By Kevin Guilfoile
Last week my wife went out looking for a vase she could fit inside another vase and then one of the vases would have a candle in it and the other would be filled with a bunch of seashells. I'm not really sure, I just know that I needed to watch about fifteen minutes of Enter the Dragon to top off the masculinity lost while she was describing it to me.
She ended up at a crafts and hobby chain store called Michael's and she found the vases and they actually looked pretty cool on our dining room table. Kung Fu panic completely unnecessary.
As she was arranging them she said, almost as an afterthought, "There was this sign right at the entrance to Michael's advertising a special on Novelty Country Planters, whatever those are. Except on the sign, they misspelled country."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"They misspelled country."
"Misspelled it how?"
She rolled her eyes, and not in the sexy way.
"Holy crap!" I said. "Really? At Michael's?"
She said, "It was printed from a computer and they cut it out and arranged it with a bunch of other specials so the display looked sort of like a flower. It was all appropriately crafty."
"Did you take a picture?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You can't use your imagination?" she said.
"I could," I said. "But I'm pretty sure at the meeting when some engineer first proposed putting a camera in a phone, a marketing guy asked what people would do with such a thing, and the engineer said, 'Someday a woman is going to encounter an unintentional obscenity in a suburban craft store and she'll want to take a picture of it to show her husband.'"
"Did the engineer mention that the husband has the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy?"
"He said something about that," I said. "Only in Japanese."
This Saturday, a full week later, she came home from running errands and she said, "Oh, I took a picture of that sign."
"What sign?" I asked.
"At Michael's. Country Planters."
Now I'm not sure what disturbs me most about this, the ignorance or the apathy. I'd like to assume it was just a typo, that any Michael's employee with computer and scissors privileges would know how to spell the word country. Then I remember the night 15 years ago when my buddy Jim and I went to a Blackhawks playoff game at old Chicago Stadium. Our seats were way up in the balcony and when we got up there I handed my ticket to the usher so she could direct us to our seats. She glanced at it and said, "Walk down the concourse to ay-zuhl E and go up the steps."
As we walked away, I turned to Jim and said, "Could you be a bigger failure as a stadium usher than to make it all the way to the end of the season and still not know how to pronounce the word aisle?"
Aside from the mistake, bad as it is, how could this sign remain up for a whole week? Have we just become so hopelessly distracted by the rising price of gas and the falling values of our homes and a war that won't end that we don't even notice an in-store advertisement containing one of the last words that can still get a rise out of us?
Of course we noticed it and could have taken the manager politely aside and quietly pointed out the error so he could correct it.
That sounds like the responsibility of someone who doesn't have a blog.
----
Just to bring this back on topic, yesterday's Trib had an interesting piece about Dave Kaczynski, who famously turned his brother Ted into authorities and also developed a friendship with one of the Unabomber victims. The Kaczynski brothers grew up on the south side of Chicago.
Related, here are a series of excerpts from an interesting and long piece that appeared in the now hard-to-find third issue of McSweeney's, detailing the correspondence between Ted Kaczynski and psychologist Gary Greenberg, as well as Greenberg's failed attempts to write about the experience. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
And now, in a bookstore near you
For forty years, Andy Austin has been Channel 7's courtroom artist. Right now she's madly drawing pictures from the trial of your friend and Rod's, Tony Rezko, but she has covered every important trial in Chicago starting with the infamous Chicago 7 and Judge Julius Hoffman. Now she's written all this up in a book called "Rule 53," so-called because rule 53 is the federal statute that outlaws cameras in the courtroom. How many of us remember Bobby Seale being shackled to his chair? That and other details from the great trials of the last forty years make this a must-have reference for anyone wanting to write about crime in Chicago. We always knew Andy could draw, but she's also a skilled writer who brings out the key dramas in the stories she's telling.
Most of us Outfitters are far from shy about urging our latest tomes on you. One exception to that--our highly literate member, Michael Dymmoch, who supports everyone's work but never brags about her own. So listen up out there: Michael has a new book out, M.I.A. It's tender, it's suspenseful, and it's in a store near you.
Most of us Outfitters are far from shy about urging our latest tomes on you. One exception to that--our highly literate member, Michael Dymmoch, who supports everyone's work but never brags about her own. So listen up out there: Michael has a new book out, M.I.A. It's tender, it's suspenseful, and it's in a store near you.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
And the Winner Is --
By Barbara D'Amato
There are a lot of awards given in the diverse world of mystery and crime writing, and getting to be more all the time. The most recent that I’m aware of is given by the Thrillerwriters, a relatively new organization, which is just now trying to come up with a name for their awards.
Crime writing awards fall into two main categories -- the peer-judged and the voted-on award.
The Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award and the Shamus are two of the judged. For the Edgar, five writers judge the entries in a category, except the Best Novel category, which now uses eight judges, and for good reason. I served on the committee for best novel of 2006, and we received about 550 books. [Yes, five hundred and fifty!] Every entry was read by two judges, cutting down the number we each had to read initially to about a hundred and forty. If any judge recommended a book, it then was read by everybody. It’s a huge job. Also, where do you put more than five hundred books in an apartment? For the Shamus, three judges read in each category. I’ve read for the Shamus a couple of times, and for the Edgar the best first, best play, best short story, best paperback, best screenplay, best true crime, a couple of times each. In fact, the only ones I haven’t done are children’s and young adult. While this may show that I am a patsy, I do like to read, especially when I should be working. And there is something great about getting a one-year slice of what’s being written in a specific field.
How does it really work? Some judges use a five-page rule. If a book hasn’t engaged their attention by then, they sideline it. I tend to go for a fifty-page cutoff, but even so I usually finish the book. Somebody spent a year or more of his life on this. I can at least read it.
But have I learned anything about judging? We all wonder how fair, how accurate, how right the judging is. Is the winner really the best book of the year? Well, yes and no.
Committees I’ve served on have done one of two things. Frequently several of the judges strongly prefer different books. In these cases, it’s often everybody’s second or third choice that wins. The other case involves a book that blows away four of the five judges and is loathed by the fifth judge. It doesn’t even make his top twenty. I think that very unusual books tend to polarize people and quite often that results in one committee member just despising it. That book will win, with one very grumpy committee member left dissatisfied.
But I’ve never seen an incompetently written book win.
And what about the other kind of award? Bouchercon and Malice Domestic are two of several organizations that give out awards based on the votes of attendees at their convention. The typical method is to send a request to all people registered for the convention, asking them to nominate their favorites in several categories--best first, best novel, best short story, best critical/biographical, best children’s, and so on. The five [it’s usually five, but not always] that receive the most mentions go on a list that is sent to attendees well before they arrive for the convention. The hope is that they will have a chance to read most or all of the books. At the convention they are given ballots, they vote, the ballots are collected there, the votes are counted, and the winners announced, usually at a Saturday night banquet.
These are often somewhat disparagingly called popularity contests. But what is wrong with that? The voters are readers, readers who care enough to pay serious money to go to a writing convention.
The talk in the halls about why they voted as they did can leave you wondering, though. What have I heard? Well--
“Okay, this isn’t his best book, but his last one should have won the Edgar, so I’m voting for this one.”
“This isn’t her best book, but I’m voting for her whole body of work.”
“I like the title.”
“He won last year, so I’m not voting for him.”
One of the real drawbacks of the convention ballot is that very few people have read all the books in contention. I rarely vote in certain categories, like children’s and young adult, because I don’t read enough in those fields. For these convention ballots, generally, I’ve decided it’s okay to vote in a category if I’ve read three out of the five nominees. Otherwise I don’t vote.
Could we, meaning the mystery community, improve on these methods of generating awards?
There are a lot of awards given in the diverse world of mystery and crime writing, and getting to be more all the time. The most recent that I’m aware of is given by the Thrillerwriters, a relatively new organization, which is just now trying to come up with a name for their awards.
Crime writing awards fall into two main categories -- the peer-judged and the voted-on award.
The Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award and the Shamus are two of the judged. For the Edgar, five writers judge the entries in a category, except the Best Novel category, which now uses eight judges, and for good reason. I served on the committee for best novel of 2006, and we received about 550 books. [Yes, five hundred and fifty!] Every entry was read by two judges, cutting down the number we each had to read initially to about a hundred and forty. If any judge recommended a book, it then was read by everybody. It’s a huge job. Also, where do you put more than five hundred books in an apartment? For the Shamus, three judges read in each category. I’ve read for the Shamus a couple of times, and for the Edgar the best first, best play, best short story, best paperback, best screenplay, best true crime, a couple of times each. In fact, the only ones I haven’t done are children’s and young adult. While this may show that I am a patsy, I do like to read, especially when I should be working. And there is something great about getting a one-year slice of what’s being written in a specific field.
How does it really work? Some judges use a five-page rule. If a book hasn’t engaged their attention by then, they sideline it. I tend to go for a fifty-page cutoff, but even so I usually finish the book. Somebody spent a year or more of his life on this. I can at least read it.
But have I learned anything about judging? We all wonder how fair, how accurate, how right the judging is. Is the winner really the best book of the year? Well, yes and no.
Committees I’ve served on have done one of two things. Frequently several of the judges strongly prefer different books. In these cases, it’s often everybody’s second or third choice that wins. The other case involves a book that blows away four of the five judges and is loathed by the fifth judge. It doesn’t even make his top twenty. I think that very unusual books tend to polarize people and quite often that results in one committee member just despising it. That book will win, with one very grumpy committee member left dissatisfied.
But I’ve never seen an incompetently written book win.
And what about the other kind of award? Bouchercon and Malice Domestic are two of several organizations that give out awards based on the votes of attendees at their convention. The typical method is to send a request to all people registered for the convention, asking them to nominate their favorites in several categories--best first, best novel, best short story, best critical/biographical, best children’s, and so on. The five [it’s usually five, but not always] that receive the most mentions go on a list that is sent to attendees well before they arrive for the convention. The hope is that they will have a chance to read most or all of the books. At the convention they are given ballots, they vote, the ballots are collected there, the votes are counted, and the winners announced, usually at a Saturday night banquet.
These are often somewhat disparagingly called popularity contests. But what is wrong with that? The voters are readers, readers who care enough to pay serious money to go to a writing convention.
The talk in the halls about why they voted as they did can leave you wondering, though. What have I heard? Well--
“Okay, this isn’t his best book, but his last one should have won the Edgar, so I’m voting for this one.”
“This isn’t her best book, but I’m voting for her whole body of work.”
“I like the title.”
“He won last year, so I’m not voting for him.”
One of the real drawbacks of the convention ballot is that very few people have read all the books in contention. I rarely vote in certain categories, like children’s and young adult, because I don’t read enough in those fields. For these convention ballots, generally, I’ve decided it’s okay to vote in a category if I’ve read three out of the five nominees. Otherwise I don’t vote.
Could we, meaning the mystery community, improve on these methods of generating awards?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Hot and Bothered
by Marcus Sakey
I recently got turned on by Philip Roth.
I don't mean "turned on to"; I've been a fan of his for fifteen years, though in a sort of laissez-faire, read a novel every other year sort of way. I mean "turned on by."
And as is often the case, the scene that got me wasn't really that overtly erotic. It's from THE HUMAN STAIN, and it's a scene in which a woman dances naked for her much older lover. There are moments in the book that are more blatantly sexual, but there was something about this that just killed me. They're talking while she's dancing, and she's telling him that there is nothing beyond this moment, that it's a mistake to bring other things to it, the weight of love and expectation, the questions of what you should and shouldn't be and want, anything beyond the sheer joy of the moment and the animal recognition of one another:
There's more, lots more, and it builds in a steady rhythm that just slayed me. In a novel that's about the judgment of others, especially when it comes to racial identity and sexual mores, a private scene between two people creating their own reality becomes startling erotic.
But I find that's often the case. The passages that turn me on are rarely a play-by-play of what's happening, a description of nipples or sweat or flinging hair. It's usually something unexpected, something that suggests the whole larger arena of sexuality, that brings the personal stake into it.
That said, I'm also a sucker for a straight-out sex scene where the language pays homage to the rhythm of passion. My friend John Hart does that beautifully in this passage from THE KING OF LIES:
Phew. Guess I shoulda put up a parental warning. Kids, stop reading this two paragraphs ago.
Anyway. How do you like your sex? Do you like to be right in the moment, reading the details, or would you rather step back, and see the larger picture? Somewhere in the middle? Who does it just right for you?
What turns you on?
I recently got turned on by Philip Roth.
I don't mean "turned on to"; I've been a fan of his for fifteen years, though in a sort of laissez-faire, read a novel every other year sort of way. I mean "turned on by."
And as is often the case, the scene that got me wasn't really that overtly erotic. It's from THE HUMAN STAIN, and it's a scene in which a woman dances naked for her much older lover. There are moments in the book that are more blatantly sexual, but there was something about this that just killed me. They're talking while she's dancing, and she's telling him that there is nothing beyond this moment, that it's a mistake to bring other things to it, the weight of love and expectation, the questions of what you should and shouldn't be and want, anything beyond the sheer joy of the moment and the animal recognition of one another:
"You want to know why am I in this world? What is it about? It's about this. It's about, You're here, and I'll do it for you. It's about not thinking you're someone else somewhere else. You're a woman and you're in bed with your husband, and you're not fucking for fucking, you're not fucking to come, you're fucking because you're in bed with your husband and it's the right thing to do. You're a man and you're with your wife and you're fucking her, but you're thinking you want to be fucking the post office janitor. Okay--you know what? You're with the janitor."
He says softly, with a laugh, "And that proves the existence of God."
"If that doesn't, nothing does."
"Keep dancing," he says.
There's more, lots more, and it builds in a steady rhythm that just slayed me. In a novel that's about the judgment of others, especially when it comes to racial identity and sexual mores, a private scene between two people creating their own reality becomes startling erotic.
But I find that's often the case. The passages that turn me on are rarely a play-by-play of what's happening, a description of nipples or sweat or flinging hair. It's usually something unexpected, something that suggests the whole larger arena of sexuality, that brings the personal stake into it.
That said, I'm also a sucker for a straight-out sex scene where the language pays homage to the rhythm of passion. My friend John Hart does that beautifully in this passage from THE KING OF LIES:
"I heard distant sound and recognized my name; it burned in my ear. Then I felt her tongue cool it. Her lips moved over me--my eyes, my neck, my face. Her hands found the back of my head and they pulled my lips back to hers. I tasted plums, kissed her harder, and she weakened against me. I picked her up, felt her legs around me. Then more motion and we were inside, up the stairs and onto the bed that knew so well the force of our passion. Clothes evaporated, as if burned away by flesh too hot to bear them. My mouth found her breasts, the hard, ready nipples, and the sort plane of her stomach. I tasted all of her. The dew of her sweat, the deep cleft of her, her legs like velvet bands across my ears. Her fingers clawed at my hair, tangled, and she pulled me up, said words I couldn't possibly understand. She took me in her roughened palm and led me into her. My head rocked back. She was heat, fire; she cried my name again, but I was beyond response, lost and desperate never to be found."
Phew. Guess I shoulda put up a parental warning. Kids, stop reading this two paragraphs ago.
Anyway. How do you like your sex? Do you like to be right in the moment, reading the details, or would you rather step back, and see the larger picture? Somewhere in the middle? Who does it just right for you?
What turns you on?
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Happy Mother's Day
by Michael Dymmoch
My Ma was a compulsive reader—not her fault. It’s hereditary. My grandmother was a reader. Her mother got in trouble for reading when she was supposed to be working. Maybe that’s why Ma was such a great school librarian. She’d ask a kid about his interests, then find him a book on the subject. And when he returned the book, she’d ask him to tell her how he liked it. She filled her library with plants and bright posters. I still have one she made herself—a fat green dragon announcing “I need a book.”
I grew up with bookshelves full of books. Kids’ books. Adult books. Science and picture books. And we had The Reader’s Digest in the bathroom. Ma never limited my reading. I guess she figured if I was old enough to decipher the words, I’d figure out what to do with them. I must have been in college before I understood the concept of censorship. (I still don’t think I “get” it.)
Ma made me look things up. She must have understood that you have to spell the word to find it in the dictionary, ‘cause she’d often tell me how to spell words. But she wouldn’t give me definitions. She bought an old encyclopedia at a rummage sale and made me use that, too.
Ma had infinite patience with her embryonic novelist. It may have driven her crazy to listen to dialogs I’d memorized from favorite TV shows, but she never let on. She was inordinately proud when I finally published something.
Ma let me and my sibling have pets but she didn’t let us mistreat them. I grew up with questions like, “How would you feel if someone pulled your ears? (or tail? or hair?)” Even ants got respect. (“How would you feel if a giant stomped on your house and killed your family.”) In spite of her fear of such animals, Ma let me keep a donkey (who taught me to be patient with stubborn individuals). When the donkey died, Ma made peanut butter sandwiches (his favorite) for his funeral.
Ma taught me to cook and sew and be helpful, and to understand irony. And she left me with the observation—framed and on my wall now--“People need love most when they deserve it least.”
My Ma was a compulsive reader—not her fault. It’s hereditary. My grandmother was a reader. Her mother got in trouble for reading when she was supposed to be working. Maybe that’s why Ma was such a great school librarian. She’d ask a kid about his interests, then find him a book on the subject. And when he returned the book, she’d ask him to tell her how he liked it. She filled her library with plants and bright posters. I still have one she made herself—a fat green dragon announcing “I need a book.”
I grew up with bookshelves full of books. Kids’ books. Adult books. Science and picture books. And we had The Reader’s Digest in the bathroom. Ma never limited my reading. I guess she figured if I was old enough to decipher the words, I’d figure out what to do with them. I must have been in college before I understood the concept of censorship. (I still don’t think I “get” it.)
Ma made me look things up. She must have understood that you have to spell the word to find it in the dictionary, ‘cause she’d often tell me how to spell words. But she wouldn’t give me definitions. She bought an old encyclopedia at a rummage sale and made me use that, too.
Ma had infinite patience with her embryonic novelist. It may have driven her crazy to listen to dialogs I’d memorized from favorite TV shows, but she never let on. She was inordinately proud when I finally published something.
Ma let me and my sibling have pets but she didn’t let us mistreat them. I grew up with questions like, “How would you feel if someone pulled your ears? (or tail? or hair?)” Even ants got respect. (“How would you feel if a giant stomped on your house and killed your family.”) In spite of her fear of such animals, Ma let me keep a donkey (who taught me to be patient with stubborn individuals). When the donkey died, Ma made peanut butter sandwiches (his favorite) for his funeral.
Ma taught me to cook and sew and be helpful, and to understand irony. And she left me with the observation—framed and on my wall now--“People need love most when they deserve it least.”
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Copyediting, The Final Frontier . . .
by Sean Chercover
I used to hate revising. Silly (and hard to believe now), but years ago I actually saw re-writing as some kind of failure. I was suffering under a debilitating and unhealthy idea that voiced itself in my head thusly:
“If you were a better writer, you’d have gotten it right the first time.”
As I said, a debilitating and unhealthy idea. Kerouac’s famous scroll didn’t help any (this NPR story is definitely worth a read/listen) and it was a relief to learn how much of the scroll story was a deliberately created myth.
Anyway, I hated revising and consequently wrote a lot of garbage that was in desperate need of revision.
Now I love rewriting. One of the things I’ve learned from writers with five, ten, even fifteen or more books under their belts is: The tyranny of the blank page never goes away. The blank page (or blank 350 pages) will always strike fear in the heart.
But once you’ve filled those blank pages with words, life is beautiful. You’ve got something with which to work. It has form and substance and you can see it and feel it and examine it from different angles . . .
. . . and then you can make it better. Just as there’s nothing so frightening as facing a blank page, there is nothing so energizing as facing a finished draft and diving in to make it better.
And then agent and editor look at the thing with fresh eyes and offer their comments and suggestions, and you get to play some more.
And then comes the copy-edited manuscript, which I just finished working on.
The copy-edited manuscript teaches you a lot about the little idiosyncratic quirks you have as a writer.
For example, I seem to have a compulsion to hyphenate the entire world. It would seem that, to me, any group of words looks better connected by hyphens.
It was an open-and-shut case. This house is worth two-point-four million. They were floral-print sheets. We walked side-by-side. All incorrectly hyphenated by yours truly.
And for some reason I will never understand, I missed the opportunity to hyphenate “over-the-counter” and “matter-of-factly” – both of which do (apparently) require hyphens.
Of course, one of the nice things about the copyedit is that you can tell the grammar police that you appreciate the suggestion, but you like your bad grammar and plan to keep it that way. I decided to keep my beloved hyphens for “knock-on-wood” and “creeped-out” (and a few others) even if they aren’t technically correct.
And don’t get me started on the commas. I write with WAY too many commas. I’m like a bad director trying to give line readings to my actors. I’m trying to sit on the reader’s shoulder and say “PAUSE HERE, DAMNIT”. But the problem with all these commas is, that, they, really, slow, the, pace. So on second draft, I fly through the manuscript killing commas with glee. I rip them out willy-nilly (properly hyphenated? I have no idea!) and then the thing reads much faster without them.
Well. With this book, I was perhaps a little enthusiastic with the killing of the commas, and now I’ve got the copyeditor throwing little red pencil commas all over the damn place. And I know she’s right, but I also know that we really don’t need many of these commas and they slow the read (I didn’t really need the comma before “but” in this sentence, for example, even though it is correct). For me, rhythm and pacing and readability trumps technical precision (especially in dialogue).
So the copyediting stage can be a lot of fun, but you can agonize a long time over a comma or a beloved hyphenation. And you learn about your quirks.
I am a compulsive hyphenator. Even if hyphenator isn't a word.
I love leaving off the final comma in a sentence of serial commas.
How ‘bout you? Any particular quirks you’d like to share?
I used to hate revising. Silly (and hard to believe now), but years ago I actually saw re-writing as some kind of failure. I was suffering under a debilitating and unhealthy idea that voiced itself in my head thusly:
“If you were a better writer, you’d have gotten it right the first time.”
As I said, a debilitating and unhealthy idea. Kerouac’s famous scroll didn’t help any (this NPR story is definitely worth a read/listen) and it was a relief to learn how much of the scroll story was a deliberately created myth.
Anyway, I hated revising and consequently wrote a lot of garbage that was in desperate need of revision.
Now I love rewriting. One of the things I’ve learned from writers with five, ten, even fifteen or more books under their belts is: The tyranny of the blank page never goes away. The blank page (or blank 350 pages) will always strike fear in the heart.
But once you’ve filled those blank pages with words, life is beautiful. You’ve got something with which to work. It has form and substance and you can see it and feel it and examine it from different angles . . .
. . . and then you can make it better. Just as there’s nothing so frightening as facing a blank page, there is nothing so energizing as facing a finished draft and diving in to make it better.
And then agent and editor look at the thing with fresh eyes and offer their comments and suggestions, and you get to play some more.
And then comes the copy-edited manuscript, which I just finished working on.
The copy-edited manuscript teaches you a lot about the little idiosyncratic quirks you have as a writer.
For example, I seem to have a compulsion to hyphenate the entire world. It would seem that, to me, any group of words looks better connected by hyphens.
It was an open-and-shut case. This house is worth two-point-four million. They were floral-print sheets. We walked side-by-side. All incorrectly hyphenated by yours truly.
And for some reason I will never understand, I missed the opportunity to hyphenate “over-the-counter” and “matter-of-factly” – both of which do (apparently) require hyphens.
Of course, one of the nice things about the copyedit is that you can tell the grammar police that you appreciate the suggestion, but you like your bad grammar and plan to keep it that way. I decided to keep my beloved hyphens for “knock-on-wood” and “creeped-out” (and a few others) even if they aren’t technically correct.
And don’t get me started on the commas. I write with WAY too many commas. I’m like a bad director trying to give line readings to my actors. I’m trying to sit on the reader’s shoulder and say “PAUSE HERE, DAMNIT”. But the problem with all these commas is, that, they, really, slow, the, pace. So on second draft, I fly through the manuscript killing commas with glee. I rip them out willy-nilly (properly hyphenated? I have no idea!) and then the thing reads much faster without them.
Well. With this book, I was perhaps a little enthusiastic with the killing of the commas, and now I’ve got the copyeditor throwing little red pencil commas all over the damn place. And I know she’s right, but I also know that we really don’t need many of these commas and they slow the read (I didn’t really need the comma before “but” in this sentence, for example, even though it is correct). For me, rhythm and pacing and readability trumps technical precision (especially in dialogue).
So the copyediting stage can be a lot of fun, but you can agonize a long time over a comma or a beloved hyphenation. And you learn about your quirks.
I am a compulsive hyphenator. Even if hyphenator isn't a word.
I love leaving off the final comma in a sentence of serial commas.
How ‘bout you? Any particular quirks you’d like to share?
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Fake News
I used to be a lot more certain about things when I was younger. Take the article I read in McPaper the other day. Apparently the Pentagon has set up a foreign language network of “news” websites. The latest one is for Iraqis, but there are also sites for people from the Balkan states
as well as North Africans. The Pentagon says these websites are a way to combat insurgent messages and get the “truth” out about U.S. interests.
Some journalists decry these sites as deceptive propaganda designed to manage and control information. They are particularly bothered by the fact that these websites appear to be objective and it’s only by clicking on “About this Site” that you find out they are sponsored by the Pentagon. “There’s a heavy responsibility to let people know where you’re coming from,” says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
As a former broadcast journalist, I agree. In fact, when I was working in the media I believed that ONLY the fourth estate had the right to disseminate news and information. Any one or any thing else was clearly tainted by the interests of the writer or the organization behind it.
Well, things have changed.
My idealistic balloon was first punctured about twenty years ago when I quit journalism for PR. I was shocked to find out that TV stations actually ran stories produced by corporations. Back then, they were called “video news clips”, and, yes, as a former TV producer, I wrote and produced some. I rationalized it by saying – and believing – that there are usually two sides of a story, and that each side had the right to get their story out. I probably also rationalized it with the belief that the content of the VNRs I worked on were relatively benign: a medical procedure that uses new technology… or a new drug that fights rheumatoid arthritis. Still, I had the nagging suspicion that I was unwittingly contributing to something a bit nefarious, because back then, VNRs were indistinguishable from “real news.” There were no markers or other IDs that labeled the stories as paid programming.
Fast forward 20 years.
We have learned that conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams was paid by the Administration to talk up “No Child Left Behind.” Liberal MSNBC broadcasters Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann don't even pretend to be objective. Neither does conservative Bill O’Reilly, despite his new-found love for Hillary. Or NY Times columnist Frank Rich. Everyone dishes information filtered by their own agendas. At the same time so many VNRs fill the airwaves (in an effort to stem declining profitability of TV news operations) that there have been calls to standardize the practice.
Sad, isn’t it? News has been adulterated. Commercialized. Politicized. And I’ve been a party to it.
For a while, I thought the internet would resolve the problem. Because anyone can say anything at any time, I assumed the result would be a purer grass roots form of communication. The First Amendment would flourish. But how many of you really read all the comments on Politco? Or CNN? Do they really add to the national conversation?
Even more worrisome is the specter of commercial control, as the biggies in the communications industry try to persuade Congress to let them control the pipeline that brings us our information, such as it is.
Ultimately, given that Islamic fundamentalists, racists of all stripes, and just plain nutcases can launch their own websites, is the Pentagon’s attempt to put out their own version of the truth any less worthy? After all, propaganda is nothing new -- the Voice of America has been around for decades. Isn’t this simply a print version of the same thing?
The bottom line is that I’ve come to accept that any news I get has been filtered or paid for by someone else. Everyone has an ax to grind, and more are sharpening theirs as I write this. Hell, even writing crime fiction says something about the way we look at the world.
So, I‘m not nearly as certain about my principles as I used to be. I'm not sure where to draw the line.
What about you? What do you think?
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The Revolution Will Be Televised (But It Won't Be On Location)
By Kevin Guilfoile
On a sweltering, Texas-in-August afternoon, a justifiably angry, liberal mob wanted to drag me from my car and tear me to pieces.
That story in a minute. First I want to say that if you have time to read just one Outfit post today, go back and read Sara's essay again. That's important and this isn't.
But Sara's bizarre and shocking story about the outrage of Protest Pits reminded me that I was a bystander at what I think might have been the genesis of that idea.
In the summer of 1992 I was working for the Houston Astros when the Republican National Convention rolled into town. We Astrodome employees were exiled to remote parking lots and our subterranean offices were searched by Secret Service agents and teams of dogs, all reasonable precautions, I thought.
At some point it was announced that there would be a "designated protest area," and to my knowledge it was the first time that tactic was employed at such a major event. The media certainly treated it as a novelty. But the brilliant thing about it was this: It was Houston, Texas. In August. Ninety-five degrees and 100% humidity. In the protest area there was a tent and electricity and coolers filled with bottled water. More importantly, because there was a tent and electricity and coolers filled with bottled water, all the television crews were also in the protest area.
So the choice was to protest a half-mile away, at the actual entrance to the Astrodome where the delegates and nominee would actually pass, and where it was unbearably hot and lonely and where no one would record your activism, or you could protest in the designated area where no one actually attending the convention would see you, but where it was both more comfortable and you had a chance to be on the evening news.
As Sara points out, the distant, designated protest area has become a routine part of any event with the slightest stink of controversy and at the time I remember thinking that it was kind of momentous and peculiar and fiendishly clever. And after work I specifically drove around the Astrodome complex so I could get a look at the protesters up close. There was lots of traffic and I cut a few people off getting over to the right-hand lane for a better view.
The protesters were pressed up against the chain fence along the side of the road like prisoners in a riot, hundreds of them with signs demanding the U.S. government stop atrocities in Bosnia and provide more money for Head Start and dozens of other unrelated interests. They were all desperately trying to draw attention to their cause from passing motorists, mostly just folks like me on their way home from work. Somewhere up ahead I was vaguely aware of flashing lights from a police squad car. A traffic stop, I figured. But as I crawled along in traffic, I realized the protesters seemed especially agitated. Even the Head Start woman was screaming, fangs bared, face flush. I craned my neck to see if I could tell who they were yelling at. Traffic stopped altogether and I was stuck, just twenty or so feet from the caged mob.
And that's when I realized they were yelling at me.
These people hated me.
And I couldn't figure out why.
The van in front of me pulled over to the shoulder and made a right hand turn up ahead. I inched up behind an old school bus, painted grey. It had bars on the windows. And across the rear emergency exit was a hand-painted sign that said:
THANK GOD FOR AIDS.
And behind the bars of the bus I saw white sheets and hoods.
I had never seen actual Klansmen outside of the Geraldo show so I forgot about the people yelling at me for a minute and stared in horrible fascination. Then I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a pickup behind me. In accordance with some lunatic group insurance safe-driving policy, the driver wore a sheet but no hood. His passenger was in a suit and tie.
Just like me, except I had an baseball lapel pin and he had a swastika arm band.
Behind them was another pickup and two more guys in sheets and behind them were more guys in sheets and behind them was a police escort and finally it dawned on me that I've driven myself into a Klan parade.
I put on my turn signal and tried to change lanes, but the guy to my left had blocked me in and started screaming at me and swearing. I rolled down my window and desperately tried to explain--I'm not in the Klan, I just work for the Astros!--but he couldn't hear me and was too busy anyhow hurling an Arby's shake at me out his passenger window.
After a few awful minutes with the doors locked the guy ran out of throwable food and headed home. I maneuvered out of the Klan lane and made my way around the bus. A long banner down the side of it said, STOP ABORTING WHITE BABIES and then had a phone number you could call to buy a t-shirt with that catchy slogan.
The convention delegates, alas, saw none of it.
On a sweltering, Texas-in-August afternoon, a justifiably angry, liberal mob wanted to drag me from my car and tear me to pieces.
That story in a minute. First I want to say that if you have time to read just one Outfit post today, go back and read Sara's essay again. That's important and this isn't.
But Sara's bizarre and shocking story about the outrage of Protest Pits reminded me that I was a bystander at what I think might have been the genesis of that idea.
In the summer of 1992 I was working for the Houston Astros when the Republican National Convention rolled into town. We Astrodome employees were exiled to remote parking lots and our subterranean offices were searched by Secret Service agents and teams of dogs, all reasonable precautions, I thought.At some point it was announced that there would be a "designated protest area," and to my knowledge it was the first time that tactic was employed at such a major event. The media certainly treated it as a novelty. But the brilliant thing about it was this: It was Houston, Texas. In August. Ninety-five degrees and 100% humidity. In the protest area there was a tent and electricity and coolers filled with bottled water. More importantly, because there was a tent and electricity and coolers filled with bottled water, all the television crews were also in the protest area.
So the choice was to protest a half-mile away, at the actual entrance to the Astrodome where the delegates and nominee would actually pass, and where it was unbearably hot and lonely and where no one would record your activism, or you could protest in the designated area where no one actually attending the convention would see you, but where it was both more comfortable and you had a chance to be on the evening news.
As Sara points out, the distant, designated protest area has become a routine part of any event with the slightest stink of controversy and at the time I remember thinking that it was kind of momentous and peculiar and fiendishly clever. And after work I specifically drove around the Astrodome complex so I could get a look at the protesters up close. There was lots of traffic and I cut a few people off getting over to the right-hand lane for a better view.
The protesters were pressed up against the chain fence along the side of the road like prisoners in a riot, hundreds of them with signs demanding the U.S. government stop atrocities in Bosnia and provide more money for Head Start and dozens of other unrelated interests. They were all desperately trying to draw attention to their cause from passing motorists, mostly just folks like me on their way home from work. Somewhere up ahead I was vaguely aware of flashing lights from a police squad car. A traffic stop, I figured. But as I crawled along in traffic, I realized the protesters seemed especially agitated. Even the Head Start woman was screaming, fangs bared, face flush. I craned my neck to see if I could tell who they were yelling at. Traffic stopped altogether and I was stuck, just twenty or so feet from the caged mob.
And that's when I realized they were yelling at me.
These people hated me.
And I couldn't figure out why.
The van in front of me pulled over to the shoulder and made a right hand turn up ahead. I inched up behind an old school bus, painted grey. It had bars on the windows. And across the rear emergency exit was a hand-painted sign that said:
THANK GOD FOR AIDS.
And behind the bars of the bus I saw white sheets and hoods.
I had never seen actual Klansmen outside of the Geraldo show so I forgot about the people yelling at me for a minute and stared in horrible fascination. Then I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a pickup behind me. In accordance with some lunatic group insurance safe-driving policy, the driver wore a sheet but no hood. His passenger was in a suit and tie.
Just like me, except I had an baseball lapel pin and he had a swastika arm band.
Behind them was another pickup and two more guys in sheets and behind them were more guys in sheets and behind them was a police escort and finally it dawned on me that I've driven myself into a Klan parade.
I put on my turn signal and tried to change lanes, but the guy to my left had blocked me in and started screaming at me and swearing. I rolled down my window and desperately tried to explain--I'm not in the Klan, I just work for the Astros!--but he couldn't hear me and was too busy anyhow hurling an Arby's shake at me out his passenger window.
After a few awful minutes with the doors locked the guy ran out of throwable food and headed home. I maneuvered out of the Klan lane and made my way around the bus. A long banner down the side of it said, STOP ABORTING WHITE BABIES and then had a phone number you could call to buy a t-shirt with that catchy slogan.
The convention delegates, alas, saw none of it.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Fun at Chicago's Field Museum
It was a scene straight out of Ross Thomas, or even V I Warshawski: black limos pulling up in front of a marble facade, security guards and city cops surrounding the people as they got out, whisking them inside. Across the street, a handful of people without influence, harassed by the cops for trying to hand out leaflets.
At the end of the novel, justice somehow triumphs. At the end of the morning in Chicago, money won.
What was the story? Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing Company. An ACLU lawsuit charges that Jeppesen has sold direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the delivery of captives in U.S. custody to secret overseas locations where "friendly governments" as well as CIA operatives carried out their torture. Boeing refuses to provide information on the subject; and the judge hearing the case accepted the CIA's claim that any pursuit of the matter in court would breach necessary government secrecy; this ruling is currently under appeal.
Boeing shareholders were meeting at the Field Museum on April 28; I was part of a small band who went to inform the shareholders that their company is directly involved in torture.
Police and museum security forces came to our ten-strong group of protesters and told us we were confined to a tiny space about a quarter mile east of the museum entrance, that if we wanted to hand out material or talk to anyone, that was our “first amendment” space. As protesters, we could not be on sidewalks or streets because we were a hazard to public safety. Nor could we be on the museum grounds because they were private property, not covered by the first amendment.
I left the protest and went to sit on a curb looking at the shareholders as they arrived. I took pictures with my cellphone, but I confess they weren’t clear enough to shame anyone. It started to rain; people stopped arriving; I began texting a friend.
Suddenly two cops and a museum security man appeared and demanded to know what I was doing.
Me: “I’m sitting here sending a friend a text message.”
Cop 1: “And then what do you plan to do?”
Me: “I don’t know. Perhaps telephone my husband. Is any of this illegal?”
Cops1 & 2 take off. Another cop drives up.
Cop 3: What are you doing here?
Me: I’m a citizen out for a walk. I don’t know why I should be accosted for that.
Cop 3: Accost? No one accosted you. They were just making conversation.
Museum security man: Come on, let me take you to see (and he named two people I didn’t know.)”
Me: I don’t know them.
MSM: You were just talking to them.
Me: I’m a Chicago writer. I enjoy events involving my city—I get lots of good ideas for stories that way. And I think it’s wonderful that the museum pays such personal attention to every citizen who happens to be nearby.
3rd cop: What are you doing here?
(A 4th cop, on a bike, arrives and plants herself between me and the parking lot.)
Me; I’m a citizen. I didn’t know there’d be so much interest in a citizen taking a walk in the morning.
MSM: Let me walk you over to the protest. Come on.
Me: I’m gathering material for my work. Let me have your name—I’ll be glad to include you in my blog posting.
MSM leaves. Cop 3 tells me to keep my feet out of the parking lot—my butt on the curb is okay. A young woman arrives with fliers about Jeppesen and its torture. She can stand next to me holding them, but Cop 3 tells her she cannot hand them out unless she is standing in the “first amendment area.” I call the ACLU to find out what the law is regarding handing out fliers and leave a message.
End of my part of the story. Later, I learn that some nuns with the 8th Day Center for Justice were at the shareholders meeting because their religious order owns some shares in Boeing. They introduced a human rights resolution, discussing Boeing’s involvement in torture, and at least forced shareholders and management to listen to what their company is doing.
These Sisters are heroic, but they didn’t change the outcome for our country’s engagement in torture. Ross Thomas would have found a way for them to force Boeing to scuttle their connection to the CIA. It would have involved a wonderful quadruple cross such as only he could carry off. Even V I might have managed a small victory. Me, I have spent the last 24 hours feeling utterly helpless.
And I wonder, too, about these things:
1, Why are Chinese risking their lives to protest their government’s behavior in Tibet, and why were there only ten of us protesting Jeppesen’s torture flights?
2. Does the First Amendment exist any more, when protest at the museum and at political conventions, and anywhere else, is walled off remote from public view? (Remember last summer when the police arrested Quakers at Taste of Chicago for advocating peace “too close” to an army recruitment booth?)
3. Why am I paying taxes for cops who protect corporations and harass citizens?
4. Who knew that the Field Museum's high ticket prices included paying for my own private security escort?
5. What is it about money that makes the museum’s security staff so obsequious to members of a corporation?
Sara Paretsky
At the end of the novel, justice somehow triumphs. At the end of the morning in Chicago, money won.
What was the story? Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing Company. An ACLU lawsuit charges that Jeppesen has sold direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the delivery of captives in U.S. custody to secret overseas locations where "friendly governments" as well as CIA operatives carried out their torture. Boeing refuses to provide information on the subject; and the judge hearing the case accepted the CIA's claim that any pursuit of the matter in court would breach necessary government secrecy; this ruling is currently under appeal.
Boeing shareholders were meeting at the Field Museum on April 28; I was part of a small band who went to inform the shareholders that their company is directly involved in torture.
Police and museum security forces came to our ten-strong group of protesters and told us we were confined to a tiny space about a quarter mile east of the museum entrance, that if we wanted to hand out material or talk to anyone, that was our “first amendment” space. As protesters, we could not be on sidewalks or streets because we were a hazard to public safety. Nor could we be on the museum grounds because they were private property, not covered by the first amendment.
I left the protest and went to sit on a curb looking at the shareholders as they arrived. I took pictures with my cellphone, but I confess they weren’t clear enough to shame anyone. It started to rain; people stopped arriving; I began texting a friend.
Suddenly two cops and a museum security man appeared and demanded to know what I was doing.
Me: “I’m sitting here sending a friend a text message.”
Cop 1: “And then what do you plan to do?”
Me: “I don’t know. Perhaps telephone my husband. Is any of this illegal?”
Cops1 & 2 take off. Another cop drives up.
Cop 3: What are you doing here?
Me: I’m a citizen out for a walk. I don’t know why I should be accosted for that.
Cop 3: Accost? No one accosted you. They were just making conversation.
Museum security man: Come on, let me take you to see (and he named two people I didn’t know.)”
Me: I don’t know them.
MSM: You were just talking to them.
Me: I’m a Chicago writer. I enjoy events involving my city—I get lots of good ideas for stories that way. And I think it’s wonderful that the museum pays such personal attention to every citizen who happens to be nearby.
3rd cop: What are you doing here?
(A 4th cop, on a bike, arrives and plants herself between me and the parking lot.)
Me; I’m a citizen. I didn’t know there’d be so much interest in a citizen taking a walk in the morning.
MSM: Let me walk you over to the protest. Come on.
Me: I’m gathering material for my work. Let me have your name—I’ll be glad to include you in my blog posting.
MSM leaves. Cop 3 tells me to keep my feet out of the parking lot—my butt on the curb is okay. A young woman arrives with fliers about Jeppesen and its torture. She can stand next to me holding them, but Cop 3 tells her she cannot hand them out unless she is standing in the “first amendment area.” I call the ACLU to find out what the law is regarding handing out fliers and leave a message.
End of my part of the story. Later, I learn that some nuns with the 8th Day Center for Justice were at the shareholders meeting because their religious order owns some shares in Boeing. They introduced a human rights resolution, discussing Boeing’s involvement in torture, and at least forced shareholders and management to listen to what their company is doing.
These Sisters are heroic, but they didn’t change the outcome for our country’s engagement in torture. Ross Thomas would have found a way for them to force Boeing to scuttle their connection to the CIA. It would have involved a wonderful quadruple cross such as only he could carry off. Even V I might have managed a small victory. Me, I have spent the last 24 hours feeling utterly helpless.
And I wonder, too, about these things:
1, Why are Chinese risking their lives to protest their government’s behavior in Tibet, and why were there only ten of us protesting Jeppesen’s torture flights?
2. Does the First Amendment exist any more, when protest at the museum and at political conventions, and anywhere else, is walled off remote from public view? (Remember last summer when the police arrested Quakers at Taste of Chicago for advocating peace “too close” to an army recruitment booth?)
3. Why am I paying taxes for cops who protect corporations and harass citizens?
4. Who knew that the Field Museum's high ticket prices included paying for my own private security escort?
5. What is it about money that makes the museum’s security staff so obsequious to members of a corporation?
Sara Paretsky
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The End of The Long Goodbye
By Barbara D’Amato
This is the last of The Outfit’s postings on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Our attention to it was inspired by the Chicago Public Library’s choice of the book for their One Book One Chicago program.
After posts on Chandler himself and the book’s content, I thought it would be appropriate to ask, “How does Chandler get his effects?” And to focus this question, we could examine Chandler’s revisions of the very end of the novel, the last couple of sentences of The Long Goodbye. The changes they passed through tell something about Chandler’s thinking and demonstrate his care for his craft.
The late Hugh Holton, a police officer who wrote thrillers centered on the Chicago Police Department, was often asked at lectures how long it took him to write a book. He would say, “Six weeks,” and when the gasping stopped, would add, “And eleven months to rewrite.” Chandler’s rewrites are so meticulous, they remind me that he began his writing career as a poet.
Mark Coggins is the Shamus and Barry-nominated author of The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital and Candy from Strangers, featuring private eye August Riordan. Bleak House Books published his fourth book, Runoff, last November. In addition to writing fiction, he is a Chandler scholar, author of the article, “Writing the Long Goodbye.” In it Coggins says, “I recently had the opportunity to examine some 200 pages of original typescript with excised or rewritten scenes while visiting the special collection of Raymond Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.” What he found gives fascinating insight into how Chandler wrote.
He worked on The Long Goodbye intermittently from 1949 until May of 1952, at which point he turned it in to his agents—finished, he thought. They didn’t like it. They said Marlowe had become too sentimental.
Chandler went back to his typewriter for a couple more months.
He did, in fact, work on a typewriter, but the sheets Coggins saw were not standard typing paper. Chandler used small yellow sheets 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. Coggins says this was to limit the amount of retyping he had to do if he revised a page. Coggins was not permitted to photocopy the pages, since he could not secure permission from the Chandler estate, but he described the pages and even made mock-ups, which can be viewed in his article.
Chandler apparently rewrote drastically, underlining on a page only the material he wanted to keep, then retyping a largely new take on the scene. Whole scenes were eliminated entirely.
But to get to my example, the book’s closing words:
Coggins compared two versions of The Long Goodbye, June 24, 1953, and July 9, 1953, and the published ending, and found four different versions.
FIRST VERSION -- June 24, 1953:
Coggins finds this too abrupt and believes in writing it this way Chandler may have been responding to his agents’ objections to Marlowe having become too soft and sentimental.
SECOND VERSION -- July 9:
THIRD VERSION – also July 9:
Coggins notes that the second July 9 version was written in pen, which Chandler did not often use. He believes this indicates the difficulty Chandler was having striking the right tone. Coggins says “After rereading this [version three], Chandler must have felt he had overcompensated. The final sentence, ‘But he didn’t’ almost comes across with a catch in the throat.”
FOURTH VERSION -- AS PUBLISHED:
Coggins’s view is that the extra description in the final, published version “slows the narrative and adds weight to what is occurring. It also manages to convey an appropriate depth of feeling at the parting, while at the same time retaining Marlowe’s cynical worldview.”
Okay. What do you think of his choices? I hesitate to admit I prefer the first version. It seems clean and straightforward to me. My feeling at that point in the book would be that if the reader didn’t get it by now, tying a ribbon on it wouldn’t help.
The “don’t ask me why” in the second version has a whiff of begging for sympathy.
To me, he certainly did overcompensate in version three. It’s a bit too self-pitying.
The final version ties it up nicely, but why add the cops? A late attempt to return to the tough-guy persona?
If I’d been writing the book, I would have gone with version one. Probably that shows why I’m not Chandler. But I would be really interested to know what other people think.
This is the last of The Outfit’s postings on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Our attention to it was inspired by the Chicago Public Library’s choice of the book for their One Book One Chicago program.
After posts on Chandler himself and the book’s content, I thought it would be appropriate to ask, “How does Chandler get his effects?” And to focus this question, we could examine Chandler’s revisions of the very end of the novel, the last couple of sentences of The Long Goodbye. The changes they passed through tell something about Chandler’s thinking and demonstrate his care for his craft.The late Hugh Holton, a police officer who wrote thrillers centered on the Chicago Police Department, was often asked at lectures how long it took him to write a book. He would say, “Six weeks,” and when the gasping stopped, would add, “And eleven months to rewrite.” Chandler’s rewrites are so meticulous, they remind me that he began his writing career as a poet.
Mark Coggins is the Shamus and Barry-nominated author of The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital and Candy from Strangers, featuring private eye August Riordan. Bleak House Books published his fourth book, Runoff, last November. In addition to writing fiction, he is a Chandler scholar, author of the article, “Writing the Long Goodbye.” In it Coggins says, “I recently had the opportunity to examine some 200 pages of original typescript with excised or rewritten scenes while visiting the special collection of Raymond Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.” What he found gives fascinating insight into how Chandler wrote.
He worked on The Long Goodbye intermittently from 1949 until May of 1952, at which point he turned it in to his agents—finished, he thought. They didn’t like it. They said Marlowe had become too sentimental.
Chandler went back to his typewriter for a couple more months.
He did, in fact, work on a typewriter, but the sheets Coggins saw were not standard typing paper. Chandler used small yellow sheets 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. Coggins says this was to limit the amount of retyping he had to do if he revised a page. Coggins was not permitted to photocopy the pages, since he could not secure permission from the Chandler estate, but he described the pages and even made mock-ups, which can be viewed in his article.
Chandler apparently rewrote drastically, underlining on a page only the material he wanted to keep, then retyping a largely new take on the scene. Whole scenes were eliminated entirely.
But to get to my example, the book’s closing words:
Coggins compared two versions of The Long Goodbye, June 24, 1953, and July 9, 1953, and the published ending, and found four different versions.
FIRST VERSION -- June 24, 1953:
He turned quickly and walked out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going along the hall.They died.Then I just listened.Slow curtain.
Coggins finds this too abrupt and believes in writing it this way Chandler may have been responding to his agents’ objections to Marlowe having become too soft and sentimental.
SECOND VERSION -- July 9:
He turned away quickly and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. After a little while I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening.
Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you.
THIRD VERSION – also July 9:
He turned and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. Then I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening anyway. As if he might come back to talk me out of it. As if I hoped he would.
But he didn’t.
Coggins notes that the second July 9 version was written in pen, which Chandler did not often use. He believes this indicates the difficulty Chandler was having striking the right tone. Coggins says “After rereading this [version three], Chandler must have felt he had overcompensated. The final sentence, ‘But he didn’t’ almost comes across with a catch in the throat.”
FOURTH VERSION -- AS PUBLISHED:
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.
I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
Coggins’s view is that the extra description in the final, published version “slows the narrative and adds weight to what is occurring. It also manages to convey an appropriate depth of feeling at the parting, while at the same time retaining Marlowe’s cynical worldview.”
Okay. What do you think of his choices? I hesitate to admit I prefer the first version. It seems clean and straightforward to me. My feeling at that point in the book would be that if the reader didn’t get it by now, tying a ribbon on it wouldn’t help.
The “don’t ask me why” in the second version has a whiff of begging for sympathy.
To me, he certainly did overcompensate in version three. It’s a bit too self-pitying.
The final version ties it up nicely, but why add the cops? A late attempt to return to the tough-guy persona?
If I’d been writing the book, I would have gone with version one. Probably that shows why I’m not Chandler. But I would be really interested to know what other people think.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Enough Already--And a Contest
by Marcus Sakey
Chandler, Chandler, Chandler.
We've talked about him at some length now. You've read stories of first exposure, weighed his misogyny, agreed that he was a master stylist and a pretty weak plotter. We've broken down Marlowe, talked about booze and stereotypes and the self as a symbol.
This is the part where I admit that I'm not a Chandler scholar. This was actually my first reading of his work, and while I was startled and delighted by the language and the social commentary, I'm not really in a position to instruct anyone on it.
So here's the plan. When Kevin and I taught at the library, we warmed up the students by asking them to write a Chandler-ism. A one-liner description rich in attitude and flair and noir sensibilities. (Check here if you haven't read Chandler and want to see what I'm talking about).
It turned out to be a lot of fun. Here was mine:
The winner, chosen in an unapologetically subjective fashion--in other words, by me--wins a prize.
Two, actually: an autographed advance copy of my forthcoming novel GOOD PEOPLE, which isn't out until August, and an autographed advanced copy of my friend Julia Spencer-Fleming's upcoming book I SHALL NOT WANT, which isn't out till June. Outfitters can't win the prize, but I hope you'll participate.
So let's see what you folks got. Talk Chandler to me.
Chandler, Chandler, Chandler.
We've talked about him at some length now. You've read stories of first exposure, weighed his misogyny, agreed that he was a master stylist and a pretty weak plotter. We've broken down Marlowe, talked about booze and stereotypes and the self as a symbol.
This is the part where I admit that I'm not a Chandler scholar. This was actually my first reading of his work, and while I was startled and delighted by the language and the social commentary, I'm not really in a position to instruct anyone on it.
So here's the plan. When Kevin and I taught at the library, we warmed up the students by asking them to write a Chandler-ism. A one-liner description rich in attitude and flair and noir sensibilities. (Check here if you haven't read Chandler and want to see what I'm talking about).
It turned out to be a lot of fun. Here was mine:
"The dope was pure as a nun's daydream, and the woman holding it was all daydream but no nun."Kevin's (and I'm paraphrasing here bro, my apologies for where I mangle it) ran:
"The sign in the window advertising pedicures was written by a hand that you would never want touching your foot."Now it's your turn. Gimme your best shot. It can be about a car, a lover, a fight, an alley, a crime, whatever. Something from a work in progress or something you make up on the spot.
The winner, chosen in an unapologetically subjective fashion--in other words, by me--wins a prize.
Two, actually: an autographed advance copy of my forthcoming novel GOOD PEOPLE, which isn't out until August, and an autographed advanced copy of my friend Julia Spencer-Fleming's upcoming book I SHALL NOT WANT, which isn't out till June. Outfitters can't win the prize, but I hope you'll participate.
So let's see what you folks got. Talk Chandler to me.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Long Goodbye
by Michael Dymmoch
My first encounter with Philip Marlow was in school. Chandler’s work wasn’t on any reading list, and I didn’t know crime fiction from newspaper filler. But I knew I liked the prose. I was an ugly duckling of a writer then, wondering why I wanted to hang out with art majors instead of other science geeks. I didn’t know a simile from sansemilla or a metaphor from a metronome. I still thought writers were inspired by God.
Years later, when I discovered I wasn’t a duck at all—or a chemist for that matter—I read Chandler again. And as a writer, I like the prose even more because I know how hard it is to write well. And to write beautifully. And to say more with metaphor than with mere description. Now, I know Chandler should have been on my schools’ reading lists.
Take, for example, his description of a man too far gone into the bottle: “He was leaning against a store front. He had to lean against something. His shirt was dirty and open at the neck and partly outside his jacket and partly not. He hadn’t shaved for four or five days. His nose was pinched. His skin was so pale that the long thin scars hardly showed. And his eyes were like holes poked in a snowbank.”
After Marlow rescues and feeds this individual, “His face now had a little color and the eyes were not so far back in his head that you had to grope for them.”
The beauty of metaphor is that it says so much more than the literal meaning of the words—paints the story and the subtext. Chandler was the master. His prose is elegant the way a great mathematical proof is elegant, or a tersely written bit of computer code. It does what’s needed without wasted words. And what a pleasure The Long Goodbye is to read.
Chandler was pretty good at suspense, too. Take the opening of chapter five: "The gun wasn’t pointed at me, he was just holding it.” Or the ending of chapter eight: "'Guess you won’t be with us long, if you’ve got Endicott,' he said pleasantly as he locked me in. I said I hoped he was right." Chandler was, after all, the man who advised, “In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns."
While it’s true the plot of The Long Goodbye rambles a bit, it covers a great deal of ground. Chandler managed to get in social commentary, a great shot at corrupt cops, and a portrait of California that made me feel I’d been there.
For the reader who loves words, following the story is like discovering wonderful sights when you’ve strayed from the Interstate.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
THE MARLOWE PARADIGM
(Ed’s note: This is a longer post than usual, but really worth it. So go round up a cup of coffee and a cigarette… and dive in…)
Friend-of-the-Outfit JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels for over 15 years, policing jurisdictions from college campuses to military bases, inner city streets to suburban parks, and railroad depots to rural dirt roads. His collection of true crime articles, Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, was a Macavity nominee, and a chapter from the book, “Blood for Oil,” won the Western Writers Spur Award for Best Short Non-Fiction. Jim’s lectures on Chandler’s early work were published on the B&N website as the e-book Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir. His short stories featuring cop Dan Sullivan have appeared in Writers’ Journal, Over My Dead Body!, and Blue Murder. His first, still unpublished novel, An Obscure Grave, was a finalist for the CWA’s Debut Dagger.
See if you can identify a particular fictional character from the following description:
-- An unmarried male
-- American
-- Ex-cop
-- In his 30’s (at least when the series begins)
-- Who owns and operates his own one-man agency
-- And works out of a large American city
-- Telling his own stories in the first person
Yeah, you’re probably thinking, that’s a pretty good capsule description of Philip Marlowe. So what’s the point?
It’s also a pretty accurate description of 80-90% of all the hard-boiled private eye characters created since Marlowe. But why is that? Why is the archetype not Dashiell Hammett, who, for practical purposes, founded the hard-boiled school, but Chandler, the self-acknowledged Hammett disciple?
Talent? Perhaps. But a lot of people, including me, would give you an argument. After all, it’s Hammett, not Chandler, who wrote what is generally regarded as the best and most famous of all hard-boiled private eye novels, The Maltese Falcon.
Yet, when we think of a private eye, it’s not the operative of a large world-wide agency that comes to mind, nor even one half of a two-person partnership; it’s the lone wolf in his shabby office barely eking out a living. It’s not the spare, stripped-down third person style that we associate with the PI; rather it’s the more personal, more elegiac first person style. Indeed, that first-person style is so pervasive that private eye stories in other mediums, like film and television, routinely replicate it by voice-over narration.
It’s not the hard-nosed professional who can sleep with a woman one day and turn her over to the cops the next that’s our prototype; it’s the slightly tarnished modern-day knight errant, forever on the lookout for a damsel in distress to rescue.
Many of the writers who follow what I’m calling “The Marlowe Paradigm” have been up-front about it. In an omnibus volume collecting three of his Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald (the “Holy Spirit” to Hammett’s “Father” and Chandler’s “Son”) flatly stated that Archer was deliberately “patterned on Marlowe.” Robert B. Parker has said that he started writing his series about Boston P.I. Spenser because he was frustrated that Chandler hadn’t written more Marlowe novels. Loren D. Estleman, when he heard someone describe his Amos Walker character as “Philip Marlowe in Detroit,” admitted this was an accurate statement.
Others choose a less direct way of acknowledging their source. Science fiction writer Milton Lesser adopted the Chandlerian pseudonym “Stephen Marlowe” when he began a series about a DC-based shamus named Chester Drum, eventually taking it as his legal name. Thomas B. Dewey’s The Mean Streets, generally regarded as the best in his series about the Chicago op known only as “Mac,” takes its title from a phrase in Chandler’s article “The Simple Art of Murder.”
And dozens, indeed hundreds, of others have followed the paradigm just as faithfully without ever acknowledging it. Indeed, their use of it may have been almost subconscious, something they weren’t even aware of.
So pervasive was that pattern that, in 1988, when editor Byron Preiss proposed an anthology of new Marlowe short stories by contemporary PI writers, to be called Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as a way of celebrating Chandler’s centenary, William DeAndrea, one of the authors asked to submit, respectfully declined with the wry observation that writing new Marlowe stories seemed to be what most of the those invited to contribute were already doing anyway.
One of the most interesting things about that anthology, by the way, is the degree to which the contributors approached Marlowe as a tabula rasa on whom they could impose their own notions of characterization, themes, and story-telling techniques. Hence, Max Allan Collins, who writes historical private eye novels based on famous real-life crimes, fictionalized a real life crime and had Marlowe solve it. Midwestern law professor Francis M. Nevins wrote a story in which Marlowe travels to the Midwest and gets involved in a case that turns on an interpretation of probate law. Native New Yorker Robert J. Randisi brought Marlowe to the Big Apple for an adventure set in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station. Mexican mystery writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo II’s story took Marlowe south of the border. Edward D. Hoch, best-known for short stories featuring classically skull-crushing puzzles, involved Marlowe with a classic puzzle. And Roger L. Simon, whose Moses Wine novels are marked by an unabashedly left-wing sensibility, wrote Marlowe into a story promoting Simon’s leftist political views. Marlowe’s iconic status had allowed him to become whatever those writers wanted him to become.
And, as much as private eye fiction has evolved since Chandler passed from the scene, the Marlowe Paradigm remains the most frequently used model. Consider the private eye sub-genre’s most obvious innovation over the last quarter century or so, the use of female protagonists in what was previously an all-male preserve.
Writers like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretskey, and Maxine O’Callahan are all, quite rightly, praised as innovators, and yet, aside from their genders, how much do their characters, Kinsey Milhone, V.I. Warshawski,, and Delilah West, veer from the Marlowe paradigm? Milhone and West not at all, and Warshawski only that, in addition to not being a man, she’s not an ex-cop.
So we come back to the original question. Why is Chandler’s model so pervasive?
Perhaps Marlowe’s status as the PI archetype stems from his striving to live up to the knightly virtues of chivalry and honor. Hammett’s protagonists might do heroic things, but they do it less from an over-arching moral sense, than simply because it’s their job. Sam Spade sums it up by shrugging his shoulders and offering the inadequate explanation that, “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.” By contrast, Marlowe, whose very name evokes images of Medieval do-gooding, continually agonizes over his chosen profession not being “a game for knights.”
But I think there might be another explanation. And, not surprisingly, Chandler hinted at it himself.
In a 1948 letter to fellow mystery writer Cleve F. Adams, Chandler remarked on the fact that he seemed to have replaced Hammett as the leading proponent of hard-boiled crime fiction.
“Since Hammett has not written for publication since 1932,” he wrote, “I have been picked out by some people as the leading representative of the school. This is very likely due to the fact that The Maltese Falcon did not start the high budget mystery picture trend, although it ought to have. Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet did, and I was associated with both of them. The result is that everybody who used to be accused of writing like Hammett may now be accused of trying to write like Chandler.”
Moreover, Chandler, as he mentions, was associated with high-budget films, with “A” pictures as they were once called in the movie industry. And because of the way he sold those books, one at a time rather than all in a group, different studios bought the rights to different books, and subsequently made different Marlowe pictures.
This was in sharp contrast to what was then the common practice for a series of mystery films featuring the same continuing character. Usually a studio would simply buy the rights to all the books featuring a given character, as well as rights to the character him (or her)self, and go on to release a series of quickly made, comparatively low-budget “B” films featuring the same cast in picture after picture, which had the effect of identifying a particular actor with a particular fictional detective.
Dick Powell, anxious to change his image as a juvenile tenor in Busby Berkeley musicals, was the first to tackle the role in the seminal film noir Murder, My Sweet (RKO, 1945), based on Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely. In the opinion of many, including me, Powell’s performance was the best, most faithful interpretation of Marlowe., and it brought about precisely the image change he hoped it would. For the rest of his career, Powell played tough guy roles in films like Cornered (1946), Rogue’s Regiment (1948), To the Ends of the Earth (1948), and Cry Danger (1951).
Humphrey Bogart, who’d already played Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in the 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon, was the next in The Big Sleep (Warner’s, 1946). Already regarded as Hollywood’s top tough guy, Bogart’s performance in Sleep simply grafted of his already well-honed, familiar screen persona onto Chandler’s character. Hence, while in Murder, My Sweet, Powell became Marlowe, in The Big Sleep, Marlowe became Bogart. Still, if you’re a hard-boiled private eye character, there are few actors it’s more appropriate to “become” then Humphrey Bogart. On the strength of his portrayals of Spade in Falcon and Marlowe in Sleep, Bogart, more than any other actor, has become the visual embodiment of the hard-boiled private eye.
Robert Montgomery was the next to try his hand at the part in The Lady in the Lake (MGM, 1946), remarkable for two reasons. First, it’s the only Marlowe film on which Chandler did any work on the screenplay (though he lost interest quickly, and is not credited except as the author of the source novel). Second, Montgomery, who also directed, had the original notion of coming up with a visual equivalent for Chandler’s vivid first-person narration. He made the camera Marlowe’s eyes. The audience saw everything from the hero’s point of view, and, except for a few scenes in which Marlowe looked in a mirror, Montgomery’s performance consisted almost entirely on off-screen voice work. The gimmick became tiresome at feature-length, though, and the resulting film is now something of a technical curiosity that never achieved the classic status of MMS or TBS.
A too-youthful George Montgomery (no relation to Robert) was the final film Marlowe of the decade, playing the detective in The Brasher Doubloon (20th/Fox, 1947), based on Chandler’s 1943 novel, The High Window. An attempt was made to overcome Montgomery’s boyish appearance by having him grow a mustache, and, to date, he is the only big screen Marlowe with facial hair, but the device didn’t work. Next to more mature actors like Powell, Bogart, and Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery lacked the gravitas to carry the part off. Still, based on later performances, it’s likely he’d have been quite good in the part had he waited a decade or so.
Each of the films, and each of the performances, adhered, with a fair amount of faithfulness, to Chandler’s vision of the character. Hence audiences were seeing someone who was simultaneously different in each picture, and yet the same in each picture.
Over the next twenty-odd years, Marlowe was absent from the big screen, though his adventures could be heard on radio or seen on TV. But those four films released between 1945 and 1947 already set the pattern. Not only for the way Marlowe would be depicted, but for the way any hard-boiled private eye character, in any medium, would be depicted.
This is all speculation, of course, and to those of us who live for words on the printed page, the notion that screen adaptations would be more influential than the original works might seem counterintuitive, if not downright sacrilegious.
Ultimately, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter. Raymond Chandler remains important not just for what he wrote, but for the effect his writing had on those who came after. Arguably, he was the most influential mystery writer of the 20th Century. And whether his pervasive influence stems directly from his own work, the heroic image he created, or the adaptations made from that work, there’s no denying that every crime writer who ever sent a tough private eye on an adventure down a big city’s mean streets in the search for hidden truth owes a huge debt to Chandler. So complete is his influence that it’s become almost subliminal, part of our collective “pop culture” DNA.
Jim Doherty
SEAN WINS THE GUMSHOE!
Mystery Ink, the website run by Chicago Sun Times crime fiction reviewer David Montgomery, announced the winners of the seventh annual Gumshoe Awards, and guess who won Best First? That's right... it's Outfiteer Sean Chercover for BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD! Here's the list:
Best Mystery:
James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown (Simon & Schuster)
Best Thriller:
Robert Crais - The Watchman (Simon & Schuster)
Best First Novel:
Sean Chercover - Big City, Bad Blood (William Morrow)
Lifetime Achievement Award:
Donald E. Westlake
Best Crime Fiction Website:
The Thrilling Detective: www.thrillingdetective.com
For more information, go to: http://www.mysteryinkonline.com/gumshoe.htm
WAY TO GO, SEAN!!!
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