Chandler Was Right

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Raymond Chandler cautioned noir writers about luv. He said luv ruins detectives. So last night I'm reading a detective novel by Robert Crais in which Elvis Cole has a girl friend. His lady totally fucked up the man's life, work, routines, etc. Crais got rid of her, he said, because she fucked up the plots too much. She did. In the next novel poor Elvis babysits her kid while she flys off to New York, and much of the book is about Elvis and the kid hanging out until a pervert has the decency to snatch the kid (he'll be sorry).

Crais succumbed to the same disease all best selling writers catch, after 6 big hits drenched in blood and gore, and shot fulla lead, he becomes confident enough to write a few books about a detective who helps cute kids find their lost dogs and lunch money. The girl friend was all for it. Crais missed a few sweet paydays and got his mind right about the value of pussy.

 

[sexnovella]

Yes he was.

It is a sin to change anything that is working and never ever let the private life get mixed with the proffessional work.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

A woman is the kiss of death for detectives and rock stars.

 

[sexnovella]

Maybe even worse...

Like the lyrics in the song "Poison" by Alice Cooper.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Or... "Ah ken git noh, satiss-fact-shohn - na ne nerrrhhh."

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Or... "Ah ken git noh, satiss-fact-shohn - na ne nerrrhhh."

The Stones wrote the song here in town.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

This thread shouldn't sink. It raises one of the most troublesome issues about the psychology of what really drives people, namely those to do with how and why they achieve genuine feelings of satisfaction deep down inside - instead of a continual lip-service to some grandiose social proposition that is an entire cultural fabrication of top-down power systems be they religious or econo-political.

I mean, what really is behind the social artifice of a 'decent relationship?'

A book, a very intelligent older student at university once told me, is a 'unit medium,' rather than mass media, and readers individually and confidentially 'cast their vote' about the story absent from the mass coersive effect of social pressure.

I think Chandler was certainly right. We use the term 'love' today but it is a recent social construct (as they say) in the way general society means it now - the ancient Greeks knew much better and distinuished love as having several quite different aspects.

Odysseus - an ancestor of mine, apparently, so the family legend goes - wandered through a stack of 'adventures' over a number of years, solving riddles, fighting monsters, having encounters with beautiful women, nymphs, witches and so on, very far away from his wife and kid and even then when he finally returned, he violently massacred a bunch of suitors for his wife that they all were presuming had been widowed. Homer never makes the mistake of writing anything he expects readers to consume concerning the subsequent 'wonderful(?)' years in which Odysseus was happy at home with his family. A prototype noir tale if there ever was one. And one that has lasted more than two thousand years!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

My 3rd great grandmother wrote her memoirs in which she spoke of her sexual attraction to her future husband. They married in 1814. He was about 12 years older than she was when they met, and she expressed her surprise and anger that he didn't try and seduce her. And she asked him if he was a 'queer rooster.' He replied that she was too young and it was rude to seduce the daughter of friends when he was a guest in their home. He made her wait till she was 18.

But she didn't love him, she wanted sex. They had 10 kids and were married 44 years but she never said she loved him, she said he thrilled her and scared her, but she never mentioned love.

 

[49greg]

A woman is the kiss of death for detectives and rock stars.

And love was the kiss of death for "Cheers".

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

And love was the kiss of death for "Cheers".

And Joe and Rhoda.