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
True Coffeeshop Story
“Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, the late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.” On the strangeness of literary celebrity.
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I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness
Toni Morrison gives a devastating interview in The Guardian.
“Our sturdiest atheists”
Recommended Reading: Millions contributor Michelle Huneven on Charles Baxter’s There’s Something I Want You to Do.
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CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
Tuesday New Release Day: Wyld; Harvkey; Simpson; de Rosnay; Henderson; Solomon
New this week: All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld; In the Course of Human Events by Mike Harvkey; Casebook by Mona Simpson; The Other Story by Tatiana de Rosnay; Vernon Downs by Jaime Clarke; and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. For more on these titles and other new releases, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
Common Consciousness Changed
“For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress towards justice and peace.” The inimitable Primo Levi on the spiritual value of science and its ability to bring people together.
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Dark Imaginings
Heading to London in the near future? Stop by the British Library’s new Terror and Wonder, which bills itself as the UK’s biggest Gothic exhibition in history. To whet your appetite, you can read this Guardian piece by Neil Gaiman, in which the Sandman author names Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the apex of Gothic fiction. Related: our own Hannah Gersen on Frankenstein and the “Year Without a Summer.”
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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