05.19.09: hard-boiled wonderland

when i mowed through stephenie meyer's supercheesy twilight series last year, the subject was the hook: i can't stand meyer's writing style, but i love all things vampire-related.* now, after reading the big sleep for my 101 in 1001 list, i find myself scrambling for raymond chandler novels with what seems like the flip side of those feelings: detective novels don't usually do it for me, and i really dislike guys'-guy characters...but chandler is so much fun, so bone dry yet maudlin, so preposterous and great. the upside of this is that i'm having windfall fun with a genre that had always seemed awfully flat to me; the downer is that i'm falling in love with a writer who might or might not be, well, a total asshole (if you take him and the novels at face value, a misanthrope's the nicest thing he could be). i'm turning to an expert (tom hiney, whose biography of the guy was a times notable book in 1999) for context; in the meantime, i'm going ahead with the shameless page-turning.** some of the passages i've dogeared:

(from the big sleep, 1939)

Overhead the rain still pounded, with a remote sound, as if it was somebody else's rain.

(from farewell, my lovely, 1940)

The big man said: "Now that we are all between pals and no ladies present we don't really give so much time to why you went back up there, but this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down."
"A gag," I said. "An old, old gag."
"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."

(from the long goodbye, 1953, my favorite thus far)

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

At three A.M. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.

I might even have got rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

have you read chandler? what'd you think?

*and zombie-related, apparently. not sure when they shambled into the tent, but there they are.

**it's best when you read it aloud in your head with a beaky gumshoe voice.

04.29.09

my garfunkelesque 'recent reads' list (the dozen titles in that column on the right) has been awfully tomboyish lately, probably because i picked up a bunch of media roundups (especially esquire's "75 books every man should read"*) right before creating my own latest 101 in 1001 list. so how's the Man Canon? a bit dodgy, but surprisingly enjoyable. in order of suitability for mixed company (descending), a handful:

sharp teeth, toby barlow

{+} like vikram seth's the golden gate (sonnets about san francisco), a modern take on the epic poem (free verse about packs of werewolves in los angeles). one of its main story lines - a romance between a dogcatcher and a she-wolf - springs from the idea that packs, like bee hives, have queens. barlow's an ad exec, not a full-time poet, and his style's a bit rough - but it suits the material, and he's got joss whedon's knack for writing strong female characters (several of sharp teeth's remind me of buffy and angel's ladies).

{-} the lonely gal who took in strays was a bit one-note, but i quibble.


watchmen, alan moore and dave gibbons

{+} lady superheroes costumed heroes! okay, one is murdered long before the book starts and another is considerably more forgiving than she should be, but the most prominent one - laurie - gets to kick some ass. next to most of its contemporaries (neil gaiman's sandman, which came a few years later, notwithstanding), it's positively girlpowertastic.

{-} how to say this without spoiling the book? i get the feeling that alan moore hasn't spent a lot of time around real, live women. his can be...improbable.


rabbit, run, john updike

{+} as i tweeted a few weeks ago, updike is something of an apple with a razor blade: his language is gorgeous and precise, and his sense of a conversation's emotional pace is really remarkable. but then there's the

{-} constant need to make really vile observations about women. rabbit angstrom (a former basketball star and current philanderer) is a dog, and the contrast between his adorable/despicable tendencies is A Big Deal, and i get that - but do i need the panty-sniffing on every page? it jerked me out of the book, as did updike's disproportionately unflattering portraits of his women (poor ruth: 5'8" or 5'9", 147 pounds, and thus - according to updike - hopelessly, relentlessly fat!). i felt unwelcome in updike's head, if that makes any sense.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what's the most masculine book you can think of? define 'masculine' however you like.

02 why does art garfunkel's reading list cut off after 2007? did studs terkel's the magnificent ambersons ruin all other books for him?

03 what should female superheroes wear?

*an especially silly list, but Manly Cultural Roundups are fascinating, aren't they?