Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts

Saturday, February 07, 2015

More Raymond Chandler, Please! America Needs Chandler!




No American writer writes better than Raymond Chandler.  Chandler was considered Pulp.  Hemingway got a place in the canon of Literature.  That should be indicative of what is dreadfuylly wrong with us.  Raymond Chandler told the truth.  Ernest Hemingway is supposed be the truth.

Raymond Chandler knew that Hemingway was a bully with powerful friends and a typewriter. In The Big Sleep Chandler offered this insight via dialogue

Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.
Not really, Chandler knew that Americans will buy anything as long as it was packaged nicely. How else did Obama get two terms and why is Dancing Withe Stars?

Hemingway  wanted the world to know that he was 'vital.' Okay.

Chandler was, as another great writer described himself to be, ' the broken hearted witness to mankinds' folly.'

Raymond Chandler wrote within what is called the 'hard-boiled' detective genre.  His prose is supposed to be black and white and anything but elegant.  Well, get this -

“There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight- arms you with an ice- blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up- from- under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non- fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa- Romeo town car complete with pilot and co- pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent- mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
One of my favorite passages from The Long Goodbye ends the reverie of private detctive Phillip Marlowe's enchantment as he watches a stunningly put-together woman clinb a high dive ladder and plunge nto a pool -
"She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."

Don't we all.   

Friday, December 03, 2010

Read Raymond Chandler; Mix A Metaphor; Wink at a Homely Girl or Boy and Mind Your Manners


"She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight." ---The Little Sister (Chapter 12)

Now that Civil Unions are a reality in Illinois, I have lost fat, increased my muscle tone, sprouted darker richer and more lustrous hair, play the oboe as well the banjo and guitar, found more zeroes before the decimals in my checking account, and am no longer troubled by Low T. No, not the evil Chinaman Loan Shark and Opiates Purveyor from Morgan Park, but that new affliction of "guys 45 and over." In fact, now that same sex couples can begin bringing an avalanche of lawsuits against everything from gumball machines to the State of Illinois, I sleep much better knowing that thanks to Greg Harris, Deb Mell, the Illinois Democratic Party, WTTW, every news outlet in Illinois and Asian Carp Civil Unions is the path to Liberty.

The last fifty plus years, have been absolute hell!

Well, thank God that's over. Now, I have time to go back and re-read Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler was an Irish-Chicago born , British educated writer who captured the sound and sense of urban America like no other writer, since Mark Twain. As a young man, Chandler fought in the trenches of France during WWI with the Canadian Gordon Highlanders and later transferred to the RAF. After the war, he settled in Los Angeles, married woman eighteen years his senior, clerked for an Oil Company and began writing Pulp Fiction -after he was fired for his boozing.

In one of his early stories his narrator states, "I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard." --"The King in Yellow"

His novels The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, and Farewell My Lovely also helped launch his career as a Hollywood Screenwriter. Hollywood now hires kids who can barely read but create Graphic Novels. Try an find a script that is not lifted from another work -AVATAR is Dances With Wolves from Walter Scott's Waverly.

Chandler represented the epoch when movies were an art unto themselves and actually had wit, craft and a theme.

Now, that my life will be a path strewn with roses, rainbows and lollipops, all thanks to Civil Unions. I can re-read Raymond Chandler.