Sherry Chandler

Blood simple

Every now and then over the past several years, when I have cried out “I need escape reading,” my husband has proffered me a copy of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest.

And I’ve always said some version of “I’m not that desperate.”

Published in 1929, Red Harvest is the granddaddy of what you might call American bloodbath fiction. It is the story of a man with no name, known only as the Continental Op, who goes into a town called “Poisonville” and triggers a gang war in which all the baddies kill one another off.

This same plot, more or less, also drives Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The Coen Brother’s Blood Simple takes its title from one of the Op’s lines

This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.

Since I have enjoyed most, if not all, of these movies, there is some argument that my cultural education is incomplete if I refuse to read the source material.

That seems like a good enough reason to give for the fact that this week I finally gave over and read the thing.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkertons through some pretty rough stuff between 1915 – 1921, especially their strikebreaking activities. He was possibly himself the model for his most famous detective, Sam Spade.

Certainly the Continental Op has more in common with Humphrey Bogart than with men like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis. In Red Harvest, the Op describes himself as 40 years old, about 5′ 6″, weighing 190 pounds, and not really in shape to walk several blocks.

Hammet served in both World Wars and there’s no doubt that, having worked for the Pinkertons, he had some knowledge of the mean streets. After 1934, he gave up writing and became a left-wing activist. He spent time in prison and was blacklisted for his activities and his refusal to testify to more than his own activities.

Hammett was not highly educated but he’s a great stylist. Red Harvest is lean and quick-moving and there’s none of the male sentimentality in it that I sometimes see in Hammett’s followers, like RAymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. At Time magazine. Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included it on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 to 2005, along with The Great Gatsby, The Invisible Man, and Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret.

So it’s a very readable novel, engaging in the beginning. (The version I read was published by Vintage Crime in 1989.) But the more I read, the less interested I became. The novel isn’t really about solving a mystery. It’s more like the old Renaissance revenge dramas, something by Thomas Kyd or Kit Marlowe. For all the theme goes all the way back to Seneca, it’s not a genre I’ve ever cared much for, Hamlet being the exception that proves the rule.

And by the time we get to the final puzzle — did the Op do it? — and the dying man’s confession, the suspension on my disbelief is completely sprung. The explanation is rigged and silly.

(Added: I do have to say somewhere in here that the Op has qualms about the violence he has unleashed. He is not blood-simple. And because of the violence, he is compromised and loses what you might call the moral high ground if you spoke in such clichés. His position becomes ambiguous.)

Good enough for whiling away a rainy afternoon. Not as nuanced as The Maltese Falcon (but there I may be influenced by the Bogart performance). Not as contrived as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I wouldn’t put it on the same list with The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. Dalloway.

A different kind of birdsong?

From Heraclitean Fire, who says:

The set-up in the video isn’t exactly the same as the one in the gallery, but it gives you the idea: a flock of zebra finches in a room with electric guitars and up-turned cymbals, who ‘play’ the instruments by hopping around and perching on them. They are free-flying in the gallery, and you can walk on paths between the instruments.

It’s an immediately appealing idea and quite memorable, so it will probably be something of a hit, at least by the standards of contemporary art installations. To be honest, though, I thought it was less striking in reality than it was in neatly-edited little close-ups on YouTube. It was more like being in a slightly odd aviary than in some kind of extraordinary art-place. People did seem to be enjoying it, though. I slightly wonder how much of that was just the pleasure of being in among all these very tame little birds, but perhaps I’m just projecting my own reactions.

I’ll have to admit to zebra finch envy. They are lovely little birds. But like Harry, I wonder if they wouldn’t be happier left alone. And can they hear all that racket?

27 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London

Monday musings

Well, it’s Monday and a brand new month, which so far seems to be coming in like a lamb, St David’s day, and the first day of meterological spring. So there must be something to celebrate, though there are still dirty drifts piled up here and there and snow is back in the forecast for midweek.

I’ve tried to be patient with this winter. We do, after all, live in a temperate zone, and a certain amount of winter is a pre-requisite. Freezing is good for keeping pests in control. And at least this year hasn’t — so far — gifted us with ice storms like we had last year. Ice is hard on trees and other living things.

But I am hungry for the sun. Such a gray winter we’ve had.

But Stoney has a photo to cheer my heart.

It occurs to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about movies here. It’s not that we haven’t been watching movies. Just that none of the ones we watched seemed worth the energy of writing a post about.

I make an exception for Crazy Heart. It’s a fine movie, and well worth writing about, but it has been written about at length, and beyond the fact that I think it’s worthy of all the praise it’s gotten, I don’t see that I need to add much.

The Dresser is a fine movie and so is The Lion in Winter but nobody needs me to tell them so.

Mr. Thank You (Arigatô San) is a pellucid black and white movie from 1936 Japan. Directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, it’s a portrait of rural Japan in depression. Mr. Thank You is a bus driver and some of the shots of that bus on mountain highways is worthy of anything Eastern Kentucky can produce. Some excellent photography and some geography and culture lessons for me.

The movie we watched this week, 1941’s Man Hunt was directed by Fritz Lang and I know it must have been recommended somewhere as a masterpiece of its time. Certainly it’s remarkable for being anti-British propaganda made in Hollywood by a German director. But I found the propaganda over the top, the plot fantastic, and the classism and sexism difficult to ignore. Otherwise there is a wide-eyed Roddy McDowell as a clever plucky cabin boy and a young John Carradine as a villain of the Reich, complete with swordstick.

One delightful gem we stumbled across was Ginny Mule’s The Accountant, which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. I refer you to Yellowhammer Press for a good review/description of this film. They say:

This film masterfully expresses something about the rural South that is so necessary, so utterly visceral, and yet something that is captured so rarely — that the disappearance of the family farm, the corporatization of food production in America, and the caricaturization of the Southern farmer and his culture have acted in concert to destroy a way of life. In short, it’s a movie about the end of a South in which small farmers are still financially viable and culturally necessary.

But it is also a wildly quirky comedy. Here’s a taste:

A salmagundi

Harry Rutherford, of Heraclitean Fire, has started a new blog interprise called A London Salmagundi: Being a Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of Divers Things etc. It’s the place to go to find your photo of the Common Potoo (which I think is a bird) or a photomicrograph of a dinosaur bone. or a YouTube of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show in 1957.

It was through Harry’s Salmagundi that I discovered F*ck Yeah, Victorians, a tumblr site that has been fascinating my husband for about a week now. it’s not a site for the squeamish, but it is certainly a window into the wierder side of Victorian culture.

If you think you might prefer to do something wholesome, like crochet, look to Pocahontas County Fare for your links to Free Crochet Patterns, Especially Old Ones .

Thinking about old crochet, old lace, I thought I might go looking for an old poem on the subject. Here’s what I found:

Old Flemish Lace

A LONG, rich breadth of Holland lace,
A window by a Flemish sea;
Huge men go by with mighty pace,—
Great Anne was Queen these days, may be,
And strange ships prowled for spoil the sea—
For you—old lace!

Stitch after stitch enwrought with grace,
The mist falls cold on Zuyder-Zee;
The silver tankards hang in place
Along the wall; across her knee
Dame Snuyder spreads her square of lace,
A veil—for me?

The Holland dames put by their lace,
The bells of Bruges ring out in glee;
The mill-wheels move in sluggish race:—
Farewell, sweet bells! Then down the sea
The slow ship brings the bridal grace—
The veil—for me!

Manhattan shores—a New World place,
The Pinxter-blows their sweetest be:
And now—come close, O love-bright face—
Bend low—…
        Nay, not old Trinity,
To Olde Sainte Marke’s i’ the Bowerie,
Dear Hal,—with thee!

—Amelia Walstien Carpenter, Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001

Dear Hal, I’m guessing, is the proposed bridegroom. And a pinxter here, I think may be the pinxter azalea.

And then I found this, which sort of pulls it all together, except maybe for the bawdy Victorians:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ‘ flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ‘ they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ‘ wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ‘ lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ‘ ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ‘ dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ‘ treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ‘ nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ‘ to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ‘ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ‘ nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ‘ death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ‘ beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999.

On matters of varying importance

I don’t know about the groundhogs but the raccoons around here are certainly seeing their shadows. Here are a couple of shots TR got of the daylight raid on the supplementary sunflower seed feeders. The birds are many at the feeders this year.

Some people call this Candlemas Day and Your Daily Poem has posted “A Song for Candlemas” by Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856 – 1935)

Issue 2 of Still is up and it includes literature by some of my favorite writers. I draw your attention especially to Matthew Haughton, Bobbi Buchanan, and Elaine Fowler Palencia. Let me tell you that Elaine is one of the masters of the short story. Her collection, Small Caucasian Woman, remains one of the best examples of Appalachian literature and of the American short story. Matthew is circulating a fine poetry manuscript. And Bobbi edits New Southerner.

I want also to share with you this video add for Darlene Campbell’s new fantasy novel, Dragon’s Heir. The artwork in this video is Darlene’s own and I am thoroughly charmed by the notion of using YouTube to do a form of cover blurb. Darlene is also a fine poet who posts at Raven’s Shadowl

And just as a follow up, the other day I did a search on Melverina Elverina Peppercorn and found, in addition to my own post, not much except this musing on names at Vast Public Indifference, where I find that there was more than one man in the 19^th century south named Alexander The Great.

Oh, and Fringe Magazine has an interesting interview with the founder of Bookslut, Jessa Crispin: The Accidental Tastemaker

“I Could Be A Poet”

Got this from Mark Brown, who posted it to FB for Ernie O’Dell. I will add a dedication to Georgia Green Stamper.

Mr. Ledbetter has a birthday

at least according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other sources give a different date, but why not celebrate it anyway?

The “Bourgeois Blues” was first recorded in 1938.

“The Bourgeois Blues” is a blues song by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. It was written after Lead Belly went to Washington, D.C. at the request of Alan Lomax, to record a number of songs for the Library of Congress. After they had finished, they decided to go out with their wives to celebrate, but were thrown out of numerous establishments for being an interracial party.

Here’s a link to a digitally remastered version of this song at Lala.