WWPMD?

Sometimes you just need to read some Raymond Chandler at the end of a workday and have Phil Marlowe give you some perspective. Marlowe would have no patience for hippie platitudes or Rilke quotes, but even he knows that it's important to be a good human. Or at least try to be:

I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They’d get around to it.

I drove on to the Oxnard cut-off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.

All right. Why should I be?...Who am I cutting my throat for this time? ...All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be...Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.

Now, wait a minute...You’ve got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight.

(This is from Chapter 13 of The Little Sister; read the whole chapter here)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Today is Raymond Chandler's birthday. Here's one of my favorite quotes, talking about Phillip Marlowe setting up a chess problem for himself:
[It was] ...a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

2. With the windows open at night, I've been hearing some rustling in the front sometimes. It's not human-sized rustling, but I've wondered what creature is doing it (mice? snails? there are a lot of snails here). This morning at 4:00 it woke me (and Toby) up again and I looked out to see a mama raccoon and FOUR big babies. They seemed to be eating snails. Carry on, raccoons.

Speaking Of Styles From The 40s

I started thinking about Raymond Chandler yesterday and all the women's outfits he described. They're really fantastic--"a brown linen suit with a pimento-colored scarf," a white suit with delphinium blue gloves and hat--but this one is the clear winner:

She was searing a white wool skirt, a burgundy silk blouse and a black velvet overjacket with short sleeves. Her hair was a hot sunset. She wore a golden topaz bracelet and topaz earrings and a topaz dinner ring in the shape of a shield. Her fingernails matched her blouse exactly. She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.

Cut and Color

So I made a hair appointment Saturday, which reminded me of this (fairly long) passage from The Long Goodbye. "Kingpin racketeers"--long live Raymond Chandler.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home...

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable kind. She is very languid and very shadowy and speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal...

And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.