Click images for desktop size: "Positively No Smoking" by Tiffany Fallon When companies are posting record profits and their stock price keeps falling, that tells you something.
When gas and oil companies are trebling their record net profits and the gas prices don't drop and the workers don't get a raise that tells you something more.
When the quality of your life can be ensured with an injection of 5 or 600 bucks that tells you all you need to know.
You do the things you have to in order to make it through. Shave every other day to cut down on the cost of a razor blade. Make the coffee a little bit weaker cause its better to have weak coffee than to have no coffee at all.
It does make what you've got taste better. It makes love seem more real. The good shines like a buried marble peeking out looking for only a glimmer of a sunbeam.
The politicians who don't have a clue as to what to do, except to protect what they have in their bank accounts, manage to throw up some pretty distractions.
The economists all pretend they have an answer. Some do. Most of the ideas work for a few years and then blow up in our faces. Corporations don't care if you live or die and they have a lot of talent invested in figuring out loop holes.
Funny though. Some good things, even some great things have come out of the depressions and recessions of the past. Many of them better than the stuff that happens in the good times.
In the great depression we got Woody Guthrie. We got the unions so we could stand together and get a living wage. It took nearly 60 years for corruption and Republicans to destroy them.
Comic Books flourished. A dime could buy you 3 loaves of day old bread or days of fantasy.
And we got Raymond Chandler.
We wouldn't have any of that and much more if the country hadn't been nearly destroyed by incompetent politicians and uncaring corporations. I've been reading a book: "Killer In The Rain".
Its a book that Chandler would never let come out in his lifetime. He was insecure about his skill, not definite in his genius. I think he was probably insufferable but not about his skill and art.
Click images for desktop size: "The Dark Knight" by DC Comics and Warner Bros If, like me, you think Chandler is one of the great 20th century writers, its a lucky thing that executors of estates and heirs don't care much about a man's feelings when there's money to be made.
Chandler had what he considered to be a serious flaw as a writer. He couldn't come up with enough good plots to move his stuff along. The plot was trivial in his work but he didn't want his stuff to turn into anything boring. His adage about poor writing "If you can't think of anything else to do have somebody come in with a gun," was a part of his self criticism.
Plots are hard. Chandler had all the tools, style, an ear for dialogue and a love of people that let him show us how they really are and still not hate them.
I guess his predicament is like being a great band but not having anybody able to write great songs. (The Byrds come to mind - super tight singing and playing but they only really shined when they did covers.)
What Chandler hated about the stories in "Killer In The Rain" is that they were all originally sold to pulp magazines. He assumed, rightly, that they were rapidly forgotten. In these stories are the beginnings of the plots of almost all his novels, plot and sometimes characters.
He thought that going back and reinventing dreams he's already had, meeting great characters he'd already introduced us to made him less of a writer, less of a man.
Certainly it must have seemed that way to him.
As a simple example though there's the character of Steve Skalla. Skalla was the beast of a man who moved behind the scenes in the incredible, "Farewell My Lovely". In the novel he's a brute, a killer who's only decent quality is the love he had for a woman, a woman who betrayed him. Even that betrayal does not tarnish his love for her.
All the highly entertaining plot mechanisms revolve around the tear inducing tough conclusion where Chandler insists nobility is not only the par vue of the genteel and wealthy, but that a deeper more permanent nobility exists in a man who can forget rage, hatred and violence and care only for love.
Steve Skalla was first introduced in the short story, "Try The Girl". Amazingly the character remains exactly the same. Chandler painted in in broader strokes and with fewer nuances but its the same man. In this story he's even tougher, even more understanding and a bit pathetic, but he remains a durable classic character.
Chandler was making the same points in the novel and the short story but in the short story its sort of clubbed home. He also tears away the veneer of the cultured by having them act more brutally than the giant brute would conceive.

Click images for desktop size: "Dominique" by Carlos Dega The telling scene is in the house of Skalla's girl. He's never gotten to see her. There's a dead body there and the wife of the dead body. She'd been stalking her husband in a jealous rage.
When she finds him dead she assumes that the brute Skalla killed her man. She shoots him five times in the stomach.
Five bullets don't do much to slow Skalla down. The ever present detective takes the gun from her roughly. Skalla says, "Take it easy on her. Man the little ones hurt as much as the big ones, don't they?" (his only acknowledgment of being shot while he holds his guts in with both hands).
The up scale woman response to Skalla's protectiveness is to walk up to him and spit in his face. The detective jerks her away and throws her into a chair. Skalla says, "Don't be so rough, maybe she loved the guy."
"Maybe she loved the guy."
Its a beautiful line and a beautiful scene. Of course, in Chandler's world, Skalla didn't commit the crime he was assassinated for. He was taking the rap for the woman he loved, a woman he hadn't seen in 8 years, who hadn't written to him, had changed her name and well . . . that's love and that's Chandler.
In the novel it is even sadder and crueler but subtler than that.
I hurt my back yesterday. Chopping holes in the ice so the dogs and I can walk (or run around) without slipping and hurting ourselves . . . its just soreness and nothing else.
My little blind dog is more of a concern. He's not doing great. He had a bad night. I'll lounge around, heal and do my exercises even watch a couple movies. He'll only have me to comfort him. He ate today so I have hopes.
What else do we ever have.