woops

is not like other people
i'm just finished Journey to the End of Night last night, which I should have read years ago but only just got round to at long last what a slog

i did like it at first - alot of pessimistic books go out of their way to rub you're face in how awful life is, whereas céline's narrator is more or less just reporting what he sees - but 500 pages was too much. 300 would have done the trick. obviously times and attention spans have changed, but yh
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I was intrigued enough by @catalog's mentions of the Jarett Kobek Zodiac kiler books that I ordered them on Friday, they arrived yesterday, and this morning I just finished the first one, Motor Spirit

the title is derived from one of the observers of the death of a "misfit" at the hands of a bunch of speed freaks in a 60s Haight Ashbury crash pad, who commented that the victim deserved to die because she did not possess "motor spirit", or as the author puts it, she wasn't suffering from amphetamine psychosis

the book channels that energy, reading like a wired Ellroy without the nasty prejudices - lots of short sentences:

Charlie was a bust. But Charlie started it all. Charlie planted the seed. Charlie was the farmer. The Zodiac is the crop.

Kobek ignores the mess created by years of Zodiac "researchers" and returns to primary sources, making distinctions between Zodiac the killer and Zodiac the media creation

I thoroughly enjoyed it, going to start the sequel, How to Find Zodiac, now
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
the title is derived from one of the observers of the death of a "misfit" at the hands of a bunch of speed freaks in a 60s Haight Ashbury crash pad, who commented that the victim deserved to die because she did not possess "motor spirit", or as the author puts it, she wasn't suffering from amphetamine psychosis
Hmm, harsh system in which anyone who is not high enough to give themselves permanent brain damage deserves to die.
Sounds like exactly the sort of rule you might come up with once you've managed to ingest enough speed to get yourself off that very hook.
 

version

Well-known member
i'm just finished Journey to the End of Night last night, which I should have read years ago but only just got round to at long last what a slog

i did like it at first - alot of pessimistic books go out of their way to rub you're face in how awful life is, whereas céline's narrator is more or less just reporting what he sees - but 500 pages was too much. 300 would have done the trick. obviously times and attention spans have changed, but yh

Yeah, it really starts to drag toward the end, but there are some good bits - love this from the Africa section,

"Men, days, things — they passed before you knew it in this hotbed of vegetation, heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. Everything passed, disgustingly, in little pieces, in phrases, particles of flesh and bone, in regrets and corpuscles; demolished by the sun, they melted away in a torrent of light and colors, and taste and time went with them, everything went. Nothing remained but shimmering dread."
 

woops

is not like other people
Yeah, it really starts to drag toward the end, but there are some good bits - love this from the Africa section,

"Men, days, things — they passed before you knew it in this hotbed of vegetation, heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. Everything passed, disgustingly, in little pieces, in phrases, particles of flesh and bone, in regrets and corpuscles; demolished by the sun, they melted away in a torrent of light and colors, and taste and time went with them, everything went. Nothing remained but shimmering dread."
Yes but even reading that paragraph you can see how easily there could be too much of it. Anyway Death on the Instalment Plan is apparently the one lol
 

catalog

Well-known member
I was intrigued enough by @catalog's mentions of the Jarett Kobek Zodiac kiler books that I ordered them on Friday, they arrived yesterday, and this morning I just finished the first one, Motor Spirit

the title is derived from one of the observers of the death of a "misfit" at the hands of a bunch of speed freaks in a 60s Haight Ashbury crash pad, who commented that the victim deserved to die because she did not possess "motor spirit", or as the author puts it, she wasn't suffering from amphetamine psychosis

the book channels that energy, reading like a wired Ellroy without the nasty prejudices - lots of short sentences:



Kobek ignores the mess created by years of Zodiac "researchers" and returns to primary sources, making distinctions between Zodiac the killer and Zodiac the media creation

I thoroughly enjoyed it, going to start the sequel, How to Find Zodiac, now
Hes a good writer, I think I've read everything by him now, apart from this one called "if you won't read then why should I write", which I'm gonna order soon.


Be interested to know what you make of the second one William Kent, its an insane amount of research into one guy, who he says he cannot ever discount from being zodiac. Just incredible obsessive detail. And it's this sort of sideways look at that time in West coast America, people looking in on the counterculture, but never quite part of it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
One thing about The Big Sleep (Chandler) and Red Harvest (Hammet) is that they - I guess maybe the whole noir thing in general - give a sort of insight into the arbitrary nature of censorship and how the things that offend us, or which someone deems ought to offend us - or perhaps it would be better to say that someone deems that we need to be protected from - changes over the years.

I think I'm right in saying that the Maltese Falcon which was also by Hammett, has been filmed (at least) twice. The first version (which I've never seen, has anyone here seen it in fact? @DLaurent maybe?) was filmed before the Hayes Code was in place and presumably it contained some things which would have counted as too strong for the very famous version which came out a few years later starring Humphrey Bogart.

I know that in that the Bogey version the bits about one of the bad guys being gay are pretty much removed apart from when Bogey refers to him as a "gunsel" which apparently was an anti-gay slur obscure enough to get past the censors. Of course, removing the homophobia was not a progressive move - they weren't removing the insults to protect the insulted, rather they were removing all references to homosexuality altogether, deleting the very idea to protect the delicate sensibilities of audience that was presumably composed of a particularly innocent group of maiden aunts.

In the Big Sleep book there are a couple of quite horrible bits - on one occasion he describes something as "unpleasant and nasty like a fag party" and another bit where he talks about fighting a big gay bloke as follows

20220515_141558.jpg

It's very strange to me cos it reads as though he literally believes that to be true. Or maybe it was just what he could get away with. A nice bit of literary punching down. And it's quite interesting how when I read a line like that I find it shocking - well, maybe that's not quite the right word, but the bits where you have the authorial voice expressing strong homophobic sentiments, and then on almost the next line they censor a simple profanity is as clear an example you could hope for of how views have completely switched round since then

Profanity.jpg


One might also wonder why so many of the bad guys turn out to be gay; I suppose that you could make an argument that our gumshoes operate in a murky half-world of vice - protection rackets and pornography, gambling and blackmail are their daily bread - and it does make sense that people whose very lifestyles were deemed criminal would have found themselves being pushed into it. But why are they always the bad guys? Definitely seems to be a strong case of homophobia which I imagine would be pretty much par for the course for tough guys such as Hammett and Chandler... or did they protest just a little too much? Or is that just too neat and satisfactory an answer?

Speaking of tough guys, it's often said that Hammett's books gained extra authenticity from his time working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency (presumably the basis for The Continental Agency in Red Harvest) but I'm struggling to believe that Hammett ever marched into a town and mowed down about fifty men - ultimately putting the entirety of four or five criminal gangs into the big sleep.

But whatever, of course the books are larger than life, they are sensational crime fiction novels destined to be huge films - and perhaps when they mention authenticity they are talking about the language and the slang which they used. And really, it's the dialogue that makes the films for me - the way it's written and the way the actors delivered it. Obviously I have no way of judging how true to life it was - other than what it says in the introduction or wikipedia or whatever - but it sounds cool and that's really what I want to be honest.

I'm glad to read these books at last anyway. I have seen loads and loads of noir films over the years. I mean really I have seen a lot, but I've never read any of the books at all. Ah, wait a minute though, once I did find a book by Mickey Spillane kicking around on a shelf in the spare room in my parents' house when I was very little. Typically I picked it up and tried to read it but I just didn't have the toolkit to understand it (was probably five or six years old), I could sort of understand that there was something that might interest me later.

But anyway, what really struck me in reading these books is how similar they are to the films. Most films are quite different to a book, but these ones are closer than almost anything that I have read. You could say that is because the books are simplistic, or you could equally argue that they are slimmed down and taut with no unnecessary fat, it jus depends on your viewpoint really. There is very little in the way of introspection or thought or anything beyond "I did this, then I did that, and then I decided to do this" with a few wisecracks stirred in.

The only book I have read where the film and book are so similar in feel and approach is No Country For Old Men... which, I guess, you could call a neo-noir, and so that is perhaps not surprising.

Anyway, gonnna knock this long, rambling post on the head at that point. I said I was gonna talk about censorship and how it changed but really I just kinda splurged out everything in my mind. Oh well.
 

version

Well-known member
I read Didion's Miami the other day and currently reading a Pasolini anthology with a bunch of his poems, political writings and literary essays; there's also an interview with Pound but he doesn't say much.

Both notable for having decent covers too.

81x2igkkqrL.jpg in_danger_a_pasolini_anthology_vv.jpg

The Didion reads a bit like earlier DeLillo, same grounded but slightly vague and paranoid style where there's a lot of talk of things which may or may not have happened, things in the air, names, people and places which keep popping up.

One thing which stuck out was her describing how much influence various radio personalities had among the exile community. Everything would get filtered through these Spanish-language Rush Limbaugh-types who would boil everything down to whether or not it sounded like someone was being too soft on Castro, although some of the listeners sounded just as extreme, if not moreso - apparently one bloke dared to suggest on air that the violence going on at the time was counterproductive and someone blew his legs off outside the station for it.

There's some interesting stuff about the language coming from Washington too, how it would constantly shrink and grow and warp depending on the situation, how they'd talk about a part when they meant a whole and a whole when they meant a part, how Reagan would float theories in the language of advertising the way Trump would later do his "People are saying... " thing, e.g. new information telling him some right-wing group committing atrocities was really 'the left' disguising themselves as such.

Something else which made an impression was one of the apparent motivating factors in the CIA training a bunch of the exiles and sticking them in various bases and front organisations was essentially to keep them occupied. They'd keep stringing them along as though they were planning further invasions of Cuba, but never follow through.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I like that Pasolini looks cool. In a weird way I expect Fellini to look like Marcello or Sergio Leone to look like Clint Eastwood - but then you see em and of course they are short, fat, balding... they have a magical gift of a different type, but there is a reason that they picked these guys to be their avatars...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Be interested to know what you make of the second one William Kent, its an insane amount of research into one guy, who he says he cannot ever discount from being zodiac. Just incredible obsessive detail. And it's this sort of sideways look at that time in West coast America, people looking in on the counterculture, but never quite part of it.

just finished How To Find Zodiac tonight. I thought I'd gone off the deep end with some of my "research" in the past, but this guy really plumbs the depths of the ocean - obsessive doesn't quite do him justice. It's a fascinating look into the world of small press / fanzines / Amateur Press Associations , tracking one man over decades through his contributions to smudged, badly mimeographed zines.

Is he Zodiac? Kobek certainly makes a stronger case than last year's "Zodiac Revealed" headlines - an angry drunk, Gary Francis Poste, was named as the killer by the "Case Busters", a group of 40 "researchers", who say that because a photofit of the suspect has lines on the forehead and so does Poste, that is incontrovertible proof that he was Zodiac. Shoddy.

At least Kobek shows that his guy was a member of the Minutemen, knew about ammonium nitrate and stove oil recipes for explosives, had knowledge of radions, ciphers, and other things that are mentioned in the Zodiac letters...

I was on the fence, but then...when Kobek mentions that his suspect was into the Gor books - well, that marks him out as a definite wrong 'un. When I was a kid rummaging in the bargain bins of the local Woolworths for books I'd buy Conan, Sven Hassel, I even bought one Leo Kessler, but even at a young age I knew there was something off about those piles of Chronicles of Gor books and left them well alone, a bias that was confirmed when older and I read about the Darlington sex cult

A highly entertaining read, I'll probably buy more Kobek books when I get paid...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Kobek, a man who read police reports of non-consensual acts involving broom handles, said that reading the Gor books was the worst thing he had to do when researching his serial killer book...
 

catalog

Well-known member
The bit I was most interested in, William Kent, was the living outdoors/lifestyle mag he talks about, forgotten it's name now, the one where it was a husband and wife team in charge, then they wrote to everyone that they were giving over control to another couple, and kobek says it was literally just the same people, but they had given themselves new names, new identities.

i'll try find the quote tonight when i get home, but the guy he mentions, he seems like a richard shaver type guy, just another portal to something.

it's all, to me, wrapped up in Stewart Brand / Whole Earth stuff, it's the flipside to all that.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just to be clear I have not really read all of the Gor books twice. Or even once. I did read the first one last year, inspired by a book that I really enjoyed (and which I know I have mentioned several times). It was called Their Brilliant Careers or something similar to that and it took the form of biographies of a number of made-up Australian writers. Each chapter was a pisstake of a real writer or maybe a scene or literary incident or something. Most of the chapters referenced things that I believe I was familiar enough with that I could pretty much understand them and get all the jokes - but the first chapter was about this guy who wrote the Gor books. I could spot the reference but really I knew nothing about them so I thought I had better read at least something about Gor to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. It wasn't particularly good, but it wasn't that bad either really - and while I certainly had no inclination to read anything else by him, I have to admit that I had been hoping for worse. I was hoping it would be so bad that I would be actually laughing... and sadly it wasn't like that, just very mediocre. I have heard that it was the after the first book that he really took the plunge and dived into the badness, but I am sure I will never be able to confirm or deny that.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I have heard that it was the after the first book that he really took the plunge and dived into the badness, but I am sure I will never be able to confirm or deny that.

apparently the real dark turn was when he switched publishers from Ballantine to DAW, that's when the abuse of the slave women really goes into high gear. Kobek recounts that when he was sourcing the Gor books that the ballantine ones were easy to get, but the later, nastier, ones were scarce, and he came to the conclusion that the owners of these did not want to let them go...

This morning I tried to find the documentary of the Darlington Gorean sex cult on youtube, but unfortunately came up empty handed - which is a shame because I remember it being hilarious - it was like a benefits / poverty porn programme with added BDSM
 
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