Before cutting his teeth as novelist and screenwriter, Raymond Chandler tried to make it as a poet. Here are some early poems from the author of The Long Goodbye.
Chandler’s Poetry
From Jakarta to Franfurt
In light of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, which had Indonesia as the official guest of honor, check out Wayan Sunarta’s essay on the rise of Indonesian literature abroad. As he explains it, “Although Indonesian literature is in the ascendant at home, it has so far failed to establish itself internationally. The number of works translated from Indonesian is still very small.”
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Polygamy the New Feminism?
Fans intrigued/disturbed by the real-life look at polygamy from the perspective of women in the HBO series "Big Love" might be interested in this bit of news from Siberia.
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The 7 Habits of Self-Help
“I have learned to consume them in secret, in my own home, reading them the way you would eat a bag of M&M’s that you keep stashed behind the kale chips.” Jake Tobin Garrett for Electric Literature about the allure of self-help books. See also:“Unleashing the Essence of Self-Help Books in Three Simple Steps.”
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Tuesday New Releases
David Remnick's biography of President Obama, The Bridge is out. (The Times explained how Remnick finds time to run the New Yorker and write a 700-page biography of a sitting president.) Also new: Another chronicle of the collapse, The End of Wall Street by talented financial journalist Roger Lowenstein; Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's "blog book" The Notebook; another in the posthumously published oeuvre of Irène Némirovsky, Dimanche and Other Stories; the latest from A.L. Kennedy, What Becomes; and Tom Rachman's touted debut The Imperfectionists.
“I found this person to talk to”
Nikil Saval isn’t the only n +1 editor with a new book out. Through his magazine’s publishing arm, cofounder Benjamin Kunkel is releasing a play, Buzz, which comes on the heels of last month's Utopia or Bust. At Full Stop, William Harris reviews Buzz, calling it "the type of play that propels itself by introducing the indefinite edges of a mystery." It may also be a good time to read Kunkel’s Year in Reading entry.
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Gorey and Macabre
Eve Bowen takes a trip to "Gorey Preserved," an exhibition of "nearly every edition of every work published by [Edward] Gorey, in addition to illustrations for dust jackets and magazines, etchings, posters, and design ephemera," on display at Columbia University until August 10th. Those unable to attend need not fret—Bowen walk readers through a history of the prolific illustrator's work and includes plenty of links to his drawings online.
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Helpful Elves
Fact: 4 percent of books are written by secret government agencies, while a full .5 percent are authored by helpful elves. How do we know? The New Yorker said so.
I’m looking for the poem written by Raymond Chandler witht some words written in his poem that talk about “these mean streets” or a “hero” or just “mean Streets”.
I hope someone out here in the cyber world will know and understand what I might be speaking about….please help!
Dennis
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler