Este es un caso del detective Phillip Marlowe que me dejó una sensación parecida a El sueño eterno. El personaje principal y sus frases sarcásticas siguen siendo geniales, y esta vez las descripciones de los lugares en los que se mueven los criminales me transmitieron una mayor sensación de oscuridad y corrupción.

La trama es incluso más complicada que en El sueño eterno así que, otra vez, paso siquiera de intentar resumirla. Todo empieza cuando Marlowe se encuentra por casualidad con Moose Malloy, un hombre enorme y peligroso, recién salido de la cárcel, y dispuesto a lo que haga falta en la busqueda de su antigua novia; y acaba involucrando a cada vez más gente hasta llegar al jefe local de la mafia, que entre otras cosas dirige un tétrico casino flotante. De nuevo, parece que Marlowe se encuentre como por arte de magia en medio de todo, justo en el sitio adecuado en el momento oportuno, y gracias a eso acaba encontrando sentido a todos los hilos y personajes aparentemente inconexos que van apareciendo.

The director’s sister-in-law Mathilde Seigner hinted that the leader has been instrumental to the recent development.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is thanks to the President that Roman has been freed, but he has been super. The President has been very effective,” Times Online quoted her as telling Le Parisien newspaper.

Sarkozy had earlier expressed his views on the director being held on a US warrant for having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. (via Nicolas Sarkozy ‘helped’ Roman Polanski get bail).

Joseph Wambaugh on Hollywood

For years now, I have been avid reader of Joseph Wambaugh – a policeman turned writer. His comedies, wrapped in (mostly) LA or (sometimes) New York milieu, are in the style of Raymond Chandler under halogen lamp. The darker areas get better light. The chrome glints more. Glamour quotient gets mixed with large doses of warmth and understanding. Unlike Chandler, Wambaugh’s is never judgmental – which make his characters very real.

I read Wambaugh’s Glitter Dome, and twenty years later I remember one of his interesting observations on Hollywood,

Parking, not pussy, is at a premium around these parts, they said.

Sex, Cinema and Fashion

Hollywood, Bollywood (a patronizing name by which Indian film industry calls itself), haute couture businesses have a rather blase attitude about sex. Hence, to hold Hollywood to ordinary behavioural norms, has a puritanical air about it. In the Polanski affaire, the alleged victim, Samantha Geimer, wants the case closed.

But anyway, coming to why this story gets me curious, is why did Anand Jon, a haute couture designer get such a harsh sentence. Unwilling /semi-willing /actively willing sex in Hollywood /Bollywood /haute couture businesses is what (I have been given to believe is) normal. I mean these days, stars /starlets ‘leak’ sex tapes on the internet.

And no one has ever been seriously prosecuted, convicted and sentenced – as Anand Jon has been!

Where is the balance

I am assuming that Anand Jon is guilty. Is it the first time that models have tried advancing their career by sleeping with designers? Has it not happened before? I wonder what is it that Anand Jon did, which brought down the entire American judicial establishment onto him like ton of bricks. The case of the Sri Lankan Rajarathnam has similar smell to it.

The US prosecuting authority, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the Galleon Fund made some US$20 million out of this insider trading. I am sure that Galleon Fund (more than US$5 billion in assets under management) spent more than US$20 million on tea, coffee, espresso, soda, Evian and paper napkins. Rajrathnam’s own net worth was estimated by “Forbes” to be US$ 1.3 billion.

Is there any sense, any balance to these cases. Is Preet Bharara, indulging in reverse ‘affirmative action’ by prosecuting Rajarathnam? Is Preet Bharara trying to prove that he is colour blind?

“If you’re a wealthy trader, you aren’t special,” Bloomberg quoted Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara as saying at a press conference. “Knock on our door before we come knocking on yours.”

If you ask me, he should investigate Hank Paulson, the Former Treasury Secretary, under whose watch many bankruptcies happened conveniently in favour of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

First Published: Liberty Magazine (3 instalments), 1933
Edition Read: Vintage Crime, 1989
ISBN: 0-679-772265-3
Subtitle: A Novel of Dangerous Romance

Though beautifully written, this novella is primarily interesting for what it says about the sort of hero Hammett thought he was creating in his writings. This time he incarnated that hero as a woman.

In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler famously compared the hard boiled sleauth to a modern day knight. Hammett clearly thought slightly differently, because whatever Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is, he isn’t a knight. He sleeps with his partner’s wife, after all, and has one of the most cleverly written suppressed mean streaks I’ve ever read. Where Chandler wanted to evoke the idealism in a man who understood just how far from ideal the world is, Hammett was more content to write about seriously flawed real people who did the best they could.

When he transfers those characteristics to a woman, he put in a number of characteristics that will certainly make people groan. Luise sells her body to get through life. Perhaps that’s not so different from the more traditional male protagonists of hard boiled novels who certainly seem to get beaten and tortured and generally subjected to considerable physical danger and violence on a regular basis. Still, for whatever reason, we’ve always thought of selling yourself for sex as quite different from selling yourself to take someone else’s beating. Whatever that reason is, I’m not convinced it’s a good one, but it’s certainly a true description of our cultural attitudes. However, like the male heroes, Luise has her limits. The action of the book is driven by the fact that Luise is trying to leave her current boyfriend/employer because she has decided that he is too low for her. The parallels here are pretty easy to draw. Spade won’t work for the man who killed his partner, not because that man is so much worse than others, but because a partnership means something even when you’re sleeping with the guy’s wife. Chandler’s Marlowe gets more beatings from the people he won’t help than from the people he will. Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe refuse to have guilty parties as their clients (with limited exceptions). The key to maintaining moral fibre in the world of the hard boiled novel isn’t that you don’t sell yourself, it’s that you choose who you sell yourself to. Your limits are imposed, not by the outside world, but by yourself on yourself.

Despite being a woman who sells sex, Luise is definitely a heroine. She’s tough and smart. It’s true that the the major male character – Brazil – tries to protect her but, for the most part, he fails. She succeeds at protecting him. I don’t want to read too much into a title, but the novella is called Woman in the Dark and I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to think that the Dark in this case is the world that Hammett and the other hard boiled writers of this era inhabited and struggled against. It’s very rare to read a book in which a woman is allowed into that world as a full participant.

I guess the only other thing I want to say about the book is that it is worth reading for some of the character sketches. When we first meet Brazil in his cabin, we get a wonderful picture of a hard and broken man without any description of him being necessary. It’s one of the best instances of evocation through sparse writing and distance you can find in such an identifiable moment. It’s artful and just glorious writing.

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.

-Raymond Chandler, opening of “The Big Sleep”

Part of the thrill, and challenge, of making a devised show is that you discover the rules as you proceed. A methodology emerges as the material gets made. Having a pre-defined formula would make for a more efficient process but I choose to adopt a more open, playful approach – knowing that accidents will yield the more exciting possibilities. (I’m reminded of photo-shoots in which all the pre -planned ideas get exhausted but it’s the throwaway shot at the end of the roll of film which ends up getting used) It’s an expensive business – not only ‘cos it eats up time but because a lot of created stuff ends up in the edit-bin – but then the whole point of this unit is to investigate the theatre-making process.

The Bristol students have been terrific so far. Bright, keen, industrious, supportive of each other and committed to an emerging aesthetic. They have bought into the uncertain elements and seem to be actually enjoying themselves. My responsibilities to them as theatre director have to be complemented by those of tutor and ultimately assessor, so it’s vital to have an eye on learning objectives, be critically rigorous and offer the wisdom and practicality of my own professional experience.

Prompted by a R4 Woman’s Hour feature I heard early in the year (marking the 50’s anniversary of Chandler’s death and discussing his portrayal of women), I chose to tackle an adaptation of  his novel ‘The Little Sister’ with a gender balance of 10female ; 4male. We’re investigating the Chandler through the stylistics of film noir, as if the performance takes place on an LA film set. The four male students will play four actors who are being screen-tested for the role of Marlowe. Each of them possesses different qualities which will be exercised through the challenging environment of the entirely girl-powered studio mechanism (smoothie; lone-wolf;  troubled; sensitive). Their actress sparring-partners (all femme fatales in their own ways) are double cast – as if three pairs of exuberant, glamorous, sexy and dangerous twins are all trying to test/outwit their Marlowes (and their actors) whilst the theatrical space and narrative is driven by the remaining 2 pairs -the producers and the foley/narrator team, who direct the story and fill in any additional character parts.

The concept feels good, so now it’s just a question of getting the material down into a tight manageable structure – or do I mean script ? Shucks – I mean script…. we need a script.

I print a rough draft of some scripted scenes, compiled from their own adaptations, then hand it out. It’s eyes down and a sea of furrowed brows, as they start to dissect it…

My heart sinks.

I ejaculate a comment that the “Script is the stranglehold of the British Theatre … It kills creativity!”.

George (who is fashioning herself as the Katherine Hepburn-like Producer role), raises an eyebrow and coolly says “That’s a rather sweeping generalisation, isn’t it Graeme?”. She’s so right. Our script will be a wonderful consolidation of all the work so far. I skulk off, realising I made myself sound like an idiot. We could devote a session to the writing/devising debate – but we don’t have time. Back in my 2nd year at Lancaster, Richard Wilson was forever coming out with the most provocative statements – stimulated debate, raising questions about culture, politics, society – but in this instance I decide to shut up and go back to writing the script.

This Book Cover Totally Looks Like This Other Book Cover

» Think you can do better? Make your own!

Pictures by: dunno source Look-alike by: dunno source via Totally Looks Like Builder

Hello Book Club #28 was held at Wakeling’s house in Old Street on Saturday

The text before us was Raymond Chandler’s 1943 detective novel “The High Window”. The book caused an outcry of critical responses, and provoked Andy to describe it simply as “the worst book I’ve ever read”. Others were more sanguine, however, and we managed to find a few nuggets of historical and textual interest amidst a wasteland of outdated racial stereotypes, misogyny, pedestrian prose and leaden dialogue. The kindest verdict we could draw was that Chandler’s novel – now seemingly so cliched and predictable – was the starting point of the cliches that have since become so widespread. We must give him credit for inventing this particular branch of the detective novel, even if reading it 66 years on is like bashing yourself over the head with a mallet. But overall it nestles comfortably next to “The Sorrows of Young Werther” as the poorest book club text so far. The new book is chosen by me. I have decided to go back to basics with a 19th century classic – Washington Square by Henry James. Enjoy. As a kick-off for possible dates at my place – how about Sat 2nd or 9th May? Soph – can you forward this to Fleming, as I don’t have his personal email address?

Thanks Pete

Esta es la primera novela en la que aparece el famoso detective privado Phillip Marlowe, que luego se haría todavía más conocido al ser interpretado por Humphrey Bogart en el cine, con su cinismo, frases contundentes y humor ácido. Un tipo de vuelta de todo, que no tiene reparos en tratar con el lado oscuro de su ciudad, Los Angeles, a la hora de investigar para sus clientes.

En esta historia Marlowe es contratado por el general Sternwood para investigar un chantaje, aparentemente sin demasiada importancia, pero poco a poco va encontrandose con una trama cada vez más compleja que involucra, entre otros, a las dos hijas del general, un marido desaparecido o un negocio clandestino de alquiler de pornografía. El argumento es demasiado complejo como para ponerme a describirlo aquí por completo, pero sí quiero comentar que me pareció curioso el que todos los personajes que Marlowe se encuentra, de forma aparentemente casual, acaban teniendo algo que ver en la investigación. Además, el tío tiene una curiosa habilidad para que todo ocurra justo cuando él pasaba por ahí para verlo…

Me pareció una novela entretenida, y algunas frases de Marlowe son realmente demoledoras

Coisas que aleatórias para se pensar enquanto o computador de bordo desativa o sistema de criogenia e você  nota que não faz a barba há pelo menos uns vinte anos.

1) Encaremos os fatos: a década está acabando. Quando o vocalista da banda que supostamente iria salvar o rock quando você tinha 15 anos solta uma entrevista bunda dessas, é hora de repensar suas prioridades: continuo com o Marlboro vermelho ou assumo logo que fresquei e passo pro light?

2) E como tudo que é ruim demora a morrer, o Weezer insiste em lançar discos. E eu insisto em não ouvi-los para não macular a memória daquela que um dia foi minha banda favorita. Banda essa, aliás, que nos velhos tempos jamais colocaria um cachorro com as trochas digitalmente removidas na capa de um disco.

3) Deixando as reclamações de lado, siga esse caminho e baixe altos filmes massa: www.setimoprojetor.blogspot.com. Quem é piolho das quebradas “alternatchivas” da cidade, já conhece o endereço pelas recomendações do pessoal do Lado[R] no segundo número do mini-zine E[rr]ado, que eles soltaram durante o Goiamum Audiovisual, há uns dois meses. Como minha internet é uma bosta, sou obrigado a me valer de recursos duvidosos, como aproveitar a internet do trabalho em pleno horário de expediente para poder me refestelar com o acervo  do blog. É tudo separado por diretores. Entre outros, vamos ter Cronenberg, Lynch, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Godard, Mojica e outros.  É xuxu beleza.

4) Aos suicidas recomenda-se não olhar para baixo. Mas antes de qualquer atitude drástica, atentem: o Yo La Tengo está em cima do telhado, na Pitchfork TV descendo o braço em quatro músicas do não-menos-que-sensa Popular Songs. Se você estiver com pressa de pular, vá logo em “Here to Fall” e “Nothing to Hide”, que abrem e fecham o set, respectivamente.

5) Resumo pós-Festival DoSol 2009. Discos comprados: zero. Cervejas entornadas: 12 ou mais. Shows vistos de corpo presente: 2, 25.  O Inimigo tarda mas não falha. Hugo Morais viu e ouviu tudo e conta como foi essa onda, a quem interessar possa.

6) Não quero parecer repetitivo, mas… a caixinha do Raymond Chandler? Alguém? Adams? Adamovsky? Bueller…? Bueller…?

7) Sem mais, só leia.

Parabéns, galado: Neil Young, completando 64 primaveiras é uma boa desculpa para tomar umas gelas. Ou, no caso de liseu sério, ouvir um dos 1.345678 discos do homem no aconchego da sua caverna. Qualquer um vale, até o que ele gravou com o Pearl Jam ou o tal (nefasto, nefasto…) de música eletrônica lá do início dos anos 80. Sério. Mas sempre tendo em mente que o canal era nesses tempos aqui (espere até ele achar a gaita certa):

…you keep me searching for a heart of gold/ and i’m getting old…

9) |m|

I haven’t actually got any money at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped me from ordering a whole heap of books from Fishpond and Amazon. I periodically suffer reading cravings , maybe every four or life months, and during those times, I don’t only have to read, I have to read particular books by particular authors, even if I don’t currently own said books. So here’s a list of the books I’m anticipating sinking my teeth into over the next three months or so:

Car by Harry Crews

Celebration by Harry Crews

The Mulching of America by Harry Crews

Body by Harry Crews

Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Blood and Grits by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Getting Naked with Harry Crews (a book of interviews)

Perspectives on Harry Crews (essays about the author)

The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner

The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven by Alan Warner

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

Finch by Jeff Vandermeer

Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer (non fiction, about the writing and marketing process)

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (biography)

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (a Library of America edition that remarkably only costs $16 US from Amazon)

Mr Muo’s Traveling Couch by Dai Sijie

The Crazed by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

The Pickup Artist by Terry Bisson

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

That’s 22 books, and the O’Connor volume is really at least 4 books in 1. The credit card is taking a hammering.

From the most recent issue of The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

ELLROY
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me.
Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important, too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.

The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 201

“Uma Poesia para TS Elliot”

a risada atras da porta.
-você é um
romantico fodido-.
Eu sei que
eu estava errado.
Agora eu sou mais
velho, todos nós
ficamos velhos.
-Por favor, não
coloque seus problemas
em cima de mim-
ela disse.
Eu sei o
que é melhor
pra mim,
mas não
exite mais
nada que eu
possa fazer.
Sou um louco,
para-suicida
que carrega
uma mala cheia
de livros de
Bukowski,
Ginsberg,
Burroughs,
tenho até
umas poesias
do Rodrigo
Chagas impressas,
ele é um bom
filho da puta,
não consigo ser
tão cruel.
-Eu não sou
cruel- ele deve
pensar.
Diz pra eu ler
Sam Shepard e
Raymond Chandler,
mas nem Pulp de Hank
eu consigo ler.
Eu tenho tudo
agora baby,
estou cortando
os meus pulsos
nessa maquina,
que não pode parar,
o sangue
não
deve
nunca
parar
de jorrar.
Não é Shepard
que esta cuspindo
na pia, analisando
a cor da pasta de
dente que escorre
pela sua boca
seu canalha.
É Hank,
não negue,
ele é nosso,
seu a muito
mais tempo,
seu puto!
Você deveria
ter vindo aqui,
quando Elliot
veio jogar sinuca
comigo e um amigo,
meu amigo gritou de dentro
do banheiro quando
tinha acabado de cheirar
-TS ELLIOT É UM FILHO
DA PUTA!! ABRiL FoI
INSANO, MAS MARAVILHOSO,
FICAMOS 4 DIAS ACORDADOS.
VIVENDO A POESIA,
NÃO REcLAMAMOS DE NADA,
NINGUEM RECLAMOU-
-Janeiro foi o mês mais cruel-
eu disse.
Elliot concordou e abaixou
a cabeça.
-Mas realmente, eu não
consigo lembrar de nada-
eu disse para Elliot.
-Qual foi o pior mes?-
-Julho!- eu respondi.
-O que houve?-
-Foi o meu aniversario.
-É o pior momento de nossas
vidas.

-Vamos todos parar no inferno Elliot,
pelas coisas que fizermos.
me diga, como é o inferno?
-É o beco dos ratos,
onde os homens perderam seus ossos.*
-Eu estive lá.
-Não lembro de você por lá.
-Eu estava usando um capacete.
-Capacete?
-Sim, do Darth Vader.
-Caralho, que horror.

“Yo he aprendido más de los ataques que de los elogios. Aun en los más despiadados hay un toque de plausibilidad. Siempre hay algo embarazoso en los elogios incondicionales. Uno sabe, en el fondo de su corazón, que no se lo merece”. Eso le decía uno de los grandes reseñistas de los años veinte, Mencken, en una carta dirigida al novelista americano Theodor Dreiser, y eso lo recoge en un interesante libro “El arte de la distorsión” (Alfaguara) el escritor colombiano Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

También de Vásquez merece extraerse esta otra frase cuando alude a las reseñas de novedades: “Todos tenemos en mente una o dos firmas cuyo elogio de un libro es razón suficiente para no comprarlo, cuyo desprecio nos propulsa de inmediato a las librerías”. Palabras sorprendentes pero veraces. ¿Para qué sirve – o debería servir – una reseña? Indudablemente para ser verdadera guía de muchos lectores. Un buen crítico, según Steiner, le dice al público: “Esto es de verdad. La razón es ésta. Por favor, léalo”. Por supuesto que la otra tarea del crítico es decir: “Esto es una falsedad, una impostura. La razón es ésta. Por favor, sépalo”. Tanto del gran guía que fue Borges con sus reseñas en “El Hogar” (“Textos cautivos“) (Tusquets) como el también guía excelente que fue Cyril Connolly (“Obra selecta”) (Lumen) ya hablé en Mi Siglo.

Pero siempre es reconfortante volver de nuevo a Borges. Se ve siempre al guía al otro lado de su reseña. Como por ejemplo lo que nos dice en 1939 sobre “Las palmeras salvajes” de William Faulkner: ”En las obras capitales de Faukner – en Luz de agosto, en El sonido y la furia, en Santuario – las novedades técnicas parecen necesarias, inevitables. En The Wild Palms son menos atractivas que incómodas, menos justificables que exasperantes. (…) Es verosímil la afirmación de que William Faulkner es el primer novelista de nuestro tiempo. Para trabar conocimiento con él, la menos apta de sus obras me parece The Wild Palms, pero incluye (como todos los libros de Faulkner) páginas de una intensidad que notoriamente excede las posibilidades de cualquier otro autor”.

Hoy apenas tenemos guías como Borges que nos conduzcan con maestría por los libros. En el volumen “Críticas ejemplares” (Bitzoc) que reúne históricos textos de Proust, Steiner, Lytton Strachey, Edmund Wilson, Manganelli, Raymond Chandler, Benet y el propio Borges, Jean-Francois Fogel se pregunta: “¿Durante cuánto tiempo tendremos que esperar la muerte del crítico? La noticia se demora de una manera inesperada”.

¿Hará falta también hacerse la pregunta interrogando a quienes hoy no escriben una buena reseña?

(Imagénes:-1. foto por Hein Gorny.-mayo 1929.-smb. museum. Art Library.-Kunstibibliotek./-2.-libros en la calle)

The Diaries of Osmond Finger, Ghost Detective

Monday

11:45 am.
Office.

She either pretends to not hear me or is hard of hearing. This dame sure knows how to play a game, I think to myself.

She sighs. She starts talking about her case, either to me or to herself. I tell her I’ll take it on.

My secretary walks in. She says I’ll take the case.

“But he doesn’t know what the case is yet.”

Needless to say, I don’t buy her story, but I tell her I’ll buy her a drink. Need to get to know her better. There’s more to this case than would meet my eye if I still possessed one. I follow her to a bar. We go out for a drink. I talk, laugh. She sits in silence. My drinks pour right through me. She wipes the table up like the seductress she is. She’s sexy, a little too sexy. Something’s amiss. I sense she might be cheating on her husband, if she has one. I decide to investigate.

We part ways. I follow her home.

Tuesday

6:15pm
Investigating the Walker case. Marital Infidelity.

Two cars parked in driveway; One Honda Civic, one Pontiac Firefly. Neither belong to Walker, who is at work. Suspicious. Front door is unlocked. Walk through door. House seems empty, but hear noises coming from above. Check  fridge for clues and grab a glass of milk to quench thirst. Milk passes through me, spills on floor. Liquor cabinet is empty, perhaps drained by nights of infidelity. Float upstairs. The noises appear to be coming from the bedroom, which is locked. Walk through door.

An unclothed couple are linked affectionately in bed. They do not appear to be engaged in any explicitly sexual act, but something about their embrace suggests they may be more than friends. Get positive I.D. on Mrs. Walker, and a young man who does not appear to be Walker. Move closer to the couple to scrutinize for transgressions. I recognize the young man immediately: he’s made a cuckold of a lot of men out there.

Mrs. Walker complains of sudden draft, and states that she has become very cold. Puts on sweater. Young man also puts on sweater, and picks up a duvet that had been carelessly left on the floor. They resume their possible copulation under the covers. Mrs. Walker states she is too hot. I move closer to the bed, thinking she may be using “hot” in the colloquial sense, which would indeed confirm she is cuckolding her husband and not simply stating her temperature.

Young man throws duvet into the air, landing on me. Can’t see. Wish I had brought scissors to cut eye holes.

I stub my toe on the nightstand. All intimate activity is suddenly halted, for reasons mysterious.

I leave. Sounds from upstairs resume. Evidence inconclusive.

9:45 pm
City Square

I spot a group of painted young girls, skirts as high as their minds will be after the 8 vodka and energy drinks they plan on drinking tonight. They hail a cab. I float into the back. The girls slide in on top of me. I’m embarrassed at first, but soon I relax. I relax a little too much. The girls don’t seem to mind. They’re singing along to whatever pop idol’s popular this week. Talking about boys they’re meeting. No matter. I’m the only boy with them now.

Downtown. They leave. I stay in the cab a few minutes longer. I float thru the door as we pass my client’s house. Light’s on upstairs. I knock a few times, perhaps a bit timidly because nobody answers. I let myself in.

I’m still excited from the young taxi girls, and my excitement reaches a fever pitch when I enter and find my lovely, lovely client, stripped down, all alone, going to town, as it were, using her fingers to write a first-person story made up entirely of climaxes.

I wonder if she senses that I’m with her, and if I might play a starring role in the picture show currently playing the silver screen of her mind’s eye. Probably not, she’s never even seen me. But I’ve seen her. All of her. A little movie of my own starts to unfold. I sense the end coming all too quickly. My credits roll all over her. She screams. If only my seed was as spectral as the rest of me. I’ll discount her when I compile my expenses. I float away.

Friday

8:23 p.m. Jones Residence. More marital infidelity. Women these days.

Ted Jones was a client from last year who called in about a work-related insurance claim, but I’ve been following up on some suspicions I’d had about his wife ever since I found out he had one.

Float upstairs to the now familiar bedroom, where the Jones wife is wrapped up in her evening knitting. She has a face you can trust, but if there is anything you learn in 350 years on the job, it’s that every woman has something to hide. And one of these days, I’m going to uncover her crimes.

The Jones wife looks good when she knits. Focused, determined, even angelic. Maybe she is on the level after all. I watch her weave. Her nipple slips out of her nightgown as she purls. She doesn’t even notice. I wonder what she looks like binding off. I can’t control myself. Her weaving is too seductive. Driven madly by impulse, I float towards her.

Well, If she was clean, she sure isn’t now.
Better mark it as a discount.

Saturday

9:20 pm Palmer Boulevard. Spectral Haunting Case.

Secretary passed a note onto me about this case. Haunted house case, how ironic. Is it really a ghost, or is it just a cat burglar treating this house like his own personal kitty litter? Hell, I’ll take it. I need the cash.

Arrive at house, float in. Been there for other cases. Guy upstairs in the bedroom. I recognize him right away. He made a cuckold of Mr. Walker. Same guy I caught doing the horizontal tango with Mrs. Walker, the guy who attacked me with the duvet.  Sitting there, monogrammed robe, he looks pretty relaxed.

No evidence of haunting yet. But I better stick around just to make sure. According to the report, the ghost only haunts the house when the guy is having sex. What a creep. What a Goddamned pervert. I float into the closet to keep my element of surprise in case the sex-obsessed specter decides to darken this door with his deviant ways.

I hear a knock on the door and in walks my beauty from before, the dame who wanted me to check on her husband. She smiles at the guy. This is looking like it might be a bit of a sticky situation.

I watch these two fornicators start living up to their name and doing what they do best: fornicating. They both look pretty happy.

I’m rushing to conclusions now. She wasn’t suspicious of her husband at all. Her husband’s probably a good guy, probably a guy like me, only guilty of falling for the wrong dames. Falling for dames that’ll use you, cuckold you, and maybe even kill you by battering your head with a candleabra the day you’re about to get your detective’s license. Poor guy.

“See, I told you the house wasn’t haunted”, says the dame.

“The ghost only comes when I’m having sex.”

How right he is. I explode with rage; I explode with something stickier than rage. In a throe of passionate anger I lose my footing, and crash through the closet door, making a thundering racket as I send a lamp to floorsville. The couple screams, and in a frenzy of excitement I’m brought back to our first encounter, only this time it is I who blanket them, with my own duvet — of translucent white.

Hell of a night.

I just stumbled across a video filmed on the 17th of March 1918 of Canadian soldiers being presented to America dignitaries at the CEF HQ on the Western Front.The significance of this is that Chandler arrived in France on 16th of March and it is easy to imagine that Canadian commanders would show off their freshest troops. It is a long shot of course but I can’t help but wonder as I watch this video if Chandler is amongst these men.

I have to say that I am a bit bogged down in Chandler’s war experiences. Not being a military historian, I have found it difficult to decode some of the abbreviations in the records of his war service. Still, it seems to me, that there the past biographies haven’t really told the story of Chandler’s war experiences fully so I hope that mine will set that straight.

In a Philip Roth interview with the Wall Street Journal—that would be the Roth interview that doesn’t address green dildos—he talks about his current reading habits, which mainly includes old favorites. “Mostly what I’m doing is rereading stuff that I read in my 20s, writers who were big in my reading life who I haven’t read in 50 years. I’m talking about Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Turgenev, Conrad. I’m trying to reread the best before… I die.”

“Sometimes you write amazing sentences, she wrote to me, and sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence”—a lovely piece by Alexander Chee about studying writing under Annie Dillard.

Atlas Shrugged and Ralph Nader’s new novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, have more in common than you might think.

Dan Green takes a close, thoughful look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but determines (rightly, I think) that The Subterraneans is in many ways a superior work.

The American Scholar takes a close, thoughtful look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns.

Ethan Canin on the film adaptations of his work: “Movies are big, exciting, hopeful collaborations, brought down by venality, pandering, and greed.”

Lionel Shriver opens up about using her family as source material for her novel A Perfectly Good Family.

The Nation on the novels of Don Carpenter. (subscription req’d)

A gallery of Tom Adams‘ curious paperback covers for Raymond Chandler novels.

Writers aren’t doing too well in the Baltimore Sun’s contest to declare the area’s biggest local celebrity, but Anne Tyler’s still in the running.

In related news, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane speak out on the importance of the late James Crumley.

“The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved.”

Should you wait until you’re 40 before attempting to read Moby-Dick?

“If I’m going slow I’m in trouble.  It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.“   — Raymond Chandler

(These real writers have such cool ways of putting things!) —   YUR

First Published: Harper Collins, 2007
Edition Read: Harper Collins, 2007
ISBN: 978 0 00 714982 7
*** Random Book ***

You have to be at least somewhat impressed by a book that creates an alternate history in which atom bombs dropped in Europe and Marilyn Munroe Kennedy as the First Lady are mentioned in a totally off-hand, background manner.

This book is teeming with alternate history exploration. Jews vs Native Americans for control of a portion of Alaska that has been partitioned. Grand global schemes involving a Holy Land that the Zionists were driven out of by the Arabs before Israel could come to be. And so on.  It’s very well written and the murder mystery which drives the action of the book is a nice canvas on which Chabon can draw his theories of Jewish and human identity. But that’s not really what I want to talk about.

This is not a hard boiled novel in the way that Chandler or Hammett write hard boiled novels, but it reminded me very much of that genre (possibly because I read way too much of it, but anyway). Specifically, the protagonists are eerily reminiscent of the gritty, downtrodden but ultimately idealistic detectives that populate the best of the hard boiled genre.

For me, there is something endlessly seductive about that combination. A character who has seen and lives with the worst part of human nature and who has a knowledge of what people and the world are capable of that borders on cynicism but who still, ultimately, believes in their own personal honour is the best kind of hero I know. These characters are rarely, if ever, happy. Sometimes life offers them glimpses of happiness, but for the most part they harden their hearts to it. Their heroic nature isn’t in their ability to overcome the evil of the world, it is in their ability to live in and not be overtaken by the evil of the world. The dour, rude, confrontational attitude that these characters drag around with them is their armour. More often than not, they have no sword. They have no true hope of winning and yet the world is undeniably better for their being in it.

Given that the characters in Chabon’s novel fit this description pretty well, I’m not completely sure why I resist the characterisation of the book as as hard-boiled. My best explanation is that a typical hard boiled novel is written in a voice that, though not identical to, very closely resembles the protagonist’s voice. In other words, it is not just the character that has to hide his realistic idealism behind a mask of terse prose but the author as well. The authors seem to be saying that the world is as bad and debased and irredeemable as their characters believe and so offer us their detectives as way of being better than the world without leaving it. Chabon doesn’t do that. His voice in the book is not the voice of his characters. Instead, Chabon adds humerous touches to the background and sly observations that gently mock his characters. Though he never gets explicit, the narrator suggests that though his characters see the world as it is to them, the world needn’t seem that way to us.

Una nueva propuesta del club de lectura, que aprovechando que estaba en la pila de pendientes, he leído con mucho gusto. La tercera novela de Chandler que se cruza en mi camino, primero vinieron, El largo adiós y El sueño eterno. Una gozada, Chandler es un maestro. Novela negra clásica cien por cien, sin equivocación, el origen del género negro en todo su esplendor.

Nuestro querido Marlowe, tropieza con un tipo enorme recién salido de la cárcel que dice llamarse Moose Malloy y que esta buscando a su antigua novia Velma. Un tipo enorme vestido de una manera muy peculiar, en un barrio de negros y con muy mal humor solo puede traer problemas, si además, sumamos la capacidad intrínseca que tiene nuestro detective para meterse en problemas, ya tenemos los elementos para un buen lío. Pero la cosa no acabara ahí, Marlowe recibirá además una llamada para realizar un sencillo trabajo de guardaespaldas, un par de horas de trabajo bien pagadas y listo, pero como es de ordinario ese trabajo no sera tan sencillo como imagina.

287 páginas de wihskys, sombreros, policías corruptos, bonitas mujeres muy peligrosas, chantajistas, indios apestosos, cigarrillos, casinos, pistolas, palizas, más mujeres, más policías… buena novela negra donde lo que menos importa es quien empuño el arma, por que llegados a ese punto hemos absorbido tanto el lenguaje, la narración, el paisaje y a nuestro héroe, que no deseamos que se acabe, no queremos que Marlowe desenmascare al asesino, al chantajista, al traficante o al poli corrupto, queremos que se demore pagina a pagina, queremos que sus increíbles frases sigan dejando pasmados a todos sus interlocutores, que les haga enrojecer de ira, que les haga desearlo aún mas. Y es que Marlowe es un tipo duro e ingenioso, y que se mete en demasiados líos…

Me encanta Marlowe, no lo puedo evitar, es el arquetipo de detective privado con el que yo soñaba ser cuándo era pequeño, y creo que con el que sigo soñando a día de hoy dormido y despierto, un tipo con unas pelotas, más duras que el hierro.

************

En otro apartado de cosas, quiero darle las gracias a Carmina, que capitanea un fantástico blog llamado De tinta en vena, por conceder un premio a  este blog, un premio llamado Alma con arte. Este premio tiene asociadas unas reglas, que son una serie de preguntas y unas menciones, y me perdonareis, pero soy algo celoso de mi intimidad, llamémosle vergüenza y me voy a saltar todas esas reglas. Espero no parecer borde. Únicamente le pasare este premio a una buena amiga bloguera que se llama Lala y que tiene este fantástico blog, ya que la mayoría de los blogs que leo ya tienen este premio o simplemente muchos de ellos ni siquiera saben que les leo.

Muchas gracias Carmina por pasar por aquí y hacerme merecedor de ese pequeño gesto de amistad.

]]> http://goldenstate.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/stuck-by-raymond-chandler/ Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:43:39 +0000 goldenstate http://goldenstate.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/stuck-by-raymond-chandler/ http://mensolerie.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/gli-addii-internazionali-di-raymond-chandler/ Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:13:14 +0000 Recensioni dei libri sulle mensole di casa mia (e altre cose nei paraggi) http://mensolerie.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/gli-addii-internazionali-di-raymond-chandler/

Una delle recensioni più sentite e appassionate della categoria “Libri di mia mamma”

Lui è Philip Marlowe in Italia

Altri lunghi addii intorno al mondo

Il lungo addio francese

Un altro lungo addio francese

In Francia i lunghi addii si sprecano

Vabè

No Comment

Qualcuno ha da accendere?

E così tua sorella ha avuto un altro figlio?

Non sono mai stato così contento di vedere un tedesco

O una Danese

Basta che non esageri

Che poi fa la fine della Francia

Non so più cosa pensare pensavo che la Danimarca fosse diversa

Viva la Corea

Viva la Norvegia

Viva il Catalano

Dalla Polonia con bassotto

Dalla Polonia con gelato

L'immenso addio portoghese

Il proseguo addio portoghese

Il Portogallo che vuole concorrere con Francia e Danimarca

Arrivano i bulgari

Ho perso il filo

Direi basta così.

Michael Connelly (famed detective writer and former LA Times reporter) rented and wrote out of – for a short time – the same apartment that the grandfather of the modern detective story – Raymond Chandler – wrote out of in the 1930’s. Having moved from Florida to LA in 1987, Connelly went to the High Tower Apartments to see where the famed 1930’s writer had once written his most famous character stories. The cigarette marks were still on the walls, Connelly noticed. Before leaving Connelly had the manager swear that he would call him if the apartment ever became available, which it did ten years later, at which time Connelly rented it and wrote out of it for several years before finally moving on to more comfortable writing locations – an office with air conditioning.