Update

Whenever I take a little time away from blogging, my brain fills up with all sorts of weird useless screeds that I feel the need to download. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of time to do so right now, so here are three things that are currently floating around, in no particular order:

1. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had started reading Raymond Chandler. Well, last week I finished. Having now read all of his books, I would strongly recommend him to anyone who likes tight, philosophical, inspiring, and generally outstanding writing. I really got a kick out of his last two novels. The Long Goodbye is a depressing but honest contemplation on disillusionment and betrayal. Although it's a downer, it is also an honest end to Chandler's oeuvre, and would have been a good place to stop. However, a few years later, he wrote Playback. Much more energetic and lighthearted, it seems shallow after The Long Goodbye, but is a lot more fun to read. Best of all, Chandler writes his main character, Philip Marlowe, an awesomely hopeful ending in it. I liked it so much that I had to read the last ten pages twice.

That having been said, you need to eat dinner before you can get to dessert, and without The Long Goodbye, the ending to Playback doesn't make any sense. Together, though, they are a perfect meal.


2. I am working in a temp job that I really don't like very much. As I was financially strapped after the Jerome incident, I needed a job quickly and took the first temp assignment that came down the pike. It doesn't pay very much, and is in Human Resources. My job is refiling the entire employee records of a large company. In the process, I have to go through every record, which makes me feel a little bit like God. More precisely, I feel like a sad god, as I have to read these little biographies that detail the constant struggle for security and job satisfaction, which is so often undermined by drinking, divorce, cruddy superiors, and other problems. Added to this, I want to shoot most of the executives in the company, as they keep giving themselves gargantuan bonuses while dickering over $.50/hour raises for their employees. It's really pretty despicable.


3. Ella is having another operation on Friday. I am going out to see her on Thursday night, and will hopefully be back on Saturday or Sunday. They're going to put a drain in on the right hand side of her liver. She's strobing between anger, humor, irritation, and sadness, which seems about appropriate for the circumstances. Afterwards, she is coming up to the city to spend Christmas with us. One of my best friends, the infamous John, will also be coming up and is bringing his sons. Although it's going to be a cheap Christmas (we're all broke), it also looks like it'll have a lot of joy.

So that's it for now. I'll hopefully get the time and distance to write something more coherent in the next few days!

Major Fan Geekage

I'm going to interrupt this particular series of navel-gazing posts to insert a little non-paid advertisement.

Raymond Chandler is God.

Okay, I've been reading some Chandler lately, as I am working on my story plotting skills and figured that it would be a good idea to take a peek at some of the best. I had previously read a few of his short stories, but had never really delved into his longer works. I am totally blown away.

Chandler has been endlessly imitated, and I have long since gotten tired of the "A dame walked into my office. She had the kind of legs that would stop traffic on the Union Pacific, but her eyes were as cold as the slabs at the county morgue..."

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

I can see why people would want to imitate Chandler, in the same way that I can see why people would want to climb Everest or channel Katherine Hepburn, or paint like da Vinci. However, some things can't be copied. Check out this description from The Big Sleep:

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest of stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem...

Later, they talk:

Her hot black eyes looked mad. "I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don't like your manners."

"I'm not crazy about yours," I said. "I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

One thing that I never realized is how funny Chandler is. Marlowe, his main character, has an absolute distrust of the world, yet is able to laugh at the comedy that surrounds him, even when everybody takes it so seriously. Chandler realizes that, at the end of the day, none of the nonsense really matters all that much, but we still need to play the game.

He also has an eye for description that I usually associate with women. He discusses clothing and furniture in intimate detail, drawing out important personality traits from fabric choices and paint colors. There were a few times when I wondered if "interior decorator" might be something that Marlowe (or Chandler) left off his resume.

A guy who investigates murders yet is amused by the suspects, who is a man's man, yet has an eye for interior design, who presents a constant, ever-changing interpretation of reality... Using Marlowe, Chandler creates a world in which truth becomes incredibly flexible, and the search for truth becomes life-threatening.

In academia, it's amazing how often you hear the words "post-modern" and "existentialist" thrown around with very little understanding of the meaning that can underlay them. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Chandler is that he completely embraced these concepts and used them as an underpinning for his work, but did so with a smile and not a smidgen of self-consciousness.

I am totally in love.