tuesday again 3/14/2023
one of the good things about the tuesdaypost series is that it reassures me i did actually do things in a particular week, even if the week felt very much like an unmemorable gray blob
listening
Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools this came on last night as i was making dinner. two (three? let’s not think about it) years ago i found the las vegas jazz station bc i wanted something on in the background while i wrote cowboyfic. and now (when i remember internet radio exists) it’s in the rotation of things keeping me company while i tend to my databases
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reading

it’s been just over two weeks since philip marlowe has burrowed his way into my brain. i have read through most of The Simple Art of Murder, which contains the titular essay and eight novellas/short stories. if you enjoy reading and thinking about criticism as its own genre/art form, this seven page essay is well worth reading. chandler had extremely strong opinions about his colleagues that he kept to himself with varying degrees of success. aside from a brief catty snit at what we now call “cozy” mysteries, it’s a very level look at the challenges and limitations of detective fiction as a genre.
The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies
between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. There has been so much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says, “Yeah,” the author is automatically a Hammett imitator.
And there are still quite a few people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini.
i had a tremendous amount of fun reading through the novellas and picking out elements he reused and expanded upon in later full novels.
im yoinking this example from wikipedia but this sequence in The Big Sleep:
The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.
first appeared in the short story The Curtain:
This room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white carpet inside the many windows, which stared towards the dark foot-hills. The air beyond the glass was dark too. It had not started to rain, yet there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.
when you are an exacting self-editor who will spend five months on one short story i imagine it’s quite easy to go back and expand on a previous framework? it is fun to see how the sausage gets made
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watching
the westerner (1940, dir. Wyler). really had me thinking about the Types of westerns i like. this is a perfectly adequate, well-acted little open range vs. homesteaders film with an impressive prairie fire sequence. walter brennan (a guy i love to see) more than deserves his oscar. gary cooper is great as a quick-thinking drifter who scams his way out of a noose. our heroine looks very much like olivia de haviland around the eyes. the original nyt review points out that cooper is very much overshadowed, and cooper only did the movie under duress bc he was worried about this very thing (p. 138-140).
between the fact that the movie thinks cooper should be the lead but brennan steals every scene he’s in, this movie does not grab me by the lapels and shake me like some others i could name. part of it is that i do not like brennan’s character. he is a self-appointed judge with a 100% hanging rate. i also think this is a totally different movie if you are not a woman, bc his character is INCREDIBLY weird about women. the ending tried very hard and failed to make me go “aw he was all right deep down anyway huh”.
the other part of why this movie does not work for me: it starts off as my favorite genre “Some Guy has an incredibly fucked up day” but most of it is about good bible-thumping homesteaders enacting the american dream. what if we all got along??? america’s big enough for everyone isn’t it?? this movie really pulls its fuckin punches re: any sort of a theme, and i do not like cooper as an actor or brennan’s character enough to say i had a good time. this movie does not delve into an aspect of the cowboy western mythos i am particularly interested in, but it is on kanopy, and it is part of my goal to watch every western on kanopy in order to convince the boston public library to add more westerns.
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playing
man i wish fallou/t 4 was good. ive really got to fucking suck it up and start rdr2 even though i know it will consume my life in a time where i do not have a ton of time to spare
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making
chicken fajitas. no pics all gone.
also: 6/10 baby blanket repeats. im trying to get this out by midapril so if i decide to fly down and look at apartments in person i can deliver it in person. so far i am happy with this rate of progress. i am going to frown about the edging for a while when im done knitting the body but that’s a problem for future kay
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