status / june 2020
READING
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
My first foray into the gritty/detective/noir world. I’ve wanted to go there for a while. Reading in the Library of America edition, which includes Chandler’s early stories and his first three novels. Only just starting, but already everything I wanted it to be. Short lines, descriptions that cut. I mean, come on, this opening!
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder–blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well–dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Wow wow wow… and elsewhere—
“Tall, aren’t you” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
And—
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
The sun is definitely not shining in this story, and the brooding dude at the center of everything is keeping one eye on those foothills. But maybe “dude” isn’t quite the right word—
“I’m a private dick on a case”
The vocabulary is just… so thoroughly 1939. Chandler’s stories are the quintessential pulp crime stories, and Marlowe the quintessential crime detective, because, of course, Chandler helped make the genre what it is. Marlowe must wear a long coat and hat. Must drink double scotches. Must drive one of those big old cars around the dusty streets of a sordid and unforgiving city. It must be overcast—in fact, the whole world must be in black and white. I can’t help but see Bogart’s portrayal of Marlowe as I read. All the pieces are inextricably linked in my mind. When I think detective, this is it. Certainly the genre is larger than Chandler. The book often shows its age. But there’s something so comforting in getting exactly what you expect when you turn a page.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Revisiting this one in our time of trouble. Sontag’s focus is photography, specifically the photography of war, and how we respond to it. There’s so much to chew on, from the culture/art perspective and from the how-do-humans-behave/we-live-in-a-society perspective. Which is the point: Sontag identifies photography as one place where the line between art and utility are particularly blurred—or better to say blended. Photographs act on us in many ways at once; we respond to photographs in many ways at once. Some other lessons—
- A picture is not worth a thousand words. A picture never doesn’t need explanation. Relateldly,
- Captions change pictures. Examples given of two sides in a war using the very same images for their respective propaganda campaigns, by just changing the captions. Pictures can lie, because it’s easy for the words around pictures to lie.
- Authenticity is a messy business. It’s hard to argue that a shot hastily taken in the chaotic middle of an event isn’t more authentic than a shot carefully staged and lighted hours after the fact. But what do we really value in photography? The first of these pictures won’t look as good, most likely; and for a picture to do its work, it must look good, be striking, be memorable. It’s a difficult balance. If a gritty, authentic-looking photograph turns out to be a carefully calibrated artistic rendering of authenticity, what then? Sontag writes, “we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.”
- Again: often, this all comes down to the words. A photograph itself can’t tell its own (often complicated) history. Its worth, its truth, its authenticity, are told— or omitted — by its caption.
One final point. The proliferation of pseudo–events these days, whose connection to reality is tenuous, and which exist primarily to be reported on, make us wonder: is there one reality underlying everything after all? Have all events become pseudo–events, reality overtaken by hyperreality? Perhaps events themselves no longer matter so much as what is said about them. To those in doubt, Sontag gives one of the most sobering slaps-in-the-face that I, anyway, have received in a long time—
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of “the modern,” and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party–based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well–off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind–set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.
Keep what’s what in front of you. If you are a spectator, remember that what you watch is very very real. I don’t have many for–sure thoughts re living in Current Year. But this I stand by: when you come across anything or anyone, online or off, contributing the the debasement of reality, do not engage.
John Ashbery, Wakefulness
I’ve been with these poems for a while now. Just baffling enough to wake me up in the morning, and just wistful enough to accompany me to sleep at night.
LISTENING
Brian Eno, Discreet Music
I’ve known of Eno’s music since Theory IV and History of Music. But honestly I didn’t really listen to it then—and did pretty bad on on drop-the-needles as a result. Like everything studied in school, it’s so much better going back to it of my own free will a summer later. Discreet Music is Deno’s first album doing, like, what music history will forever remember Eno for doing: algorithmic–ish, tape delay, synth and ambient stuff. (How unfair, btw, that we start writing textbooks about people, codifying memory, before they’re even done working or living.)
I want to say more about the record’s incredible B side, the Variations on Pachelbel’s Canon, but that’ll keep. The title track, “Discreet Music,” is haunting and thrilling and ~suspending~ It responds incredibly to what you want it be. I’ve been playing it in the background while reading Chandler, and let me tell you: it’s not a bad soundtrack for some trenchcoat sleuthing.
GARDENING
I was a bit late to put seeds in, so things are still slow and stubborn in appearing aboveground. But perhaps by dear embryonic plants simply have superior intuition. A powerful storm blew through last night, bringing some hail. My plot fared better for being bare than it might have otherwise.
As of now, one brave little bean plant lifts its shoulders from the dirt toward the sky. I was beyond relieved to see it a few days ago. No matter how often I tell myself that life wants to live, that my role is small, that there’s little I could do to truly harm the chances of these vegetabnles, I often don’t belive it. I want so desperately not to screw up, and I’m easily convinced that I’ve done everything wrong.
The garden is for me a dual exercise in patience and in hope. Self–distrust was beginning to creep in, when lo! A streak of green in the garden that is certifiably not just encroaching grass. My confidence is restored, for now, by the showing of these leaves.
Patence. Hope. And the daily work.
You go, smol bean. I need you.
ashbery chandler eno garden listening reading sontag status