Tag: storytelling

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

~ Mark

Chandler on the detective story and how it resists criticism. This bit reminded me of Joan Acocella’s recent article about Stieg Larsson:

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.

A bit cynical, but there you go. Also provocative:

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

And of course:

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. […] I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

See also Woody Allen on escapism. The next-to-last paragraph about the nature of the crime/detective story hero is also worthwhile.

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler – The Simple Art of Murder

~ Mark

Chandler on the detective story and how it resists criticism. This bit reminded me of Joan Acocella’s recent article about Stieg Larsson:

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.

A bit cynical, but there you go. Also provocative:

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

And of course:

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. […] I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

See also Woody Allen on escapism. The next-to-last paragraph about the nature of the crime/detective story hero is also worthwhile.

Raymond Chandler – The Simple Art of Murder

Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee

~ Mark

Great interview. McPhee says gathering facts and writing nonfiction (as opposed to more self-generated fiction stuff) is like going from the grocery store to the kitchen:

I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out. […]

Once I’ve written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they’re coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I’m doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card.

That’s laying it all out where he can look at it. It’s a technique he got from his high school writing teacher. One cool thing he found is that when you get the structure set, you can let the juxtapositions do some storytelling for you. In Encounters with the Archdruid, for example:

The whole book had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word. Some of these things are absolutely dictated by the story of the journey down the Colorado River. But the choices are interesting where it’s not dictated, like the facts of David Brower’s life.

I knew where I was going to start, but I didn’t know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table.

Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee

To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet

~ Mark

Through childhood I hiked, roamed, tirelessly explored the countryside: neighboring farms, a treasure trove of old barns, abandoned houses and forbidden properties of all kinds, some of them presumably dangerous, like cisterns and wells covered with loose boards.

These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for always there’s a ghost-self, a “fictitious” self, in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression.

To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet

~ Mark

sarahbelfort:

trivialrecords:

Tintin means, literally, “Nothing”. His face, round as an O with two pinpricks for eyes, is what Hergé himself described as “the degree zero of typeage” – a typographic vanishing point. Tintin is also the degree zero of personage. He has no past, no sexual identity, no complexities. Like Cocteau’s Orphée, who spends much of the film in the negative space or dead world on the far side of the mirror, he is a writer who does not write.

— Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (excerpted in the Guardian)

Mother :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

~ Mark

Apparently Roger Ebert was posted his review of “Mother” while I was watching it. (via). I like this conclusion:

“Mother” will have you discussing the plot, not entirely to your satisfaction. I would argue: The stories in movies are complete fictions and can be resolved in any way the director chooses. If he actually cheats or lies, we have a case against him. If not, no matter what his strange conclusions, we can be grateful that we remained involved and even fascinated.

Mother :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews