I just finished re-reading my favorite Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye. It has everything.
A great hardboiled story: Marlowe's friend is accused of murder and the cops, the hoods and the powerful all warn Marlowe off the case. Inexorably the case is pushed onto him until he solves everything to no one's liking, including his.
It defines the essence of hardboiled detectives: “...this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I grew up and worked in the hardware store...”
It discusses writing as a business: “The public likes long books. ...if there are lots of pages there must be lots of gold.”
There are shots at advertising which he compares to chess: “...as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”
It has the best descriptions of drinking this side of Malcolm Lowry: Such as when you have stopped drinking “... It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. ...”
But if I had to give The Long Goodbye a book review rating it would be 2 stars. Chandler doesn't do the 1950's well. Censorship had loosened up and he uncomfortably tried to go with the new flow in pulp. Marlowe calls a man “flea dirt” and describes himself in one scene as being “erotic as a stallion.” I doubt that those lines read well in 1954, much less now.
As much as I enjoy the literary side trips in The Long Goodbye, it has too many. I wish Raymond Chandler had stayed focused on the hardboiled angle.
George W. Parker
Thoughts About Stuff: “Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis." (Whatever advice you give, be brief.) ― Horace, Ars Poética
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
How to make a point.
Here is a link to an interesting
article by Lee Drutman entitled Is Congress getting dumber, or
just more plainspoken?
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/grade-level-congress/
The premise is of the article is
simple: Examine speeches using the using the
Flesch-Kincaid test and see what happens. I want to point out
that Flesh-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and
longer sentences.
According to the results at the above
link Congress is speaking at a 10.6 grade level down from an 11.5
level in 2005.
MS Word includes a Flesh-Kincaid
analysts in its tools. I took a few book/author samples and tested
them. I grant this is a small sample but I think it has some “tough
reading” in it from a diverse group of English language writers.
Martin Eden – Jack London – 3.8
As I lay Dying – William Faulkner –
4.8
Treasure Island – Robert Lewis
Stevenson – 2.0
Paradise Lost – John Milton – 3.4
Ulysses – James Joyce – 2.7
Bleak House – Charles Dickens – 4.5
The Winter of Our Discontent – John
Steinbeck – 2.7
Based on my sampling it looks like it might be more
important to say something meaningful that everyone can understand
than worry about vocabulary and sentence length.
(I wanted to slip obfuscate into my
comment up there somewhere but I use Open Office now so I can't check to see if
it would have helped my Flesh-Kincaid rating.)
George W. Parker
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath
I have
been thinking about John Steinbeck and his writing. I like Steinbeck.
One of the questions I ask everyone who confesses to reading is “Have
you read The Winter of Our Discontent ?” No
one reads it. I have met two people in my entire life who have read it and one of them
was in Zhezkazgan,
Kazakhstan. And I don't
understand that. It's entertaining. It's funny. It's readable and you
can justify the time you spend on it.
It
seems like everyone gets the Steinbeck kicked out of them at an
early age. No one ever gets past The Grapes of Wrath. I
was lucky that the first Steinbeck I ever read was Travels
with Charley. If I had started
out with The Grapes of Wrath I
would never had picked up another thing by him. (If you
have ever seen the John Ford movie adaptation staring Henry Fonda
then you need to be sure and see the SCTV version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6O5xCRNx4g
)
My son
is in high school. One of the summer reading choices is, you guessed
it, The Grapes of Wrath. I
don't understand why they would force that book on anyone. They
should be reading something they would enjoy. No wonder all he does
is play Call of Duty.
You
can find my review of The Winter of Our Discontent at
http://georgewparkertalkingbookreviews.blogspot.com/.
George
W. Parker
Monday, May 14, 2012
B. Traven and social media
The creative person should have no
other biography than his works. B. Traven
How is that working for him in today's
social media environment?
- B. Traven has an official website – http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html.
- Here is his Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/B-Traven/112166092128826.
- This is the Twitter page - https://twitter.com/#!/btraven (Here he is in the guise of Kenneth Sean Glade.)
- How about the blog? - http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/author/b-traven/
Today B. Traven's publisher would be
working to own and manage all the above web pages to consolidate and
and control the marketing of his “brand.” Speaking to us, the buying public, in a
single voice.
Traven's various “beards” (aka
agents) would probably have their own Internet platforms and plaster
us with all kinds of insipid Tweets and posts. (Well, they are
just “beards,” not B. Traven.)
The one thing that you can be sure of
is B. Traven would be using a Tor browser.
George W. Parker
I am not a Travenologist. What I know
about B. Traven you can find here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Traven
and here - http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html. I must admit that I do agree with the opening quote.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Naivety
Here are a couple of things I hope I
never come to disbelieve: “Cheaters never win, winners never
cheat.,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” I realize these are
a little old fashion but I still like them.
Another old fashion idea is that it is
against the law to buy votes in the United States. It is against the
law to buy them directly. To be successful at it you have to use a
third party money laundering device. And the safest and most
successful washing machine available is the US Government.
Here are a couple of recent examples ,
in my opinion, of vote buying. (I don't mean that the following
things are wrong in themselves, just that the driving purpose behind
them is suspect.)
- During a time of deflation Congress passed and the President signed a 3.6% benefit increase for Social Security recipients. (I realize that there are many legitimate reasons behind this increase. I also realize that this group of Americans are active voters.)
- Just last week President Obama was touting, on campuses across the US, his fight for lower interest rates on student loans. (Again, I realize there are a great many good reasons for these lower interest rates. But was this really anything thing more than an attempt to buy votes?)
Vote buying via the Washington
machine goes the other direction too. In a previous blog I talked
about the immense spending on Capitol Hill by lobby groups. What is
a PAC or Super PAC but a way to massage money to the people,
Representatives and Senators and Presidential candidates, who enact
monetary laws?
It would be naive to believe that this
behavior is something new in Washington. But is it naive to
believe that it can be minimized? Probably, but I do plan on holding
onto the possibility.
George W. Parker
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Lobbyist
On PBS there is a Moyer & Company promo in which
a woman laments that we (the American Everyman) don’t have a lobbyist working
for us in Washington, D.C.
I did a search and found out at http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby that
there were 12,655 Federal registered lobbyist in 2011 with combined
expenditures of $3.31 billion dollars. (You’ll find a lot of interesting
information at http://www.opensecrets.org)
Lobbies by definition are special interest groups whether
they are the American Association of Retired Persons ($15 million spend in 2011http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023726&year=2011),
Pfizer Inc. ($1 million spend in 2011 http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H04)
or The National Association of Broadcasters ($13.9 million spend http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000000202&year=2011,
and on and on and on. A lobby’s business is looking out for their own issues.
The United States once experimented with a group of
multi-issue lobbyists. The thought was that one person could look after the
interests of a diverse group of people. So our population was divided up and
assigned lobbyists. These multi-issue lobbyists were called Senators and Representatives.
Apparently that experiment did not work out as expected. But maybe it’s time to reset that
idea of representing a diverse group of people.
George W. Parker
Friday, April 13, 2012
Big Data
I came across an article on BBC.com this morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17682304
that redirected my entire morning. In it Dr. Mike Lynch(1) stated:
“Today, thanks to
technology's mass appeal and accessibility, on a daily basis we collectively
produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and the growth rate is so high that 90%
of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone. The
value of this information to organisations who want to keep ahead of the curve
is huge.”
Here is the part that stopped me cold: “…90% of all information
ever created was produced in the last two years alone.” Emphasis is mine.
“…90% of all information ever created was produced in the
last two years alone.” Where in the world did that statement come from? So
I went word searching
The first thing I found was an unattributed promotional piece on
IBM’s site http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/ excerpted below. (Please note that the noun “information” is “data” here. And IBM can
help you with your “big data.”):
“What is big data?
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so
much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two
years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate
information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase
transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big
data. “
Next up was http://bigdatalowlatency.com/
which lead to another IBM quote: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/us__en_us__smarter_computing__ibm_data_final.pdf Here again the noun in use is “data” not
“information. (And IBM can still help you with your big data.)
I found a few more references to
that IBM 90% data statement which I won't bore you with. Nowhere else did I find the word “information” used. If Dr. Lynch
had used the word “data” instead of “information” I would never have run along
this tangent as there is a big difference in my mind between data and
information.
Dr. Lynch has shown us that just because
you have data doesn’t mean you have information.
(1) Dr. Mike Lynch OBE is founder and chief executive
(CEO) of Autonomy, and executive vice-president (EVP) of HP Information
Management. Autonomy, part of HP since October 2011, makes software that
processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media,
email, video, audio, text and web pages. From BBC.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)