dual personalities

Tag: Raymond CHandler

April 28, 2020

The kindness of strangers

by chuckofish

Well, the coronavirus finally hit close to home last week when one of our flyover institute students died. I had actually known this woman for over 30 years.

I was going to my class’s 10th reunion at Smith College. I had just found out that my mother was dying and I didn’t really want to go, but the plane ticket had been bought and arrangements made and everyone said go, so I went. I flew to Hartford, CT and planned to get on the Peter Pan bus to Springfield and then change to a bus to Northampton, as I had always done in college.

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But when I arrived at Bradley International Airport,  a well-dressed little lady came up to me and said, do you happen to be going to Smith College? I said, why, yes I am. She said, well, I’m going to my 30th reunion and I’m going to rent a car, but I don’t like to drive alone, so would you like to go with me?

I could have cried with relief. So Sally drove me to Northampton and we chatted amiably the whole way. I heard all about Charlie, her husband, and her three kids, her father who had been a professor at Yale, and so on. She was just the ticket for getting my mind off my troubles. I didn’t see Sally again until my first week at work in 2002 when she walked into my flyover institute and we re-introduced ourselves.

I never believed that chance meeting in the Hartford airport was a chance meeting at all. It was the unseen hand on my shoulder, the whisper from the wings assuring me that all would be well. Courage, dear heart.

Sally was 83 when she died and she had a happy life. Many people will miss her, me included.

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Looking at the clouds

Daughter #1 came home for 24 hours on Saturday and we had a lovely time working on our puzzle, listening to music, taking a walk, drinking a margarita, sitting on the patio, and watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a top-five favorite movie. The boy came over to borrow a tool and he sat outside with us in the sunshine for twenty minutes.

I read a lot of The Long Goodbye. 

“There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.”

It is pretty great but I will be ready for something else when I’m finished. It is too easy to fall into the slough of cynicism he describes so well. It is not a good time to be doing that.

I watched Robert Altman’s film version of the book and I hated it.

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I despise it when someone makes a movie based on a book, but all they really use are the names of the characters and maybe one aspect of the plot. What is the point of that?Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. Gould’s Marlowe is a complete schlub with a cat. Philip Marlowe doesn’t have a cat.

Just terrible.

Well, chin up as we start week seven of our confinement. Onward and upward.

4 Comments
March 6, 2018

Why I love Raymond Chandler

by chuckofish

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“I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

–Farewell, My Lovely

2 Comments
January 14, 2016

“How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

by chuckofish

Come now, you’ve never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why they’ve got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by *types* of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from *steamboats*. But, Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there’s not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No. No soap, Mr. Norton. We’re sunk, and we’ll have to pay through the nose, and you know it.

Did you watch Double Indemnity (1944) last night? It was on TCM as part of their Star of the Month–Fred MacMurray–repertoire.

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It is the ultimate noir film and, in my opinion, just a great movie. It is certainly Fred MacMurray’s best movie. And Barbara Stanwyck, although she has seldom looked worse, is terrific.

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Edward G. Robinson, playing against type as is MacMurray, is wonderful in the good guy role.

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However, it is the sharp dialogue and grim, realistic narration written by Raymond Chandler that makes the movie. I mean, no one before or since writes like him. Many have tried, but no one comes close.

It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Actress, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Music, and Sound. It won nothing. (Why wasn’t Fred nominated? And E. G. R.?) This was the year Going My Way won a bunch–hello, please!–but you know, the war was raging…voters went for sentimentality and breezy Bing Crosby, not a gritty crime drama.

Sigh.

Well, if you missed it, you might want to look it up. It’s a good one.

6 Comments
July 23, 2015

“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”*

by chuckofish

Happy birthday to Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959)–great writer and keen social commentator!

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“Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what is sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”
—The Long Goodbye (written in 1953)

Haven’t I been saying this for years?

Have a good Thursday. Read some Chandler or watch Double Indemnity (1944). Drink a gimlet.

*The Big Sleep

4 Comments
January 6, 2015

Under the tree: “Big brothers know everything…Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!”*

by chuckofish

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My dual personality blogged about her haul of Christmas gift books the other day, so I thought I would follow suit with a list of mine.

My big brother gave me the new biography of John Wayne by Scott Eyman and I dived right in. (Middlemarch was unceremoniously shoved to the back of the bedside table.)

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I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much. It supported my previously held view that old Duke was the greatest. I always knew he was intelligent, hard-working, kind, humble, and dreamy, but it was nice to have that opinion validated. Here is a good review of the book by Peter Bogdonavich in the New York Times.

When everyone goes home tomorrow and I am bereft, I am going to binge-watch John Wayne movies. This is what I call good therapy.

My sister gave me a new book about Raymond Chandler–another favorite of mine–The World of Raymond Chandler in His Own Words edited by Barry Day.

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Chandler, as we all know, wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins once observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit. He is a man after my own heart: “Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise the upper classes because they are phony.”

As you can imagine, this book is chock-full of great quotes by the master of simile. “Soot…was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot.” (The Big Sleep)

An old friend (and a reader of this blog) gave me

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which is full of good things to remember:

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And, of course, I can always count on daughter #2 to give me something intellectually stimulating. This year it was a copy of

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I can’t wait to delve into this one! Emerson is one of my favorites and you know I always like to look at the spiritual side of things.

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.” (Self-Reliance)

(P.S. I received some wonderful non-book presents and I hope the people who gave me these will not feel slighted that I did not mention them today.)

What are you reading?

*Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz

3 Comments
September 23, 2014

“Shake your business up and pour it. I don’t have all day.”

by chuckofish

This past weekend I finished a mystery that was recommended to me by someone at work whose opinion I respect. The book was okay. I mean I read the whole thing and that is saying something. It was well-written and engaging enough, but as mysteries go, it just wasn’t Raymond Chandler.

So I decided to re-read, for the umpteenth time, The Big Sleep.

And, omg, on the first page you are greeted with

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

And a few pages later, Philip Marlowe says, in reply to Mrs. Regan saying she doesn’t like his 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 very 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 my time trying to cross-examine me.”

Nobody writes like Raymond Chandler. He is just the  best. And as I’ve said before, Philip Marlowe is one of the great characters in fiction. Right up there with Hamlet and Holden Caulfield, if you ask me.

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And R.C. was an Episcopalian. I know we would have been best friends.

5 Comments
June 30, 2014

And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky

by chuckofish

At church last week we were exhorted to “Bring your smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras… any electronic communications device…” to church yesterday as we joined a nationwide effort to “make the Good News go viral.”

O gee. No thanks. Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted no part of this:

  • Use your smartphone, tablet or other electronic devices to share comments, prayers or pictures on your favorite social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
    Use #Episcopal and #GraceKirkwood.
  • Text questions or comments to Fr. Todd during the service.
  • Post a selfie with people around you during the time of the Peace, in the Narthex, during coffee hour, etc.
    (please ask permission before taking anyone’s picture).
    Use #Episcopal and #GraceKirkwood.
  • Keep an eye on the monitor next to the pulpit to see what other people are posting (yes, there will be a TV in the sanctuary — just for today!).
  • Come to our Sunday Forum at 9 a.m. in LaVielle Conference Room (all ages welcome).

I suppose this was supposed to appeal to young people, motivating them to come back to the new hipster Episcopal Church. See, we are with it! We’re still where it’s at, man.

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The rector takes a selfie

Passing the peace

Passing the peace

Yes, a picture speaks 1000 words. (These were on Facebook.) Now all doubt has been erased concerning whether or not we are all huge nerds at Grace.

Anyway, I stayed home. Because–zut alors!– I think church should be a haven away from cell phones and monitors.

That was what I didn’t do this weekend. As for what I did do–it was the usual: estate sale-ing, house cleaning, yard work, a little shopping, reading, and movie watching. I watched The Magnificent Seven (as I said I would) and Blackthorn, as my dual personality suggested. I am proud to say, I figured out how to turn on the subtitles (on Netflix). Go me.

I also watched Murder My Sweet (1944), which is the best film version of a Raymond Chandler novel (Farewell, My Lovely). Dick Powell is, in my estimation, better than Humphrey Bogart. I know that’s sacrilegious to some, but it’s what I think.

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Wasn’t it swell of the boy to drop it by for me? It is a really good movie, full of wonderful Chandler lines like “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom. I felt pretty good – like an amputated leg.”

I also had a  big work event on Saturday which went very well. Now I have two work days and then the OM and I are heading up to Michigan to celebrate the 4th of July and my brother’s birthday with my siblings and their better halves. Go team.

 

8 Comments
August 30, 2012

Comfort food for the soul

by chuckofish

It’s been a stressful summer. One way I have dealt with it is by re-reading some of my old favorites. Right now I am reading Out to Canaan, 4th in Jan Karon’s Mitford series, having just read These High Green Hills (#3).

These books are not for everyone (although they have been perennial bestsellers), but for me, these simple stories of the adventures of an Episcopal priest in a small town in North Carolina peopled by wonderful and endearing characters, are the only kind of fantasy I enjoy.

They had a good life in Mitford, no doubt about it. Visitors were often amazed at its seeming charm and simplicity, wanting it for themselves, seeing in it, perhaps the life they’d once had, or had missed entirely.

Yet there were Mitfords everywhere. He’d lived in them, preached in them, they were still out there, away from the fray, still containing something of innocence and dreaming, something of the past that other towns had freely let go, or allowed to be taken from them.

The books are also very funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. And they are filled with the Holy Spirit. Yes, and Karon quotes the likes of Bonhoeffer and Pascal and Wordsworth (freely)–all right up my alley.

I also enjoy the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith about a wonderful lady detective in Botswana. These books, like the Mitford books, seemingly simple and straightforward, are full of truth.

The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them–wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one’s time in tears–and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own little life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their solution?

And, as you know, when in doubt, it’s always a good time to re-read Raymond Chandler. But, look, someone seems to have “borrowed” my Chandler volume 1. (Ahem.)

What do you read for comfort?

6 Comments
June 18, 2012

Why I love Raymond Chandler

by chuckofish

“On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.

—The Little Sister

It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from ol’ Raymond Chandler. Such a way with words. Don’t we all feel better now?

3 Comments