"Scorched Face"

“I climbed Telegraph Hill to give the house the up-and-down. It was
a large house---a big frame house painted egg-yellow. It hung dizzily on
a shoulder of the hill, a shoulder that was sharp where rock had been
quarried away. The house seemed about to go skiing down on the roofs
far below.
It had no immediate neighbors. The approach was screened by
bushes and trees.”

***

“A room with three girls and a man crouching in a corner, fear in their
faces. Neither of them was Myra Banbrock, or Raymond Elwood, or any-
one we knew.
Our glances went away from them after the first quick look.
The open door across the room grabbed our attention.
The door gave to a small room.
The room was chaos.
A Small Room packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething,
writhing. The rooms was a funnel into which men and women had been
poured. They boiled noisily toward the one small window that was the
funnel's outlet. Men and women, youths and girls, screaming, struggling,
squirming, fighting. Some had no clothes.”

---Dashiell Hammett, “Scorched Face,” originally published in
Black Mask, May, 1925 and reprinted in Nightmare Town (1948)
and The Big Knockover (1966).

This is both tautly and elegantly written and clumsy at the same time.
The Continental Op, who is called "Fat Shorty" by an adversary, is good
hearted and relentless at the same time. He destroys all sorts of evidence
to protect his client and other young girls who have been drugged, orgied
and blackmailed. The second paragraph is terse and quick and good.
The scene is San Francisco, but except for that and Telegraph Hill and
the names of the characters athere are no proper names used anywhere
in the story. The twist is in the very last sentence.

Bon Bons

I appear to have gone back to an old addiction this week. mystery books! I finished three of them up this last weekend. One, Elaine Flinn's Dealing in Murder (2003) is set in Carmel and involves art and antiques. The situation, ambience, tone of the book and characters fit what are called the Cozy mystery. And although this book kept me interested enough to finish it, I was alternately irritated by the main character and by some of the writing, which seemed more than a little clumsy. Nevertheless, a Cplus just for being interesting and a little unusual (in setting and mis-en-scene, if not in amateur detective, real detective and romance). I wish the author was a little more self reflective, or at least the inimitable Molly Doyle was a little bit more reflective, less pointedly know it all and eminently happy with herself, well despite this and that. Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian is much better book stylistically. Punchy sentences, a sense of irony and self reflection, smart quick, humor and good sharp rhythmic syntax and great vocabulary. The story is a little contrived but it doesn't really matter (all the cutting of Mondrians from frames is scary and unnecessary, just steal the picture dammit). Nevertheless, good old Bernie the Burglar is attractive in a curmudgeonly way and this was fun. Michael Connelley's The Poet (1996) was perhaps the most complex of the three, with an involved plot and more sophisticated characterizations. It was a little disappointing, especially the end, and perhaps because this author has such hoopla surrounding him I was expecting more. Lets see: B plus for The Poet and B for the Burglar. I am in the middle of Richard Stevenson's Tongue Tied (2003), which seems weak in writing and characterization and a little big on the attitudinizing, but I am soenchanted by the idea of a gay Amish guy and will perservere for another fifty pages. I also am beginning the Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979) by Block, Tagged for Murder (2004) by Elaine Flinn and Michael Connelly's The Narrows (2004). Must have liked them all enough to give them all another chance. Its all like eating bon bons though.

KK at his best

“And, with a shout, collecting coat-hangers
Dour rebus, conch, hip
Ham, the autumn day, oh how genuine!
Literary frog, catch-all boxer, O
Real! The magistrate, say “group,' bower, undies
Disk, poop, “Timon of Athens.” When
The bugle shimmies, how glove towns!
It's merrimac, bends, and pure gymnasium
Impy keels! The earth desks, madmen
Impose a shy (oops) broken tube's child---
Land! Why are your bandleaders troops
Or is? Honk, can the mailed rose
Gesticulate? Arm the paper arm!
Bind up the chow in its lintel of sniff.
Rush the pilgrims, destroy tobacco, pool
The dirty beautiful jingling pyjamas, at
Last beside the stove-drum-preventing oyster,
The “Caesar” of tower dins, the cold's “I'm
A dear.” O bed, at which I used to sneer at.
Bringing cloth. O song, “Dusted hoops!” He gave
A dish of. The bear, that sound of pins. O French
Ice-cream! balconies of deserted snuff! The hills are
very underwear, and near “to be”
An angel is shouting, “Wilder baskets!”

Kenneth Koch
1st stanza of When the Sun Tries to Go On

Ashbery Talking

John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, published in London by BTL (Between the Lines, 2003) is one of the best interviews I have ever read. Ashbery is open, willing to talk and seems not only really smart but sweet. Perhaps the fact that the two are friends or at least friendly acquaintances accounts for this, but Mr. Ford's smart questions also show a deep familiarity with Ashbery's work. It does seem like a conversation. The 80-page bibliography, which makes up the last part of the book, looks exhaustive and the selections from reviews are cleverly chosen. In fact, a quote from the somewhat notorious first review of Some Trees by Wm. Arrowsmith in the Hudson Review which is intended as negative, seems eerily the reverse:
“What does come through is an impression of an impossibly fractured brittle world, depersonalized and discontinuous, whose characteristic emotional gesture is an effete and cerebral whimsy.”

I particularly like this bit by Ashbery where he talks about the way he writes:

“ How dos a poem begin, and end, for me these days? Well, very much as it always has. A few words will filter in over the transom, as they say in publishing, and Ill grab them and start trying to put them together. This causes something to happen to some other words that I hadn't been thinking of which may well take over the poem to the pint of excluding the original ones. What prompts me to start is a vague feeling that I ought to write a poem, and what 'urges' (rather too strong a word) me to stop is a sudden feeling that it would be pointless to continue.”

Mysterious Mystery Reference

Gary Niebuhr's Make Mine a Mystery; A Reader's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction published by Libraries Unlimited in 2003 has been garnering a bit of notice. It won the The Macavity Award for Best Bio/Critical Mystery Work from Mystery Readers International and The Anthony Award for Best Critical/Non-fiction Work for 2004. The Book is over 500 pages long and annotates approximately 2,700 titles in those pages, I would guess (Mr. Niebuhr owns 6,000 private eye novels and is responsible for these annotations apparently, though nowhere is this out and out stated, though we do learn that his parents who he thanks profusely, “allowed him access to our public libraries” and that his wife has lived in poverty for twenty years of their marriage to allow him to collect the aforesaid 6,000 novels and store them in their basement). All for the good I am sure, but we learn less about his standards for selecting the novels he annotates, only that he is “attempting to represent the entire mystery detective genre.” More on that later.
The book is notable for its $65.00 price tag and big print (well, it is for Libraries after all). Mr. Niebuhr on that: “Although this book is intended for professionals who advise readers, it will also be useful to fans of the genre; mystery bookstore owners, educators who teach literature courses…etc.” It would have been a lot more useful to most fans if it were smaller type, paperback and therefore less expensive? The most interesting and valuable thing about the book is its topology of private eye novels, mirrored in the structure of the book. Part 2 of the book is divided into three chapters, “Amateur Detectives,” “Public Detectives,” and “Private Detectives. Each of these is further subdivided and then that subdivision is discussed through the chronologically arranged annotations. Under Private Detectives for instance, we find: Private Detectives, Crime Specialist Detectives, Ex-Cop Detectives and Rogue Detectives. This all is quite good work, and fascinating to read, especially with the tripartite division of each category into “The Historical Founding Members,” “The Golden Agers and Beyond,” and “The Modern Practitioners.' Each author is subdivided by their character and the books in which that character figures are listed chronologically. All this is very well done, very nicely organized. The annotations are mostly short and clear and hint at the plot without giving anything away (“Jerry is publishing a true crime work by Amelia Gipson. When the author, while doing research, is poisoned from a drinking fountain at the New York Public Library, Pan takes a hand in the investigation.” reads the annotation for the Lockridge's Mr. and Mr. North novel Murder within Murder (though Niebuhr calls them Pamela North/Jerry North). The M&M North novels are preceded by a good statement about the whole series and various categorizations useful for the Reader's Advisor, or perhaps just the reader herself: Sot-boiled/Traditional, Humor, New York, New York, and Teams: for the North Series and Authors & Publishing for the particular Murder within Murder. I am going into all this just to show that the book is very well organized and in that sense well done, if non too exciting and certainly not eccentric in the style or sense of the annotations (presumably, or at least on the face of it, non-judgmental annotations). Since the book is so well organized, superficially non judgmental and “professional” it is therefore very surprising that the following authors appear to appear in this book: Nathan Aldyne, Michael Craft, Stan Cutler, Tony Fennelly, Katherine Forrest, Joseph Hansen, Ellen Hart, Steve Johnson, Val McDermid, Michael Nava, Lev Raphael, Richard Stevenson, John Morgan Wilson, R. D. Zimmerman, Mark Richard Zubro. 300 others, but none of these. Even the most casual reader of mysteries will guess what the common denominator for all of these novelist's is. Yikes! And not one included in this non-judgmental book. Perhaps there are no gay or lesbian readers in the library where Mr. Niebuhr works? Well, at least Jonathan Kellerman and Steven Saylor are included (each author has major and sympathetic gay characters in their series). One surely has to wonder what happened here, this couldn't be mere oversight, or accident? But what other purpose? Are there no editors at Libraries Unlimited, which is limited it appears in one sense.

Muriel Rukeyser's Cohort

In his blog of November 29, 2004, Ron Silliman wonders about the relationship of Muriel Rukeyser to the Objectivists. Of course, Muriel knew George Oppen fairly well and they were politically in tune with each other. I don't know about the other Objectivists, but I can't imagine Zukofsky and Rukeyser getting along. Muriel knew Robert Duncan fairly well and kept up a correspondence with him of some length, I think. But, I do think that her cohort in poetry was the group of women that she was close friends with for most of her life, including for a period of time May Sarton, and a longer periods of time, Jane Cooper, Adrienne Rich, Jean Valentine, Naomi Replansky and Grace Paley. Her “aesthetic” must have been developed in tandem with these other writers. Not that I can tell of what such an aesthetic would consist. I would think that her work is very close to Adrienne Rich's one one side and Jane Cooper's on the other, with Jane being close to Jean Valentine and Jean to Naomi Replansky. I don't know where Paley would fit in really, but I would guess to the outside of Rich.

Paley---Rich----Rukeyser----Cooper----Valentine----Replansky.

I do think that this is the context in which Rukeyser wrote and it is largely a matter of gender and of sexuality. The Objectivists were not notoriously more welcoming of women writers than the Agrarians or anyone else at that time (think of the case of Laura Riding). And if they had any hint of Rukeyser's bisexuality I can imagine all the male poets heading for the hills (I don't think this was the case, though I believe she was fairly open about her relationships with women, and was very supportive of Robert Duncan, who was of course, quite out of the closet). My feeling would be that Rukeyser came more and more to rely on her women friends for advice and support. Certainly, Cooper, Rich and Valentine shared their work with each other and were quite candid in their reactions to each other, Rich in particular being more overbearing than might have been necessary (this from some correspondence I have seen here and there, now unfortunately restricted until some large number of years after Rich's death). In any case, I think all these poets need to be studied in relationship to each other other and in relationship to themselves.