Aspiration

Check it out. Raymond Chandler, from The High Window.

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

(...)Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

I remember an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show where Mary is taking a creative writing class, and asks Lou to give her a critique. Lou puts her off and puts her off. Finally, he tells her the truth: it stinks. No one wants to read that. He takes a worn volume of Raymond Chandler from his desk, opens it at random, and reads to her. She is mesmerized.

"That's writing," says Lou.

Reading great writing makes my own efforts seem laughable. I never want to try if I can't be Raymond Chandler. But it's something of a compulsion with me. I dump out my head onto the (web) page regardless.

Sorry Mr. Chandler. Hope I'm not disturbing your sleep.

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