FARMER’S INSURANCE

I know you had plans today, but I got bad news. Our ox done come up lame. So let's get the plow strapped on you and get to tilling that back forty.

We recently bought a stack of digest paperbacks. These books generally came in the early 1950s and were often sexually charged dramas with women as the main characters. Dirt Farm falls into that basic category, though the lead is male, a war vet named Bern Winter who takes a fieldhand job hoping to exorcise his personal demons with hard work.

Unfortunately, he’s had the misfortune to walk right into a family out of Erskine Caldwell. There’s the developmentally disabled man-child who’s also a potentially dangerous physical brute. There’s the amoral sex maniac who has lascivious designs on a sibling. There’s the paragon of perfect femininity onto whom everyone attaches their hopes and dreams. There’s the subservient domestic staffer bestowed with the wisdom of the ages. There’s the emotionally crippled accident victim who wanders around in a daze playing a fiddle. And there are secrets. Secrets galore that bespeak the decadence of the South and its moneyed class.

The straight shooting manly-man protagonist could ignore all this lunacy or disrupt it, and of course he dives in head first. These digest books are usually pretty good. Far better than you’d suspect if you haven’t read any. But Dirt Farm feels like a rushed attempt to take advantage of the burgeoning southern noir sub-genre, and is shoddily constructed and ultimately pointless. Onward and upward.

Uni Books, Francis Mitchell, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 16

1964—China Detonates Nuke

At the Lop Nur test site located between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts, the People’s Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon, codenamed 596 after the month of June 1959, which is when the program was initiated.

October 16

1996—Handgun Ban in the UK

In response to a mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland that kills 16 children, the British Conservative government announces a law to ban all handguns, with the exception .22 caliber target pistols. When Labor takes power several months later, they extend the ban to all handguns.

October 15

1945—Laval Executed

Pierre Laval, who was the premier of Vichy, France, which had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, is shot by a firing squad for treason. In subsequent years it emerges that Laval may have considered himself a patriot whose goal was to publicly submit to the Germans while doing everything possible behind the scenes to thwart them. In at least one respect he may have succeeded: fifty percent of French Jews survived the war, whereas in other territories about ninety percent perished.

October 15

1966—Black Panthers Form

In the U.S., in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale form the Black Panther political party. The Panthers are active in American politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but eventually legal troubles combined with a schism over the direction of the party lead to its dissolution.

October 14

1962—Cuban Missile Crisis Begins

A U-2 spy plane flight over the island of Cuba produces photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles being installed. Though American missiles have been installed near Russia, the U.S. decides that no such weapons will be tolerated in Cuba. The resultant standoff brings the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. The crisis finally ends with a secret deal in which the U.S. removes its missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing the Cuban weapons.

October 13

1970—Angela Davis Arrested

After two months of evading police and federal authorities, Angela Davis is arrested in New York City by the FBI. She had been sought in connection with a kidnapping and murder because one of the guns used in the crime had been bought under her name. But after a trial a jury agreed that owning the weapon did not automatically make her complicit in the crimes.