Christopher’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Christopher’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Congrats to everyone, especially Ben. Nothing like seeing your name in print.

Jonathan is a Nigerian prince? Who knew?

Jennifer wrote: "Chris wrote: "Brian wrote: "Maureen wrote: "i bet swanny is A BIG weirdo..."

think he's showing his backside? :D
"

No, no. I always wear pants...just teach shirtless on odd days.

Aprop..."

this is all too funny. you sound like such a cool teacher!

To paraphrase Dirty Harry, I'm a legend in my own mind. :)

i'm just now reading the big sleep - i'm around 15 chapters in now. carmen's character and mannerisms reminds me of the cape fear remake with juliette lewis playing the daughter.

And that connection with Juliette Lewis in the "Cape Fear" remake is a good one...especially the gross make-out scenes with Robert De Niro. A seriously messed-up girl. But Carmen is more psychotic.

Kerry, I think Chandler used the rain for both. It's atmospheric (no pun intended), but it's also thematic. Rain can often suggest sadness or maybe even cleansing, but in The Big Sleep I think it's more about a darker reality lurking underneath sunshine and clear skies. There are a handful of clear, sunny scenes in the novel, such as when Marlowe and Ohls go see Owen Wilson fished out of the ocean, but they just serve to punctuate all the rain. And Marlowe usually describes the rain as ominous (without overdoing it) or dirty, or both.

This is the kind of thing I enjoy in novels--description that both works in and of itself and, at the same time, reinforces some thematic issues without bludgeoning you over the head with SYMBOLISM! or DEEPER MEANING!

Brian wrote: "Maureen wrote: "i bet swanny is A BIG weirdo..."

think he's showing his backside? :D
"

No, no. I always wear pants...just teach shirtless on odd days.

Apropos of both this thread and The Big Sleep...one sleepy class was having a hard time getting into a discussion of the book. Oddly enough, when I mentioned Carmen, some people perked up. They were writing her off as just weird or immature, though. "You just think she's weird?" I asked. "Yeah," they replied. (They'd already read the first ten chapters or so, so they'd read about Carmen naked and hopped up at Geiger's house.) "Okay, but how does she flirt with Marlowe?" I asked. The girls were all over it, but the boys weren't. So I walked over to one of the senior boy's desks, did my best Kathleen Turner voice, lowered my eyelashes (such as they are) and said to him, huskily, "You're cute." Then I sucked my thumb and giggled. Then I said in a small voice, "I feel dirty." General laughter ensued. The school counselor tells me the boy I pseudo-vamped is doing well. And they got the point about Carmen.

But, dude, a teacher in a mini-skirt and her husband with the mini-coffin on desk? Now that's weird.

Two more thoughts...

I like reading about Chandler's California, that state of sunshine and dreams which he turns on its head. It's always raining, and everyone's dreams turn out badly, like Agnes'. Every once in a while we get a day with just enough "snap" in the air to make you feel like everything is within arm's reach, and then the dirty rain comes again. (I wonder if Ridley Scott thought about this when he made "Blade Runner"...talk about one long, foul rain. Plus Harrison Ford's deadpan voice-over, sort of a pseudo-Marlowe.)

I also like reading detective novels that lead somewhere, that open up another world. Most detective novels have an apparent plot and a revealed plot; the apparent plot is the rather obvious one that's at the start of the book (the General hires Marlowe to make the blackmailing of his daughter Carmen go away) and the revealed plot is buried within the story and comes to light after the detective does some digging (Rusty Regan's disappearance becomes more and more important, until Marlowe is able to put two-and-two together). Detectives get to go into places, ask questions, and investigate things that most people aren't able to or don't want to. They also tend to find the damnedest things.

I'm reading "Bleak House" for the first time, on a Kindle I just got from work. 19th century meets the 21st. I remember suffering through "Great Expectations" in high school (I know, I'm a heretic, but I read it for summer reading, which is where books that teachers don't want to teach go, and I just couldn't get into it). I would find a few scenes to be good but mostly just staring at the page count and thinking "Oh, dear God, when will it be done?" I don't think I read a single Dickens novel in college. Then I had to teach "Hard Times" in my second teaching job and, while it's not one of Dickens' best novels, the language and voice just blew me away. In grad school I had to read "Oliver Twist" and "Our Mutual Friend" and I was hooked.

"Bleak House" so far may be the best of the pitifully small number of Dickens I've read. Characters that come across as slightly over-the-top and yet completely believable. Descriptions that verge on a kind of magic realism, the product of a rapturous imagination--at one point Dickens imagines the thoughts of animals with regards to the weather. The everlasting legal case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. (And his names--Esther Summerson, Guppy, Tulkinghorn, Horace Skimpole, Mrs. Jellyby. He mixes humor with horror, the personal with the social, hyperbole with realism. If Shakespeare and Stephen King...but I digress.

Reading on the Kindle is odd and yet sort of liberating. No thick wad of pages left to read that sometimes threatens to defeat me. The font is very readable (although every book on a Kindle is in the same font, which was slightly disconcerting at first). I like gadgets so clicking a button to turn a page isn't a big deal. More on this later...

J.R.R. Tolkien lived in southeast England. And Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard were just mentally south of the border.

I had to go to that poll and vote for To Kill a Mockingbird...apparently I wasn't the only one.

Part of what makes "The Big Sleep" a great choice for the radio theater project is that the dialogue is ready-made for you. Holmes and Watson speak in an earnest yet stiffly formal manner that my students recognize but have a hard time relating to. Translating Holmes into a spoken script is work. But Chandler just rolls easily enough off the tongue, with minor alterations.

We'll see how cool it is...end-of-year projects can be surprisingly strong or really weak sauce, depending on the seniors' attitudes. So far, so good...only two weeks left until exams start. I knew you had worked in radio, but I didn't know you produced radio theater--what was that like?

The students in my Crime and Criminality class just finished "The Big Sleep" and are now working on a final project: taking any story we've read so far this semester and turning it into a radio theater production using GarageBand on their laptops. (We're a Mac laptop school--everybody's got one.) Some students chose to use Sherlock Holmes stories, but one group chose "The Big Sleep," specifically chapters 28-29 when Marlowe meets Silver-Wig and faces off with Lash Canino. (Again, great villain name.) That group just did a read-through of their script and, for a group of senior boys three weeks from graduation, they were really good. Final product is due a week from Monday, so we'll see how it turns out...

Hell, that's nothing, JE.

"...all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party" (64).

Stuff like this dates the book somewhat and is eye-roll inducing. We get it, Marlowe's a big tough heterosexual guy who likes dames. No worries, Mr. Chandler.

From that website detnovel.com I mentioned earlier:

In the most bizarre incident of his life, Chandler arranged to finish the shooting script in an alcoholic siege. Paramount had two limos standing by at his house, six secretaries in teams of two for dictation and typing, and a doctor to give him glucose injections, since he wouldn't be eating while he drank and wrote. The limos took script to the studio, brought the doctor for Cissy (Chandler's wife), and took the maid shopping. When Houseman arrived he would find the writer passed out at the table and waken him. Chandler wrote another page and drank. Eventually he finished the screenplay of "The Blue Dahlia," as well as all revisions required by the producer. The movie brought him more fame (an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay) but doctoring of the final script had reduced Chandler's touch to a few sections of dialogue.

What Chandler really wanted was out of the movie business, but after years of poverty he couldn't bear to part with the cushion.

I think I'd like to get paid by Hollywood for movie rights to my book, but I don't think I'd like to work there.

"I smell of policemen"...lines like this just make me laugh. And the spelling of "okey" tickles me as well.

I found a really good website on hard-boiled detective fiction...click here for a view. Lots of info on Chandler, but also on the origins of the detective novel, a bunch of authors (Erle Stanley Gardner, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard, etc.) and more. Even info on film noir.

Esther wrote: "It came! It came! Stupid library says they called me, but I never got the message...I went and had them check their stacks again and it came! (Do I seem excited? Sorry...I really hate that "cut..."

Welcome to the fold, Esther. Hope you enjoy the book.

Mo, I'm with you on the romanticized military aspect...Marlowe is a knight in a fallen world, and Sternwood is his king, for now, or what passes for a king in Marlowe's world--a paying client. Vivian is loyal to a fault, which is something in a world where loyalty can be bought cheap or is rewarded with death by cyanide.

I've read a theory that Chandler actually left Owen Taylor's murder open for the reader to solve, which I'm not sure I buy. However, I also read that Chandler's uncertainty when contacted by Faulkner (and I think Howard Hawks, the director) about who killed Taylor was a bit exaggerated, purposefully, on Chandler's part--he had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood, it seems.

Give us your favorite Chandleresque lines. (And can anything be cooler as an author than to have a whole style named after you?)

My contributions:

[Marlowe to Vivian:] “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 your time trying to cross-examine me" (page 19 of Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition).

And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi (page 40).

Has anyone seen the Bogart/Bacall The Big Sleep from 1946? This bookstore scene, which is only two pages in the book, is great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2BU8-....

The girl in the bookstore is Dorothy Malone, who went on to have a pretty successful movie career. (She played Sharon Stone's mother in Basic Instinct, which is both cool and slightly disturbing.)

Kerry--I love that "for once it lit" part, too. Make Marlowe even more of a badass in a way.

Patty--Carmen just seemed like an out-and-out psychopath to me. I'm not sure the fit she has at the end is realistic, but then again I've never worked in a psych ward (though my wife has...maybe I should ask her). I think the General is a kind of father figure to Marlowe, who, after all, is told more than once that he looks sort of like Rusty Regan, who was a surrogate son to the General. He's a wounded warrior, virtually emasculated, and Marlowe wants to keep him out of the "nastiness" he mentions on the last pages. Plus what Dan said about the client/employer relationship.

Dan--I guess drawing distinctions between "plot" and "action" gets a little too fine and potentially precious...there aren't any dull moments in this book, that's for sure.

I'm not sure if this stuff is supposed to fascinate me (which it does), terrify me (which it also does), or perform some combination of the two.