There's only the sun that gives shape to the moon

[sovay]

Either I never shook the cold that began in November or I caught some other opportunistic bug in the process of recovering, but I am definitely sick. I made it to yesterday's rehearsal and then I came home, made dinner with spatch, and fell asleep on the couch. I had just finished reading one of my holiday presents from rushthatspeaks, the Strugatskys' thoroughly delightful Monday Starts on Saturday (1965). Awake later in the evening, I re-read three out of the first four books of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) and unhappily I think it was weird for my mood. I slept badly. Today I have done nothing except work for a couple of hours and feed the cats. I don't even seem able to think about or watch movies.

I am feeling alienated by, of all things, an extremely well-written article on millennial burnout. Despite thinking that I belonged to the generation just above millennials, I fall within the age limits delineated by the article; I recognize many of the attitudes, expectations, and pressures detailed therein. I don't argue that I am drowning in no time, no money, no security, no respite, and that it makes me feel like a failure on deep existential levels when honestly I don't think even someone with my problems should have to worry so much and so constantly about just not going broke month after month after month. But I looked at the article's generalizations of the key features of millennial life and aside from the crushing economic horror and accompanying self-despair they were all about as familiar to me as an Instagram filter (I didn't go to grad school because it was expected of me in the American cursus honorum, I went to grad school because I loved what I was studying and was shocked to receive grief from my department for not being more business-minded about it; I have no emotional attachment to a cool job or a job that fits my self-image, just to a job that makes enough for me to live on and doesn't make my life miserable; I don't have a close relationship with my phone or with mainstream forms of social media and I am allergic to the concept of all-hours availability; I really don't worry about curating my life) and it left me instantly feeling that this article was not written to include or to aid me; it envisions a different kind of person drowning; I won't be seen. Probably all this means is that I should not have clicked on the article in my current mental state, but here we are. The bit about the cognitive load of being poor was new to me, plausible, and upsetting.

I concluded a couple of years ago that a pulp style was definitely one of the things that ended up in my own writing before I even thought about such things; it was the similes. There is a lovely note in this annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939) that Rob got me, about the American vernacular "tall talk" that Chandler alternately condensed or elaborated into the colorful comparisons he's known for. I'm still not sure what to do with this example from The Little Sister (1949): "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."

Comments

[sovay]

I hope you feel better soon.

Thank you. I just want to be writing, and for that I need sleep.

I love that Chandler simile. I'd never thought about pulp similes before; that's really interesting.

The annotation page, in full:

"The hyperbolic simile, like the fedora and trench coat, is now seen as an indispensable element in detective fiction, but this scene still stands out for the abundance and sheer gratuitous fun of its similes, nearly all of them added in the rewriting. Chandler, who said, 'I think I rather invented this trick,' tried it out for his first story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot': 'It was a beautiful hand, without a ring. Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.' It's not in his next story, but it returned when he began to hone the first-person voice in his stories of the mid- and late 1930s. The simile arrives in force in 'Mandarin's Jade' and 'Try the Girl' (1937), where even a tough-talking gangster has the gift: 'Act nice and you are as safe as the bearded woman at a Legion convention.'

"Where did the outrageous simile come from? It's not entirely a Chandler invention. We've found it in at least one other LA private eye in the 1930s, Robert Bellem's Dan Turner: 'It was hotter than the hind hinges of hell, and my puss felt like a fried egg,' reads the opening line of Bellem's 'Death on Location' (1935).

"Beyond that, its roots go back to American folk humor and a homegrown vernacular style that stretched from the frontier literature of the Old Southwest through Mark Twain and beyond. The inimitable H. L. Mencken—journalist, cultural critic, language scholar, and, incidentally, cofounder of Black Mask—called this style, characterized by 'wild hyperbole' and 'fantastic simile and metaphor,' 'tall talk." Mencken was known to indulge in it himself with similes like this: 'About as sincere as the look upon the face of an undertaker conducting a nine-hundred dollar funeral'—not as graceful as Chandler's, but cut from the same cloth. A student of vernacular himself, Chandler no doubt was familiar with Mencken's The American Language (1919; much enlarged Fourth Edition, 1936), in which Mencken praised the 'extravagant and grotesque humor' and 'extraordinary capacity for metaphor' of the American mind.

"He Was as Square as a Text Box in an Annotated Edition

"The simile-spouting private eye caught on and is now part of popular culture; indeed, it's what people who don't know much about Raymond Chandler know about his writing style. Chandler complained as early as 1948 about his trick being copied and 'run into the ground . . . to the point where I am myself inhibited from writing the way I used to.' This didn't stop him from generation a whole list of similes for inclusion in The Little Sister, ticking them off as he used them. The Long Goodbye's self-hating novelist rants at himself after using one: 'Goddamn silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else.'

"The device became fodder for good writers, bad writers, satirists, and comedians. 'Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe,' is from the incomparable Mickey Spillane's novel The Killing Man (1989). Jim Nisbet, in The Price of the Ticket (1983), adds a touch of the surreal: 'The guttering sound from his father's throat modulated strangely, as if broadcast from some small, hapless machine attempting to recite a final bit of enigmatic code as it sank into a dark sea.'

"Here are some Chandler comparisons from outside TBS:

"The hard-boiled literature of the 1920s and '30s 'made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tea-room.'

"'My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.'

"'It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.'

"'She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight.'

"'I left her laughing. The sound was a hen having hiccups.'

"She had 'makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist.'

"'On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank on the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won't go to bed.'

"'I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.'

"'You're cold as a night watchman's feet on that one, guy.'

"The Internet is as full of Chandler similes as a digital commons might be, if it were a digital commons full of Chandler similes. Too self-aware? How about this lovely simile, from The Little Sister: 'She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had startled a fawn and it jerked away from me.'"

I'd add that I think of colorful similes as a feature of 1930's fast talk as well as hard-boiled fiction. I can hear Joan Blondell saying the nightwatchman's feet line.

[gwynnega]

These are great. I love the one about the blonde and the bishop kicking a stained glass window.

[sovay]

I love the one about the blonde and the bishop kicking a stained glass window.

It sounds like a folk saying! But it's Chandler. I love that kind of thing.

[moon_custafer]

There’s a famous Chandler one that goes something like “From thirty feet away she looked like a whole lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

[alexxkay]

Here's my favorite mock-Chandler simile, which has lurked in my quote file since the fabled days of USEnet:

"His revolver slid noisily across the floor and stopped abruptly
(like intercourse when the woman's husband comes home early) and a
pregnant silence ensued (also rather like the early husband thing.)"
-- from "The Return of Phil Noir" by Minstrel

[sovay]

"His revolver slid noisily across the floor and stopped abruptly (like intercourse when the woman's husband comes home early) and a pregnant silence ensued (also rather like the early husband thing.)"

I can see why you remembered that.