about Africa Today, another one Mr. Paine has listed as “not likely.”  Again, I Googled the name of the journal and the word “refereed,” and the second hit down was a vita for Paul Keiser over at the University of Pennsylvania, claiming it as refereed.  That’s just the first vita that popped up; there are over 1,000 hits on the search string.

So, how’s about The Black Scholar.  Well, I did the same minimal amount of research — the only kind I can imagine Mr. Paine doing — and guess what?  Yep, it’s fucking refereed.  That one was even fucking easier, as this library is kind enough to list all its “refereed/juried education journals.”  And, if you don’t buy that, you can pay $32 to read John H. Stanfield tell you it’s refereed in this volume of American Sociologist.

What’s next?  Ah, yes, Current Perspectives in Social Theory.  Same Google string, and guess what?  The first fucking hit’s for a vita that lists the journal in their Refereed Articles section.

So, how’s about the Fourth World Journal?  Well that one was real easy, because they list what they’re looking for on their fucking web page.

Submissions may be articles, essays, book reviews, commentaries, or reports that address current developments or events, and refereed articles that are final papers or essays that the author submits for peer review.

The rest.

In other words, they publish both peer-reviewed and general publication work.

So, it took me all of about ten fucking minutes to track down the first five journals on Mr. Paine’s list and clear up his immense confusion.  Leading me to wonder what the hell’s taking the Ballerina leader so long to figure these motherfuckers out?

It’s possible, I suppose, that he could be just a little slower than I give him credit for — which seems unlikely, given my general estimation of his intelligence — but I consider it more likely that he’s just, yet again, been busted with his pants around his swollen ankles, and is now waffling like a garage sale card table in a hard wind.

What say you, Mr. Paine?  Whyn’t you try just a little bit harder over there to work this one out.  After all, your none-too-sharp cronies are already doing an embarrassing bit of crowing.  William T Sherman had this to say, for instance:

Do you have any clue about why this would raise hackles among people who have actually had to respond to challenges from “peer reviewers” in real, actual, rather than sham, “peer review?”

I think when the smoke clears we’re going to be left with maybe five or six Churchill articles that were seriously “peer reviewed.” I will not necessarily object to them. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The rest.

To that, one can only say, ouch.

Oh, and, Mr. Sherman is as dumb as a hatful of assholes.

But you knew that.

Joel was recently kind enough to inquire on an old post if I’d read any of Harry Crews’ non-fiction since talking to him in the comments. The answer is hell yes. Thanks to the wonders of our local library system, I finished Florida Frenzy a couple of days back and am about half-way through Blood and Grits, which is criminally out of print. He’s right, Harry Crews may be be a fine novelist, but he’s a fucking monster essayist. More to come.

I posted a clip from the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus awhile ago which wasn’t the clip I wanted. Following are the clips I wanted. They sum up kinda what makes Mr. Crews so fucking special.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

So, as you’ll recall — hopefully, though your short term memory may be as faulty as mine – I pointed out yesterday that long-time ballerina Noj was lying when he claimed that all of Ward Churchill’s books save one were published by vanity presses. Now, as usual, Noj’s lie has been picked up by Laurie and John Martin. (Bringing the grand total of Mr. Martin’s flat-out lies to something like six in the last two weeks.)

As I’ve been trying to make clear, the term vanity publishing actually means something in the publishing world. As does self-publishing, and they are most decidedly not interchangeable. Vanity presses are overwhelmingly seen as shady affairs and scams. In fact, the primary reason self-publishing and vanity publishing have been conflated is because of the concerted marketing efforts of vanity publishers.

Anyway, vanity press publishing from Writing-World.com, a publishing basics site for aspiring authors:

You’ve just written the perfect novel, the ultimate poetry collection, or the thrilling tale of your life. You’d like to get it published. But you’ve heard the horror stories: The odds against a new author, the endless wait as you shop your manuscript, the futility of seeking publication without an agent. Then you see an ad. “Authors wanted!” it coos seductively. You know it’s a subsidy or “vanity” press (a press that is paid by the author to “publish” a book), but publication is virtually guaranteed. What harm could there be?

The answer is “plenty.” Here are ten reasons to be wary of subsidy publishing:
1) No money. If you want to earn a profit, subsidy publishing isn’t the answer. Costs may run to thousands of pounds, while royalties range from 10% to (in rare cases) 40%.

Let’s do the math. You spend $10,000 for publication, and receive 15% royalties on “net” sales (the amount received after discounts). Your book is priced at $10.95, but often sold at a 50% bookstore discount. This means you’ll receive 15% of 50% of $10.95 — or 82 cents per book. Thus, you must sell more than 12,000 copies (a staggering number even by commercial terms) just to regain your investment — before you see a penny of profit!

2) No bookstore distribution. When was the last time you saw a subsidy imprint in a bookstore? Bookstores rarely carry subsidy titles. But if your book isn’t in stores, it isn’t reaching the vast majority of book-buying customers — for this is the one place people who have never heard of you can “discover” your title.

Your book may be listed in online bookstores such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, because any book with an ISBN can be included in an electronic catalog. Unless customers know about your title in advance, however, they’ll have no reason to look for it.

3) No library distribution. Like bookstores, libraries rarely invest in subsidy-published books. This cuts off another opportunity for readers to “discover” your work.

4) No reviews. Most book reviewers ignore subsidy titles. In addition, subsidy publishers often send out only a limited number of review copies, and expect you to pay for any additional copies. This greatly limits the opportunities for people to “find out” about your book.

5) No publicity. Most subsidy publishers promise a certain amount of advertising. This is rarely in the place you need it most, however. For example, if your book covers women’s health issues, don’t expect it to be advertised in health magazines, women’s magazines, or other publications that target prospective readers. The general rule about publicity for subsidy-published books is that if you want it, you must do it yourself — at your cost.

6) No editorial screening. Most subsidy publishers do not accept books on the basis of quality or marketability, but simply on the author’s willingness to pay. This is the primary reason that such books have such a poor reputation with reviewers, genre organizations, bookstores, distributors, and consumers. In addition, many subsidy publishers offer little or no editorial assistance, publishing books “as delivered.” While some authors relish the idea of “no editorial interference” with their vision, rare is the book that couldn’t benefit from the suggestions of a good editor — not to mention copyediting and proofreading.

7) No industry acceptance. Most writing guilds and associations won’t accept a subsidy-published book as a qualification for membership, or for consideration for an industry or genre award. To qualify, a book must be “commercially published” (as defined by sales figures or an advance).

8) No ownership. Do you simply want a book to distribute to family and friends? If so, subsidy publishing isn’t the answer. You’ll usually receive no more than ten free “author copies;” if you want more, you’ll have to buy them. This means you pay for your book twice: Once to publish it, and again to obtain extra copies. Authors usually receive a 40% discount, but some subsidy publishers don’t pay royalties on sales to the author.

9) No subsidiary rights sales. This varies from publisher to publisher. Some subsidy presses openly acknowledge that they are in no position to exploit subsidiary rights (such as movie, audio, electronic, or translation rights). Others, however, issue a “standard industry contract” claiming those rights — or demand that the author pay them a percentage of any such rights that the author happens to sell. Review your contract carefully, and never sign away rights that your publisher won’t actually use; don’t accept the argument that such a transfer is “standard” in the industry.

10) No respect. While many authors have been successful with self-published books, subsidy publishing is rarely a stepping-stone to fame. The reading, writing, bookbuying, and publishing communities regard subsidy publishing as thet last resort of the truly desperate — i.e., of authors who can’t get their work published any other way. This means that no matter how good your book is, most consumers will assume that it is of poor quality and won’t give it a chance to “prove itself.” If you’re a serious author, therefore, keep in mind that subsidy publishing is more likely to damage your reputation than to enhance it.

That’s pretty much the standard take from the publishing universe. You can find variants of it anywhere.

By the way, for fun, Google the term vanity press and take note of the sponsored links. Anything look familiar?

You can disagree with the editorial standards of any small, or for that matter, large or mainstream, press. But you can’t cling to a shred of intellectual honesty while trying to re-define the term to mean what you want it to mean simply so it encompasses Ward Churchill’s books.

Now, as Mr. Paine, leader of the Ballerinas, has pointed out, a mistake ain’t a lie. Even a mistake so dumb that it might be attributed to a crack-addled ferret caught in mid-hump while fucking a woodpile. But once you stick by it when it’s exposed as dead wrong, it becomes a lie.

Ward Churchill never published with a vanity press that I know of. Joseph Trimbach’s American Indian Mafia was published by a vanity press. Those are facts.

And Noj, Laurie and John Martin are liars.

Okay, the only reason I’m bother with this is to illustrate that one can spend one’s entire fucking life catching the Ballerinas in monumentally stupid lies. This one comes from serial liar, Noj, whom I just nailed last week.

See, the Ballerinas have been going apeshit about the release of Joseph Trimbach’s self-published screed American Indian Mafia (which was penned on Mr. Trimbach’s basement walls in his own feces, I hear). I’m a little amused at the fervor generated by a barely literate vanity press offering, but hell, I’ll get around to it somewhere between Sherman and Goebbel’s memoirs. Assuming, of course, that our local library system starts stocking vanity press leavings, which seems unlikely.

Anyway, Noj offered up the following in Ballerina #1’s comments, and it was too good to pass up.

And which of Churchill’s own books were not published with a vanity press? I can only think of one.

The rest.

Really? Because, though I can’t speak for every book Mr. Churchill has put out, I can’t think of a single one that’s published by a vanity press. Help me out, Noj.

And might I suggest that if you’re so singularly fucking ignorant of the history of twentieth-century American literature as to refer to City Lights as a vanity press, you might be better served restricting your book discussion to those texts which include boy wizards?

Just a thought?

Doing his best Edward R. Murrow impersonation. And it ain’t bad.

You ever wondered?

And she not only collected science fiction novels, but she also read them.  She enjoyed them.  She said they made her think, which meant she was dumb in the gravest kind of way.

Harry Crews — Florida Frenzy 

• The schoolmarm attacks!  “Ben is a sick little bastard and that’s why he enjoys the writings of alcoholic, drug addicted, violence fixated losers. He adores Hemingway’s corn-cob rape scenario, which says it all.”  Well, yeah.  But on the bright side, I can tell the difference between Hemingway and Faulkner.  Do these pinheads read anything besides blogs?
• I’ve lived in Cincinnati.  It’s a terrifyingly corrupt little rustbelt burg, with a brutally violent and racist police force that has gone absolutely unchecked by the local mainstream media.  So, I’ll only say this: good riddance.  (Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the city overall.  Stunted, drug-infested, violent, run-down, and always on the verge of race war — it was exactly my kind of town.  And at least it wasn’t the hellishly homogenized Disneyland shithole that my beloved Denver has become.  But, still, fuck the local media.)
• “Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian ‘Special Removal Units’ to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these ‘ghost prisoners’ off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term ‘extraordinary rendition,’ a hauntingly apt phrase.”
• Since I’m handing out headline awards: how’s about this one from the New York Post?  Classless, yeah.  But too fucking funny to resist.
• “Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled ‘criminal.’ Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of ‘significant tax evasion.’ The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces ‘murderers.’ With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.”
• DNA bigot is less intelligent than he thought.  Y’know, because he’s black.  Ouch.
• “Life knows us not and we do not know life — we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.”

Mr. Martin has been banned. Not for the reason he gives — lie #5 as I’m counting — but because he has refused to provide a single shred of evidence for the first four lies (here and here). He doesn’t have to prove his case to regain his right to comment; he only has to provide some argument evidence, any argument evidence (as has been pointed out in the comments, Mr. Martin has already provided some argument: i.e., Churchill is lying because Mr. Martin says so; as such, I’d like to see some shred of evidence to that effect), as to why what he has claimed is not a lie. Something which he has evaded with a finesse worthy of Larry Craig.

Interestingly, one of the lies he’s been banned for was originally proposed here by another commenter, who was also banned for refusing to identify his source for said lie. A lie that’s so stupendously stupid it could only come from Jim Paine: i.e., that Ward Churchill has never published in peer-reviewed journals.

But more on that soonly.

Update: Jim Paine’s now claiming he never said that Ward Churchill had never published in peer-reviewed journals. That’s another lie of course. He said exactly that in June ‘05, in his comments section.

As far as refuting everything Churchill has ever written in order to convince his apologists that he may indeed have fudged on some facts here and there, that is a life’s work, and a sacrifice I’m not interested in pursuing. I do find it interesting, though, that Churchill has yet to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

The rest.

Fucking idiot. Fucking liar. Etc.

Update II: As Pablo notes in the comments to this post, Jim Paine has admitted he did indeed write the above. He offers in his defense that he didn’t know better at the time. So I’ve struck the “fucking liar” in my first update.

However, that’s always been exactly my point: the Ballerinas consistently make unqualified statements about Ward Churchill with no fucking evidence, and then leave it to the rest of the world — usually meaning journalists as unqualified as they are — to disprove them. Which, of course, they don’t, instead regurgitating the original, well, lie.

Is it fair to call it a lie? I think so. I could, for instance, make the unqualified statement that John Martin’s a child molester. After all, I’ve found no evidence on Google that he’s not. Would that make it a fair allegation, if all the research I’d done was a bit of internet trolling?

I’ll let you decide. And note that that’s kind of been the point of this blog from the get-go.

That said, Mr. Paine is, as always, a model of integrity compared to his readership. Unlike John Martin who’s still waffling like Larry Craig in a stiff . . . well, you get the idea . . . Mr. Paine has, at least, corrected his statement. Two years after the fact. And long after Ward Churchill’s vita has been readily available to anyone willing to skim through it. But, hell, at least he’s come clean.

On the other hand it is eminently fair, I believe, to call John Martin a liar for the five lies I’ve recounted in the last week. Certainly by Jim Paine’s argument that a lie is only a lie if the liar sticks by it even when the fact that it’s a lie is rubbed in their face.

Which brings us to another lie, this time from Ballerina, Noj, who left the following in Mr. Paine’s comments.

Ben is making hay from Churchill’s single publication (count ‘em — one) in AICRJ, one of the top Indian Studies journals. Which also routinely publishes other Indian impersonators and fabulists such as Jay Vest.

The rest.

Sometimes this is almost absurdly easy. Wherein one usually has to spend a little time hunting down evidence refuting Mr. Paine’s more inane allegations, all one has to do in this case is, well, be able to read and count.

Here’s Mr. Churchill’s vita, Noj. Care to retry your hand? Or are we still sticking by the statement that Churchill has only had a “single publication (count ‘em — one)” in AICRJ?

To quote you: “count ‘em.”

And a question for Mr. Paine, who can comment all he wants in this thread if he so desires. At what point does this kind of outright sloppiness and stupidity — if that’s what it was — become a lie?

Don’t believe me?  Ask the Denver Post editorial board.  Or, if you don’t believe them, try the Rocky’s.  Still confused on the issue?  Never the swiftest player on the field, David Harsanyi chimes in.

Is there anything quite as cringe-inducing as watching over-paid, under-read newspaper hacks attempt to wax philosophical in times of crisis?  Here’s a thought: when inexplicable shit happens, whyn’t you refrain from visiting us with a second inexplicable horror by attempting to explicate on said event?

Y’know, instead of bludgeoning your readership with the kind of half-baked platitudes that’d make Maya Angelou drive a railroad spike through her temple.