all the news that print will fit.
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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Sunday, January 18, 2009 np: Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures Pitchfork.tv has a weekly feature where you can watch some documentary streaming on their site for one week. This week is Grant Gee's eponymous Joy Division documentary. It's kind of nice to watch documentaries like this online where you can start and stop as you wish. I started watching it last night and am up to part 5 - it's broken into roughly ten minute segments. I also have been finally watching The Prisoner - thanks to the passing last week of the show's main actor, Patrick McGoohan. AMC.com has all 17 episodes of the series streaming where you can watch it. I read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon this past week. I've never seen the film, though it's something I plan to remedy. I'm a big fan of Raymond Chandler's writing and this book fit right into that - one of those things you have to constantly remind yourself is not cliché because it actually came first. The hard-boiled detective - slappin' dames around and fast-talking their way out of all sort of conundrums. There's a hard misogyny to nearly all of it, but it's a pretty engrossing read. Sam Spade doesn't seem to be a character who really trusts anyone outside of himself. At least, if he does, it isn't apparent in the way he interacts with anyone else in the book. It's bizarre to see a character so misogynistic and yet incredibly wounded as well. Spade was a blueprint in many ways for Chandler's Philip Marlowe, an infinitely more likeable character, even if he does retain a lot of Spade's misanthropy. It was hard to figure out exactly what was going on at times with Spade in The Maltese Falcon. He was honest and up front with nearly no one in the book - then again he wasn't alone in that fact. He seems to use the emotions of one character in particular in order to entrap them - even if it is debatable that she is using the same ploy on him. This is only novel Spade appears in as a character - there are a few scattered short stories as well that I'll have to pick up. It'd be fascinating to have a sort of modernist revision of Spade's character - in the form of examining how he became the sort of character he is. And seeing the realistic results of his misogyny, not just the cooing 'man I love to hate' response that most of the women in the book give. Something for you people to consider if you're an aspiring novelist looking for an idea. posted by J. Neas | 1/18/2009 12:46:00 PM
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