A Universal Law -- Can't get What you Don't Have.

Over on another web site some folks are discussing job hunting and of course the first law of job hunting pops up: The best job hunting tip is to look while you already have a job.

Which I start thinking about. During this cogitation it becomes clear to me that this is part of a greater and more universal law.. "It Is Easier To Get Another One Of What You Already Have." Which is also part of a greater and more universal law - "The Universe Doesn't Like You Very Much."

The universe exists to make your life difficult for you, in the end making it so difficult that you no longer have your life. That's a rigged game even by Vegas' standards. Following the principle that the universe is out to get you it makes sense that if you already have something you need, it will be abundant. Conversely if you desperately need something, it will be difficult to obtain. This is why you can easily find a Twinkie in Houston Texas (the fattest city in the fattest nation in the world) but can't find a Twinkie crumb in Ethiopia.

This applies all over the place. Consider that classic bit of folk wisdom that "it takes money to make money." So if you are broke you can't possibly make money.

Think about how much easier it is to buy a car from a car-dealer when he thinks you might just walk off the lot. Once any part, even a part as venal and insignificant as a car salesman, of the universe knows you need something it immediately becomes more difficult to get. You won't be getting the cashback bonus, you won't get the good APR, you won't get free extras. Because you need the car and the salesman knows it, that's why.

It works from other angles as well. Ever notice that being in a relationship makes you twice as attractive to others? Guess why? When you have one partner, you can get another. Try that when you're single. Welcome to late-night cable and lubricant.

The question of real need is one thing. But these rules also apply in situations where you merely want something. If you don't have something other people do have, you want it. We may call this the "Iron Law of Consumer Capitalism" and it is a subsidiary to the laws we have already discussed.

This law has the same implications as the others. We can tell it is a law because it applies even in previously non-existent circumstances. I never wanted an Ipod - I barely even used my Walkman and I steadfastly believed that you should only listen to radio in a car or else your musical taste will necessarily ossify into what you already have ("Step away from the Jackson Browne albums!").

Yet, as soon as someone I knew actually had an Ipod? It became first on my lists of wants. Because it wasn't an actual need, I was able to achieve it (while the universe will toy with your wants, it is much better on taking away what you need -- this gets back to its basic structure as a mass-murderer). My point isn't that I snuck one by the universe (you never really do) it's the reverse - that the "Iron Law of Consumer Capitalism" was waiting there to get me.

For now?

I'm off to browse the Sharper Image Catalog and relax.

Sick, but fun

Insane Central Arcade

Click once to get the penguin to drop, click again to get the Yeti to swing.

The Best 24 Years of My Undergrad Degree

were spent at the University of California at Berkeley. And if it weren't for the Bear's Lair I might well have graduated from Cal. As it turned out the Bear's Lair and a bit of a lie from the director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program (or misunderstanding between that critter and the Lord of Letters and Sciences) meant that I, alas, could not cap my undergrad academic career with a Cal degree. NYIT is good, but not the same.

OTOH only a real asshole would take 24 years to get their undergrad degree.

With all that noted...

Da Bears Rule!

45-10 over the Texas Aggies ("no students killed in silly bonfire accidents since 1999!") who played pretty well. Both coaches emptied their benches at the end of the game and that was also nice to see...

But... to be totally honest?

We effed em up!

Ooooh.... I'll Buy a Piece of That!

Just clicking from here to there on the mighty intarwebs and I click on a link that promises to take me to some embarrassing pictures of a superstar (and I love me some my scahedenfreude) and what should pop up but the 'interesting' advertisement to the right.

I am, of course, intrigued by the thing since I think we all want to know what anal aint (and is that "T" supposed to make me think of the 'taint'? Or is that "OO" supposed to make me think of anal ecstasy?). And I want to know what cutting edge product, by Pontiac at that, is represented by a shot of the back end of a red car with the message "ANAL AIN'T"

It would give a whole new meaning to four on the floor. Unfortunately, as the animation works itself out the rather pedestrian (can you say 'pedestrian' about an advert for a car?) pitch is for some Detroit piece of garbage, as you can see on the left.

The arrow moves away to reveal a message that I will never remember, because "ANAL AIN'T" has temporarily taken over my frontal lobes and a bit of my lower body.

I wonder how long this advertisement has been on the web and if Pontiac has any idea what it looks like?

Xmas time again by golly..

drinking eggnogg, snorting Holly...

and this is our xmas shrub!

Surrounded by gifts for the BAG (but not her lovely xmas stocking) and awaiting her arrival.

Maybe I'll have a piece of xmas chicken and some xmas water (It being "xmas" everything must have the "xmas" modifier).

And to all a good night..

A Pic of Ox's smashed Truck

For those of you who know the Ox, you probably don't know that last Tuesday he finished the job that he had begun weeks before in Portland. He got his car rear-ended into oblivion. Once again, it was not his fault. As Ox returned from a teleconference north of his house (hmmm.. if it was a teleconference why did he have to leave home) he was rear-ended by a man in an SUV. Ox was slowing down for traffic in front of him and the guy behind him missed the sea of brake-lights in front of him and slammed into OX and actually pushed him off the highway. If you look closely you will notice that there is no glass in the rear window of the truck - this is because Ox's head slammed all of that out.

I received a message from Ox about 9:15 that night and when I called back he said "I've been in a crash and will call you back in 5 minutes." So I waited around for him to call and since this crash occurred in Hometown USA, I headed a couple of miles away to pick him up. He was a bit concussed so instead of bringing him to my house for a drink (BTW - we were supposed to have had a drink that night, but Ox canceled due to the teleconference. If he had that drink, none of this would have happened. You know what moral I draw from this!) I drove him down to his house in Coastal USA. He talked semi-distractedly all the way down and when I got him home his lovely wife fixed me a cup of coffee and I raced back home. One thing about freeways after 11 pm, there really isn't much traffic, so that trip only took about 75 minutes.

The kicker of the whole thing is the idiot who hit him may be an uninsured driver. This would truly suck. The BAG and I may head down to Coastal USA on Xmas day and I'm sure we'll hear more about this. Ox was, fortunately, relatively unscathed other than the bump on his head and that, I suppose, is the good news.

Those of you who have his contact info can feel free to send him letters of consolation for his mighty truck. ;-)

Rats... fire down the slag-melter...

It is now illegal to melt pennies and nickels.

Why?

Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny's metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint.

One good thing about dollars... until they become completely worthless we won't be doing anything but spending them...

Me?

I'm buying nickels with them.

/My limited math skills suggest that not only do nickels provide a better return - a whopping 39% - than pennies - a paltry 12% - but that there are fewer of the buggers needed to get this whole scheme going).

I wonder how many nickels you'd actually have to melt to overcome the startup costs of the blast furnace and power?

Almost Over

I just sent my last classroom assignment to my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Program." It was on Melville's "Bartleby The Scrivener" which is a story I love and have loved since I first read it a few years ago. The crazy artisto-deluxe at Swamp Valley College recommended it to me back then and I really liked it.

I liked it even more within the context of "American" (meaning "US") Romanticism, but when it came to writing the paper I was completely flat. It's done and will be an A (I think) but I don't want to have to write anything academic anything again until I do my thesis.

If I do?

It will be deconstructionist slogans.

Written with a machine gun.

On the chest of innocent passers by.

From a fucking tower.

I'd ask what kind of moron gets an MA in English.. but I have a mirror.

Paper due at midnight... yet I am so lame..

and so uninterested in writing the thing (and only a 2500 word paper) that I am actually watching a Matlock movie.

A Matlock movie

In my defense it is set in London.

Oh, there is no defense.

I'm watching Matlock...

I'm lame.

More Dolls

Aaah.. sweet, sweet confirmation as the new Dolls album hits #12 on the Rolling Stone best of the year list. This is slightly tarnished by the fact that the number one album is by Bob Dylan ("Rwellor to Enterprise, Rwellor to Enteprise. He's DEAD Jim!) and the number two album is by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (who aren't red, hot, or peppery any longer). Still...

All you Jackson Browne, Steely Dan, Eagles listening prematurely geezed-out oldsters need to return to the roots.

You younger folks?

Get off my lawn!

Korea Calls - but I'm in the shower

The first call came from Korea.. a job teaching conversational english to Christian Women in a tourism program at Kyungin Women's College. I turned it down, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost was that when I called my friend OX (the excellent Korean) he immediately launched into a list of reasons I should finish my MA, bring enrollment success to Swamp Valley College, and wait for a better offer from Korea.

This is, of course, the Korean way of saying "I know something about this job and I'm not going to share it with you, but for God's freaking sake DO NOT take the job!" Later, when I put the thumbscrews on, he told me that the guy helping me get the job would also be working there and I would be quite obligated to him in that institutional situation. This does not sound like much to Western ears, but in Korea it means the world.

Anyway, staying here will allow me to get the victory I need at work to have a good chance at marketing employment when I return to the states. I can also pile up my full 240 hours of vacation (paid out at separation) and finish my MA without hassle. Still, it was hard to give up the opportunity to trade grades for sex with Catholic girls. ;-)

I checked the advertisement out and it is classically Korean. If you look a the screenshot below, the advertisement for the English Instructor is in that orangey pop-up window. It is 100% in Korean, meaning very difficult for most English speakers to read -- something like completely impossible. This, of course, means that no English speaker who doesn't

a) Know Korean fluently or,
b) is recommended by a Korean

will possibly even hear of the job. Very Korean, that. It ensures that job applicants will come with a social context already in place and that, although they might not be the most qualified applicants, they will "fit" into the Korean context.



you've gotta love that approach!

Ghost Basketball..

Taking some shots of a coach for a newspaper article.. as I shot this kid bounced across in front of me and it reminded me of the ghost fashion shots...

The distant echo - of faraway voices boarding faraway trains...

I suppose it is wrong to drink beer before noon.

Which is why I went for schnapps laced coffee, laudanum and whisky.

Aaaah... a day working at home from the phone. Many lies over that evil device and more coverage of Swamp Valley College's coach of some importance. It's amazing to me how, when you don't care about your job, you can identify some little things to do that will make your work seem important. And the peoples will believe you are doing something.

Funny...

Getting close to writing my thesis and all the books I have ordered from various backlot bookstores are coming in. I seem to have an author that no one ever noticed and if North Korea would be accommodating enough to nuke Japan (well, in about 3 months) I'd have a book proposal.

Sadly, I have never been lucky enough to pick who should be militarily obliterated (the only part of being a Republican that I think I might miss) and so I will struggle on at work.

Alas, I shall never have groupies. ;-(

Now We're Showing Those Damned Commies!

Because we're not selling them Ipods.

How much more stupid can this get?

Oh.. it won't work..

Kim, who engineered a secret nuclear weapons program, has other options for obtaining the high-end consumer electronics and other items he wants.

Rock Rolls the 7-11

I was going to go to sleep but I must report a classic moment at the 7-11. I go over there to purchase some certain legal items that I can, by means of chemistry, turn into something like diet items (Oh, you all know!) and the nice Persian dude behind the counter looks at my shirt and says, "those are some pretty girls."

You see the freaking picture from my shirt and it's the New York Dolls 20 years AFTER they could try to carry off the 'dressing like chicks' thing.

I don't guess the guy is Muslim, but if he is, he won't be too picky about his virgins in heaven.

Good god.. the 60 year old Dolls!

Compressed Courses and Laggardly Instructors

So, at "Just Barely Accredited Online Master's Program" the cram our courses into gnarly little indigestible 4-week modules. As I've noted elsewhere, this leaves very little room for learning moments and many instructors don't even try. If I hadn't been a voracious reader and had my experience writing a couple of MAs for money I would be totally lost. But I understand what I have to do and understand the compressed schedule.. it is 16-18 weeks (depending on semester length) crammed into 4.

Which brings me to my complaint about the professors.. if they don't get me back my grades within a week isn't that like a 4-week wait after a 'normal' class? I work at a CC in California and if grades aren't turned in within one week of the end of the semester it's a cause for major trauma. This would work out to be about 1.75 days in the compressed semester (that might be wrong, there's a reason my degree won't be in maths!). Went I went to Big Important State University, they had assignments back within two weeks.

Shouldn't the evil profs have to live to some kind of standard?

Whaaaaaah! I want my "A!"

/whine

It Might Be a Guy Thing?

Or it could just be me..

But just now means that I haven't had a shower in 106 hours...
And I like it... my hair is a sculptural statement on beauty and age...
I've also been wearing the same T-shirt for almost 100 hours
I just did shave for the first time in those 106 hours, since trying to shave that much beard off early on a Monday morning usually means a nasty cut or a patch that is missed.
But all in all...?
I don't miss the shower at all.

Working my way to the trailer park!

Education is Evil and the Maths Support It

Knowledge = Power¹

Power = Corruption²

ergo

Study Hard and Become Evil!
(Hey, it works for lawyers)

-------------------------------------------------------

¹ "Knowledge is Power"
Sir Francis Bacon

² "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"
Lord Acton

Holiday in the Sun

Turkey Day came fresh and bright, which was a nice thing after the rain-squalls of the previous night. The lovely BAG had been poking around in the little envelope in which our cabin key had been packed and, lo and behold, she pulled out two squares of paper. Each piece was a free breakfast at the restaurant at the campsite and so our question of where we would be having breakfast was solved.If the woman who checked us in had mentioned this little bonanza, neither of us had heard her do so and that made this a lovely surprise.

I drank the wine that I hadn't spilled the previous night (yeah, I know, complete wino move) sent the first post from yesterday off and we got our stuff together to go out a-beachin!

That picture over on the left is the carefree BAG heading down the hill from our cold cabin. You can see it was pretty darned nice. If by nice you mean puny and windswept. But, you know - nice.

The thing over there on the right is the Eye of Sauron from the lovely semi-sculpture, semi-garden place between the restaurant and the store of the campsite.

Breakfast was good and we headed on out.

The f irst beach, which the BAG INSISTED we visit, turns out upon internet research, to be a nude beach. This would explain the old fat guy walking around nude. It still doesn't quite explain why the BAG enjoyed it so much. Unlike the last time we stumbled (well, me anyway) across a nude beach, I couldn't get the classic pic of the guy washing his hands in the creek. Those proto-Neanderthal shots are the bomb!

Anyway, the second beach was very nice as well, as the pic to the right should hint at. At about 2 it started to get extremely windy and cold, so we headed up the highway towards a road along a creek that had been recommended by the campsite hosts. It was incredibly boring and the road ended abruptly, which we took as a sign to head back to the campsite.

By this time we were a bit hungry but since we had reservations for a complete Thanksgiving dinner we didn't want to eat much. So we grabbed some cheese and pemmican (can't escape from the BAGs essential Cheyennese nature!) and headed back to the cabin to eat.

We opened the pemmican and it was wondrous "State Miracle Pemmican!" The first piece I pulled out is over there on the left - an exact representation of the state of California (with the lines of fat which laced the meat exactly describing our internal waterways and freeway system). It was a complete miracle and I celebrated it by scarfing the stuff right down.

About 30 seconds later the BAG pulled out a piece and started laughing.

She had pulled Montana.

Later, I caught her chewing on yet another piece of the meat in a vain effort to turn it into something resembling Texas.

But the first two were legit, and if this ever happens again I believe the BAG will have a strong argument for three different miracles and thus an induction into the ranks of saints in the Catholic Church.

The lord moves in mysterious ways.

After this it was all just waiting for dinner, which was quite satisfactory and one thing about getting a plate at a restaurant is that it interferes with gluttony. This is a good thing. Dinner didn't start until 7:45 and by the time we got back to the cabin it was time to get under the covers, fire up the matress heater and cling together ("cuddle" as the BAG insists on referring to it) for heat.

Not quite a Thanksgiving like the epic one in Death Valley, but better than staying at home and watching football games.

HAPPY BIRD-EATING DAY! (Featuring hot, bird-on-bird action!)

Amusingly, when the BAG and I arrived at the first beach (mis-named "Bonny Doon," at least for one of the seagulls in the picture) we came across this lovely Thanksgiving tableaux.

And we wish the same to you and alla yours!

;-)

Holiday in Camp Odious

So, like, right after I got off the intarwebs last night I did a very unclever thing. I had purchased a lovely bottle of wine but had neglected to bring a cup. The lovely BAG opined that I should just drink from the bottle, but not wanting to live out her memories of reservation life (and mindful that one of my front teeth is still glued in some 15 years after the glue should have failed) I decided not to swing a big old bottle of wine around and instead found an old Arrowhead water bottle that was in the lesSUV. I filled it and it looked something like the picture you see over there to the left. And it worked well for 23 seconds.

It's failure is represented in the picture to the right.

Which is the upper right corner of our bed. And, unfortunately, where my laptop had been sitting at the time of the spill.

I swiped the laptop away in a hurry and asked the BAG to get the big pillow - I turned the computer so that the keyboard was upside down and parrallel to the ground. Fortunately my speed, and gravity, were my allies, and despite the fact that I had pretty seriously splattered the keyboard, everything works.

Except the BAGs brain, since about 5 minutes later she asked me, in apparent seriousness, if my computer had "fried yet."

It's at moments like this I understand that battering can conceivably have a decent reason.....

yeesh. as the BAG would say.

In any case, I am far to ghey to beat a woman, so we cleaned up the best we could and then slid into the bed. The bed is heated which is a good thing. The "cabin" is canvas and it is really freaking cold. The bathroom is close, but outside, and for some reason when we got here the windows were uncovered. As the bed warmed up we felt better (the smell of wine that permeated the beddings helped reassure me) and when the rain squalls came we congratulated ourselves on not having gone camping, and turned over in our very warm bed.

The rest was sleep.

JC Auto: Born on a Holiday

Off on a holiday. Got started a little late as I had to attend the Associated Students Meeting at Swamp Valley College. The AS sat around for a half hour bemoaning the fact that they didn't have a quorum (50% of all members plus one), which was (a key word here)15 members. Only 10 members were present. After that half hour someone said, "it sure is hard to get 15 members with all the members who are no longer part of the AS because we've suspended them for not coming to meetings."

About two of us got this immediately - if you're waiting for suspended members to be part of a quorum for a number of members that includes suspended members?

Let's just say you can suspend my member anytime you want.

So the chair gathered up all the name tags and started tossing out suspended ones until she had only the missing members who weren't suspended. Eight. Which means the total number of valid members was 18 and there had been a quorum from the start.

43 minutes after scheduled time, the meeting started. My report is early and was brief and I snuck out shortly thereafter.

Picked up the POSSLQ and literally shot over the windiest highway out of Hometown USA. No traffic at all, which is quite odd for a Thanksgiving eve, though the newsradio was reporting trouble getting to ski and gambling destinations.

We also shot up the prettiest coastline in the world and I stopped to take that orange picture (the one without the booze in it).

Unfortunately it took me a while to find a place to pull off the road, and by the time I did it was a bit dark for an ideal photo in a handheld camera type environment thingie.

So that is what you get.

The BAG was so impressed by all this natural splendor (She is one of the dirt-people, you know!) that she spent the entire time

I was trying to find a vantage place for my photo, sitting the lesSUV minutely inspecting the dust on my dashboard.

Like she hadn't seen that a million times before.

I tried to snap a candid shot, but with the self-reflexive narcissism of the truly inspired self-centered, she has a weird radar for cameras and wheeled around and gave me her biggest possible grimace.

That's gonna be some skull when it's up on someone's fireplace mantle.

We stopped off to get a flashlight and some batteries and decided to eat at the Mexican place next to the store. Unfortunately, no one had informed the BAG that Mexican food might include such oddities as burritos, chimichangas, or tacos.

One look at the menu and she wheeled about, out the door and to the completely closed coffee shop next door.

After I explained what the upside down chairs on tables, and turned off lights meant, we hopped back in the lesSUV and headed towards are campsite.

With the native tracking skills of the BAG and my superior intellect and map reading ability, we shot right past the entry to our little campground.

Good enough news as the next turnaround had a lovely little restaurant at which we ate dinner. I had a turkey sandwich and the BAG ordered that traditional Mexican dish, the calimari sandwich, with potatot chips from a bag. You could practically hear the mariachis play!

I was amused because the drink menu included the unusual, "soju saki cocktail" which sounded like just the thing that might be peace to even the warring Japanese and Koreans surrounding Dokdo (look it up, I know you don't know).

Just so I could say I did, I had the Soju Sea Breeze (something like it anyway, neither the waitress nor I knew the ingredients for the thing and when I took a picture of it, the lovely BAG added a traditional Korean gesture to the whole thing - the pointless peace sign in the background.

She could be a finger model, if it weren't for that whole twisted little finger thingy.

We paid (that is to say I did) and headed back to our lovely lodge, which is nestled in the headlands below the foothills (I'm confused) above the ocean. The place is spartan, but we saw several deer, and the mattress is heated, so we will alternately be cooking (me when the BAG has the thing turned on) and freezing (The BAG when I surreptitiously turn it off) and there will be no sleep all night as we fight over control of this.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, or something.

There is only one outlet in the place, and it serves the lights and the mattress-heater (and I know better than to unplug that) and so I will flail this up to the web, and if the battery on the laptop holds up, take a few more pics from this evening and post them in a bit.

If not, I will simply fight with the BAG.

PAPERS AS THEY SHOULD BE WROTE (Day Three)

So when you take a day off from work to write your paper, is it wrong to find yourself, at 10:42 in the morning, drinking that beer you didn't have last night? And listening to Nick Lowe and the New York Dolls?

What if you are in bed and, if you consider a t-shirt and underpants a matched pair, you aren't very matched at all?

Is it a mitigating circumstance that the weather in Hometown USA is depressing and gray?

Probably not... so I have done a bit of work on the paper... I am up to 1,000 words or so although two paragraphs are still almost complete plagiarism and some vestigial memory reminds me that this is a "very bad thing!" Before I left work last night I printed out my clipped notes, almost 30 pages of them, so when I do get revved up it should be a very short and disorganized wade through a bunch of silly crap to get the other 2k words written.

Anyway, with plagiarism in italics, here is the critter as she exists..

In Kim Yong Ik’s, "They Won't Crack It Open," readers find a brilliant but rather surprising and subtle examination of the destructive effects of racial essentialism. Kim takes a multicultural lens and by inverting it tells a deeply personal, but at the same time generally applicable tale of how racial essentialism can destroy individuals. Part of the literary beauty of this piece is that it takes a path usually not taken and, when arriving at the common destination, more clearly limns the difficulties of arriving there.

Part of the subtlety is that Kim is writing about racial (social really) essentialism in the United States that has nothing to do with racism or foreigners and little to do with immigrants. Kim uses a kind of reverse etching to sharply outline the effect that dominant culture essentialism has on its less successful members.

To simplify Dyson, essentialism is based upon the philosophical claim that any particular racial entity can be, at least theoretically, defined by a finite list of criteria which must all be present in order for an entity to belong to that race or ethnicity.

Some Philosophical Conclusions from Essentialism
The essentialist claim that only people within a group can understand the group leads us to the good old “slippery slope” argument (one of my favorite straw men) If I can't be a feminist because I haven't had the experiences of a woman, then we might say that an American feminist can't really be a feminist because she hasn't experienced the sort of oppression of women that, say, a woman from China has (or vice versa! The Chinese feminist can't be a real feminist because she hasn't experienced the sort of oppression that American woman have!). The point here is that if different experiences are seen as dividing lines, then there have to be good reasons to draw those lines one place (between male and female feminists) and not others (between American feminists and Chinese feminists). So far I haven't been shown any good reasons for doing so.

Essentialism is also divisive by nature (it has a black and white, or, in or out nature), and by implication this divisiveness is permanent and can’t be overcome. That seems wrong to me--I don't see feminism, for instance, as inherently female--historically its ideas came from the reaction of women to their own oppression, but reacting to oppression isn't 'female'.

It may be a function of a multicultural environment today and not a clever stratagem by Kim, but the title is a lovely mis-signifier as it seems to be considering the United States from the perspective of a visitor or immigrant who can’t get in. Yet, like the coconut that will never be cracked, the title signifies the “inner” circle that unfortunate citizens of the United States can never achieve.

It is worth admitting that Dick and his mother aren’t completely insiders. They are immigrants to the United States as well. Dick’s mother is clearly an immigrant ( 52) and Dick’s birthplace is never explicitly mentioned, although it is likely

Mom’s blindness!

Brilliant description of the distance of proximity, “When he was away, he was so good to me, writing to me every week. Now at home he never talks to me and gets cross with me easy.” (52)

Dick’s largesse to the Korean children is stolen. When, just prior to leaving Korean he brings blankets and food to the blind children, it is the fruit of larceny, “Later an army investigator had come a few times inquiring about some missing army goods.” (53) Dick can only live out the “Greatest Show on Earth” when he is divorced from it and even then he must steal from it’s fringe traveling show.

“The Greatest Show on Earth” is clearly a metaphor for the United States and when Kim gets here and it is clear that it shuts down for the season, that it’s geography is limited, and that not all are invited to see it, he metaphorically sees that it is only a vision, not a reality.

The blind Korean kids are at least two kinds of metaphors
1) The third world looking on, uncomprehending
2) Uncorrupted innocence

The fact they will never crack the coconut (and what another lovely symbol!) may mean that they will never taste the liquor within, but also that they will never be disappointed by contents they might not understand

Kim cleverly contrasts and compares the experience of Dick’s mothers to Korea. By doing this, Kim orientalizes (in the sense Edward Said would use the word) the lifestyle of poor white United States Citizens.

Kim typically wrote stories, although in English and for and English audience, of Korea. "They Won't Crack It Open” is a fairly substantial departure from this ouvre.

The intro is brilliant once you finish the story and as you read it you wonder how much is intentional and how much is (THAT WORD FOR EXTRA LUCKY). As you go on and experience the clever imagery and subtle wordplay that Kim uses throughout, you realize it is primarily intentional

Compare to frozen hands story for the pain coming from “within” the culture. Dick is essentially killed by the expectation of his own culture. Kim brilliantly models this as his cab driver takes the narrator from the airport through the steps of decline. (INSERT THE DRIVE)

PAPERS AS THEY SHOULD BE WROTE (Day Two-point-five)

Brilliant.

All sources found and I've reread the story. It is better on second reading and I think this guy is gonna become the subject of my thesis. The story is fricking subtle and the title makes you go in (well, in a multicultural lit class) with false expectations.

Anyway... we're at the point right after this line (which is dead on where I should be):

In Kim Yong Ik’s, "They Won't Crack It Open," readers find a brilliant but rather surprising and subtle examination of the destructive effects of racial essentialism. Kim takes a multicultural lens and by inverting it tells a deeply personal, but at the same time generally applicable tale of how racial essentialism can destroy individuals. Part of the literary beauty of this piece is that it takes a path usually not taken and, when arriving at the common destination, more clearly limns the difficulties of arriving there.

Part of the subtlety is that Kim is writing about racial (social really) essentialism in the United States that has nothing to do with racism or foreigners and little to do with immigrants.

Kim cleverly contrasts and compares the experience of Dick’s mothers to Korea. By doing this, Kim orientalizes (in the sense Edward Said would use the word) the lifestyle of poor white United States Citizens.

Kim typically wrote stories, although in English and for and English audience, of Korea. "They Won't Crack It Open” is a fairly substantial departure from this ouvre.

The intro is brilliant once you finish the story and as you read it you wonder how much is intentional and how much is (THAT WORD FOR EXTRA LUCKY). As you go on and experience the clever imagery and subtle wordplay that Kim uses throughout, you realize it is primarily intentional

Compare to frozen hands story for the pain coming from “within” the culture. Dick is essentially killed by the expectation of his own culture. Kim brilliantly models this as his cab driver takes the narrator from the airport through the steps of decline. (INSERT THE DRIVE)



WORKS CITED

Book Title: The Shapes and Styles of Asian American Prose Fiction. Contributors: Esther Mikyung Ghymn - author. Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1992. Page Number: 29.

Book Title: Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity. Contributors: Hyung Il Pai - editor, Timothy R. Tangherlini - editor. Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Place of Publication: Berkeley, CA. Publication Year: 1998.

Book Title: Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science. Contributors: David Williams - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 142.

The Melancholy of Race. Contributors: Anne Anlin Cheng - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 26.

Article Title: Cross-Cultural Reading versus Textual Accessibility in Multicultural Literature. Contributors: Seiwoong Oh - author. Journal Title: MELUS. Volume: 18. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 3+. COPYRIGHT 1993 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Affliction and Opportunity: Korean Literature in Diaspora, a Brief Overview. Contributors: Kichung Kim - author. Journal Title: Korean Studies. Volume: 25. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 2001. Page Number: 261+. COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Hawaii Press; COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

PAPERS AS THEY SHOULD BE WROTE (Day Two)

It is just about noon and the only new thing I have is that I am up to 3 external sources...

to wit:

WORKS CITED

Book Title: The Shapes and Styles of Asian American Prose Fiction. Contributors: Esther Mikyung Ghymn - author. Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1992. Page Number: 29.

Book Title: Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity. Contributors: Hyung Il Pai - editor, Timothy R. Tangherlini - editor. Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Place of Publication: Berkeley, CA. Publication Year: 1998.

Book Title: Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science. Contributors: David Williams - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 142.

This is actually grand - if I have all my sources lined up by bar-time tonite I should be in good shape.

Why my BAG must die..

So I'm struggling with a word... as my 1.5 reader(s?) might have noted in my previous post I left in a marker for a word I couldn't remember.

It went like this: (THAT WORD FOR EXTRA LUCKY)

And when the BAG came to sleep I said that the word I couldn't remember started with an "S" and that this kind of forgetfulness was the beginning of the damage old age would do to me until it finally turfed me.

I gave her the same permission I have given my sister, "shoot me in the back of my head when I no longer make sense."

This may not be the best permission to give a girlfriend whom you are soon to leave for Korea. I may be the last victim of the Korean war!

So I, stutter (another word beginning with s) that it wasn't "synchronicity" (after a horrible flashback to what the Police devolved to) and it wasn't some other word that I can't remember now (and why is the BAG out of the room and why do I hear a gun cocking?). EDIT - THE WORD WAS "SYNERGY" GAWDAMMIT!"

So just as I'm heading to the reverse dictionary online, the BAG says "look it up," and I try to wrestle the gun from her hand and shoot her in the head, but as we struggle for possession of the firearm, the page loads.

So, for the moment, no one dies.

837 bad reverse definitions come up the web page. And they aren't even in alphabetical order, or any other kind of order - they are completely random.

And the BAG says..

says...

says..

"that's not serendipitous"

And since that is the word I have been searching for for over 15 minutes, I'm not sure if I should kiss the biatch or kill her.

I'm a compromiser though. So she got kissed.

Now I'm looking for a relatively remote place with very soft earth.

I think you know what I'm saying.

PAPERS AS THEY SHOULD BE WROTE (Dolls conclusion to come - which matters only to me!)

So,

as all two (including me) readers know, in my last course in the "Just Barely Accredited Master's Program" I managed to blow the deadline for my paper and end up having to write it in one day. It was a good day as I had a hamburger and some beers, but it was not quite the amount of time I need to turn out the decent high-velocity collection of signifiers.

This all had dire consequences as I got a B on that paper and got my first course grade that wasn't an A. I suspect the shock of this event will eventually drive me to drink. My friends will be shocked and dismayed.

For now I struggle on manfully.

And, with the next paper coming up, I decided that starting with 3.5 days to go might work.

I'm just a crazy kid with a dream.

So I'm working on Kim Yong Ik's brilliant story "They Won't Crack It Open" which I'm morally certain only got into my "multicultural" textbook because the editor's didn't actually understand what Kim was saying (about which I will say more in my paper).

Anyway, with The Bizarre Alien Girlfriend in the next room watching Nazis on the history channel, eating the heads off of spring robins and sucking down root beer, I've been alone here in the room and I've started my paper. As of 10 pm in Hometown USA, this is what I have...

In Kim Yong Ik’s, "They Won't Crack It Open," readers find a brilliant but rather surprising and subtle examination of the destructive effects of racial essentialism. Kim takes a multicultural lens and by inverting it tells a deeply personal, but at the same time generally applicable tale of how racial essentialism can destroy individuals. Part of the literary beauty of this piece is that it takes a path usually not taken and, by arriving at a common destination, more clearly limns the difficulties of traveling there.

Kim typically wrote stories, although in English and for and English audience, of Korea. "They Won't Crack It Open” is a fairly substantial departure from this ouvre.

The intro is brilliant once you finish the story and as you read it you wonder how much is intentional and how much is (THAT WORD FOR EXTRA LUCKY). As you go on and experience the clever imagery and subtle wordplay that Kim uses throughout, you realize it is primarily intentional

Compare to frozen hands story for the pain coming from “within” the culture. Dick is essentially killed by the expectation of his own culture. Kim brilliantly models this as his cab driver takes the narrator from the airport through the steps of decline. (INSERT THE DRIVE)

We interrupt *almost* NY Doll blogging for this meme from The Sister

1. FIRST NAME? Charles

2. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? Yes

3. WHEN DID YOU LAST CRY? If you count a tear of joy? New York Dolls, Portland. Friday.

4. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? I don’t have “handwriting” in the traditional sense that implies communication.

5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE LUNCHMEAT? The mystery one.

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS
WITH YOU? Probably not, primarily because neither of us would really like other people.

7. DO YOU HAVE A JOURNAL? Sort of. I blog and write all the time. But it’s spread out between this venue, that venue, and some cocktail napkins.

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yes. Because you cannot go to heaven unless you have all your original body parts. Teeth don’t count.

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? If the bungee cord was on the floor? I would jump it.

10. FAVOURITE CEREAL? Like my sister, Fruit Loops

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Sometimes.

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? Hmmmmm.. in some ways, not others.. I think I am reasonably stoic. Physically, my legs are strong. After a beer or two my breath is strong. I have no idea how this adds up.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE ICE CREAM FLAVOUR? Cookie Dough

14. SHOE SIZE? US 9 to 9.5

15. RED OR PINK? Absolutely.

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVOURITE THING ABOUT
YOURSELF? In order of impotence… er.. IMPORTANCE!?!?!? Oh.. never mind. ;-)

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? What an odd question. I think I miss my deceased cat, Eddie Debartolo as president of the 9ers, and an old friend or two. Living? I dunno, I can get pretty far on without having to be in contact with people I know I’m cool with.

18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU?
This question makes me wonder how horrible it would actually be if I knew “everyone.” Fucking nightmare.

19. WHAT COLOUR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Black levis and grey tennies

20. LAST THING YOU ATE? Togos small 22, no mayo or salt.

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? My iPod.. Just now “All You Young Punks” by the Clash. Before – “Dance Like a Monkey” New York Dolls”

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOUR WOULD YOU BE? Flesh

23. FAVOURITE SMELL? Urban Category – first rain on pavement. Nature Category – Sierra Meadow.

24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE
PHONE? An answering machine at work, which is ideal as I hate the fucking phone.

25. THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE YOU ARE
ATTRACTED TO? It’s never the same

26. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? Well, duuuuh!

27. FAVOURITE DRINK? Beer. How proletarian. ;-)

28. FAVOURITE SPORT? Football (and not that commie overseas kind that abjures use of the opposable thumb. What IS wrong with Europe?)

29. EYE COLOR? brown

30. HAT SIZE: Uh… size? Don’t all baseball caps come with the adjustable backs?

31. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Nope

32. FAVOURITE FOOD? Pizza?

33. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Happy endings with masseuses. Scary movies in theaters…

34. WHAT COLOUR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING? Black and Pink.

35. SUMMER OR WINTER? Screw your reductive questions. Autumn.

36. HUGS OR KISSES? Hugs, I guess.

37. FAVOURITE DESSERT? I’m not that keen on desserts. Whiskey?

38. WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? I am only sending this back to my sister and Kari who sent it to my sister (cause Kari is my little English Rose with just the slightest bit of blight, woodiness and a couple of runners coming off here and there)

39. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Should I care?

40. WHAT BOOKS ARE YOU READING? A bunch of crap for my “Just Barely Accredited Master’s Degree” and a book of essays by Christopher Hitchens who, when he puts down the neo-con bong, can be a really great cultural writer.

41. WHAT'S ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? Mouse pad? I use a laptop most of the time and my optical mouse on the desktop doesn’t need a mouse pad. What millennium were these questions formulated for?

42. WHAT DID YOU WATCH LAST NIGHT ON TV? Football

43. FAVOURITE SOUNDS? Ocean Waves

44. ROLLING STONE OR BEATLES. Stones

45. THE FURTHEST YOU'VE BEEN FROM HOME? Seoul

46. WHAT'S YOUR SPECIAL TALENT? Apathy.

47. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Palo Alto, CA, USA

48. WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? The Sister.

all the way to the first band..

We got situated in the hotel and, told there would be a 20 minute wait for a cab, I went into the bar and had a beer. Well, ordered a beer, since the cab came in about 5 minutes. The Sister was dressed up all fashionably and had two original New York Dolls slices of vinyl that she hoped to get signed. I had to leave my camera at home as the venue was a no photo type of deal. We headed over to the venue. Got there and although the tickets said the show began at 8:30 there was a sign on the door that said it would open at 9. There was also a skinny kid pounding frantically on the door and hollering at the employees inside. He hammered and hammered until the employees came over to reassure us that the show would be at 8:30 (This turned out to be a lie of sorts.. the doors opened at 8:30, but the show began spot on at 9:30)

The kid’s name was Alex, skinny with a big nose and bigger enthusiasm. Alex also had an accent that veered from Liverpool to Jersey (sometimes by way of a planet outside our solar system) and often in the space of one word. He said he knew a good place to go to get a drink and took us around the corner to Shanghai something or other. We had a drink and he told us amusing story after amusing story, none of which would have been even slightly believable to a massively retarded cosmetology student. He was an actor who had done landscaping for over 15 years. Since he was only 23, this meant he must have done the bulk of his acting before he was 8 years old and entered the industry. He knew where to get drugs, didn’t do them, and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer (this, at least, was true). He was so entertaining that, when he went off to purchase a drink I started to ask The Sister if we should drop our spare ticket (I had purchased 3 because they were cheap) on this kid and I wasn’t halfway through beginning the question when she just nodded yes. As he was about to go off and get his ticket, we told him the good news.

He squealed like he had just won the Mrs. America contest except that this year it included a surprise violation by dilde. After another drink we headed off to the venue and, just as it started to rain, entered. Our IDs were checked (they are relentless about this in Portland and the fact I’m pushing advanced old age had no effect on this) and we were in a nice small venue with two bars and some theater seating around the edges. Being early, we grabbed a handful of them and some beers.

The start of the show was “announced” when the PA blared out “Devil With a Blue Dress” and three women in nice skimpy outfits began to dance. The first band was the winner of some local radio contest and thus no better or no worse than any other local band that might win a contest no one cares about. They could have been the Flaming Oh’s from Minneapolis or Hoi Polloi from Berkeley. They were somewhat hampered by the fact their front man couldn’t sing. I think they were called “The Charms” although they had none. The crowd was filtering in and contained all the ‘types’ you’d expect – a hipster with spit curls on his sideburns; the guy who orders two drinks at the bar and drops the first empty cup on the bar even before he gets his change; the fat guy in the pink shirt with the pink stripe in his beard; Tattoed freaks; ugly young men and women who choose ugly fashion to accentuate their failings; even a guy in a tie-dyed t-shirt who couldn’t have looked more out of place if he’d been wearing a nun’s wimple – in fact that might have fit in better.

So I just drank more…

Next…. What the makeup can’t hide can’t be made up with a kiss…

Dolls.. Day One... the Journey

Seeing the Dolls

The Journey of 1,000 Miles. No. Really!

The morning came early, and if it was bright with dew I was too tired and cranky to notice. I left Hometown USA before 7 and the moon was still up in the sky. The moon would be that impossibly small white dot above the tree in the crummy picture I have over there on the left. Because it was only a partial holiday, the roads were clear and I headed towards Sacramento to meet my sister. She was descending from her mighty mountain redoubt and our brilliant plan was to meet at the airport, stash her car in the long-term parking and then head up the Big Highway to Portland. Which we did. On the way out I received a phone call from the Korean Couple (who were heading to Portland on an entirely different quest of their own) and it appeared they were about 30 minutes ahead of me. And we drove.

And we drove.

And we drove.

And we drove some more.

And we were still in California.

I had no idea this was such a big state.

Crossing Over

Somewhere around Yreka the Korean Couple called and it seemed like we had made up some time on them. We were just heading into Yreka as they were heading out the other side and so we made plans to meet them for lunch in Ashland Oregon. They drove into town and found a little Thai restaurant and sat down and waited for us. The restaurant was nice and that little shrine over there on the right was in their front yard with two slices of pumpkin pie on the offering board. The Koreans would not let me eat any of this, so we decided to drive on. Since I had two beers I let The Sister drive. Which she did for about 10 minutes before she decided that she had to go to the bathroom. The bathrooms in public rest stops, you see, are so much more convenient than the hideous slop-filled bogs one tends to find in restaurants.

Or something.

We stopped for that and since it was so much fun we decided to stop a few miles on down the road to get some gas for the lesSUV.

Finally out of the boring top of California we cruised through southern Oregon until it began to rain. And I mean really rain. The Sister was still driving and we really couldn't see more than 100 yards ahead of us. This was made extra cool by the fact that we were in logging territory and there were logging trucks all over the road. What wasn't logging trucks was commercial trucks. Oddly, in Oregon, where you can't pump your own gas because that would apparently piss off the handicapped, you can drive a commercial truck with two articulations (so, three cargo areas each with their own set of wheels). I presume that by allowing this kind of dangerous rig on the freeways (freeways, by the way, on which you can't drive studded tires because they trash the road... unlike trucks with chains?) Oregon is attempting to ensure a steady stream of handicapped drivers who will continue to militate against the rest of us pumping our own gas.

The rain finally slackened and we drove through a couple of dark towns (I was driving by now). Another feature of the drive was the first porno-shops I have ever seen perched on the edge of a freeway and with enormous and tall neon signs. The Sister thinks that these are there to cater to the lonely truckers and when I saw one directly in the middle of a truck stop (between the closed café and the diesel pumps) I gathered that she was correct.

Just as we were within 5 miles of our exit in Portland (and goggling at the traffic jam of cars heading out of town) traffic slammed to a halt. We crawled the next 2 miles speculating on why the traffic was so bad. As we headed around a broad turn The Sister looked far ahead into the fast lane and said, "because some stupid morons got in an accident in the fast lane."

Sure enough, some stupid morons had got into an accident in the fast lane. And one set of those stupid morons was The Koreans! They were parked in the half-lane between the fast lane and the Jersey Barriers looking at the rear of their truck. Someone had rear-ended them, so they weren't acually the morons, but since I didn't know the other folks involved I cursed the Koreans, all Asian drivers, and their children down 13 generations. I had sobered up since lunch, and I was getting cranky.

We cruised into Portland and crossing the river was just gorgeous. The rain had stopped and the skyline was lit. We quickly descended into the bar area of town and found our hotel. When I got into my room I looked on the nightstand and saw the scene you see to the left. A branded condom on top of a little card that said "Yes." I was impressed and looked around a bit more. Nothing but some earplugs, but now I was really impressed. I quickly figured out the card went on the outside of my door and so I put the two pair of earplugs on the night-stand, the card in the door with the "Yes" clearly visible, and slapped the condom on my johnson. I thought that this was the best damned room service idea I had ever heard of. I laid back and awaited my yodeling sex slave!

When the maid came in to change the sheet (probably confused that I had apparently managed to soil them within 30 minutes of getting in my room) my misunderstanding on the use of the condom and the "Yes" card was eventually resolved in a humorous way.

If by humorous you mean the police were involved as well as a police baton and the condom.

I was ready for the Dolls!

Rocks, Rolls

So if you find yourself crying at a rock show are you gay?

If you are is it because you are twitching along to the NY Dolls?

Or is it just the gayness of crying?

And why, on the way to Portland, did we we pass Mr. Ed the translator on the side of a rain-wet road, after he had apparently been rear-ended?

And why is it 3:24 on Saturday morning and I' m still awake?

Because I'm going to sleep...

Until Sunday (except for silly college things, maybe, sort of)

Best rock show evar....

First Election in Some Time

That I've gone to bed without a hangover the night before... last time I went to sleep believing in victory I woke up and Bush was president.

Locally we have the Terminator beating a bore and a couple of other Republicans in on his coat-tails. No big deal, the republicans here actually think and learn (well, Arnold seems to) which separates them from Repubs out of the state. Locally McInerny seems to be beating Pombo in District 11 (Pombo loses at least 2% in any election for his "gay caballero" moustache) and that unbelievable piece of shit Santorum is down and out. I hear Katherine Harris also lost.

The House is good and the Senate might work out depending on some real nailbiters that are still up for grabs. Now the Demos have to figure out how to not do a piss-poor job and leave the field open for the next Republican set of campaigns which would claim that this (really rather weak, for all it's excellence) midterm election victory and lack of results would prove the Democrats can't govern. Which, since everything is fucked up, could happen. The Republican trick is to irrevocably break everything and then turn to Democrats and ask, "well, how would *you* fix this pile of rubble?"

US voters are normally to short-memoried to remember who effed things up (and also the idiot citizens voted for the bunglers) and Demos still haven't figured out a tack to deal with this.

Anyway.. if I'm in charge of the Democratic Brain Trust, right after I make forced homosexual inter-racial abortion mandatory for minors in my ganja-camps, I adopt the following stragedies:

1) Give up on restrictive gun control -- because you can't trust the government and if dumb rednecks kill their own kids or blow the heads off their own erections at night? It's a bonus. Punish people who misuse guns and let it go. Bonus points? Many hunters (Cheney hunts humans, so he is exempt) are environmentalist -- you can't hunt duck, say, without wetlands...


2) Abandon gay marriage -- it's a puny and insignificant thing that pisses the sexually insecure off. There are legal ways to do the exact same thing. Sorry gays, but you can still be fabulous.

3) Don't make abortion a litmus test (this should go for the looney right as well, but, well, they're looney, so they can still be concerned). Fight for abortion rights on libertarian grounds, not moral ones.

After that, I smoke some medicinal marijuana with a couple of illegal immigrants I know.

Later?

We do some welfare fraud and steal car tires.

Rooms Redux

The last post gathered such universal approbation ("it is so clean," raved anonymous) that I thought I'd post the other two pics that might tie the whole thing together..



this is the living room and it contains, as the clever eye might see, the refrigerator over there on the LEFT side. It also has the TV (inexplicably showing Rachel Ray) and the door to the dreaded outside world. This room is only used for watching the tube, so it is a bit underdecorated.

All of this is neatly tied together by the "closet in the middle of the house" which looks like this (from the living room)



with door number one leading to the kitchen, door number two leading to the bathroom and door number three (with it's charming glass window indicating the basic "garageness" of the entire proceedings) leading to the bedroom.

So (and entirely not to scale) it looks something like this:



and that is the pad.

TOMORROW - "Inside My Dental Work!"

In the rooms where I live

My mother says she reads this thing now and then..

and I've moved and she (well, anyone, really) has never seen the pad. So tonight, after sending off some slightly honeyed high-velocity doggie-biscuits of prose to my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Program" I wandered the inside chambers of my own personal Taj Mahal and snapped off a few shots.

Which is local slang for smoking crack and masturbating.

After I woke up from that bother, I grabbed the camera to show what my lovely converted garage looks like....

This is the kitchen (no oven, which is a bit of a drag) and yes, the entire doorframe is in that shot and, no, there is no refrigerator, but worry not little ones (the refrigerator will show up in tomorrow's shocking and revealing photos)..



I primarily use the kitchen to heat the place on cooler mornings.

The bathroom is directly opposite this (I suppose tomorrow I will take some exterior shots and draw some kind of layout) and it is a shotgun bathroom if one ever existed.



you can't see the shower and bath because they are to the left (as you look) of the toilet and behind the slight wall you see just past the wood cabinet.

And then, the lovely bedroom which is quite spacious and (with the light you see on the ceiling turned off and my lamps on) very feng-shuied in my personal way. Of course using the fish-eye-ish lens means the books on my dresser loom scarily, but that's just how it's gotta be...

Stupidity and Bricks n Mortar Education

I mean, how stoned is this guy?

Warning -- it is exceedingly long...

and here is an update on his weird life/firing.

Stupidity and Online Education

So, the folks at my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Degree Program" have an online, and intensive program dedicated to making learning easy for the students. Which is why my instructor has a syllabus which asks me to read two books. You can see what those two fine books over there on the graphic on the right. Each of the two books seems finer than the other and I have no doubt that the many cultures of the United States will never sparkle brighter for me after I have read these two books. Then, again, there are the books the bookstore provided. As a visual learner myself (I like to believe that this learning style explains my prediliction for online porn) I have included a graphic of those books (over there on the other left). Most beautifully? Our very first reading assignment is from the textbook that our bookstore has refused to sell us.

I suspect some kind of conflict in the canon.

Then there's also the fact these guys always want info from us but.. well ... when they ask us to provide feeback on our classes you get the lovely window to the original left. They want us to register for yet another of their sites and the registration ID I have already set up to get on eCollege (which thoroughly sucks, even compared to WebCT) won't work. Neither will the registration ID I set up for their student "portal."

Can't someone over there in IS set up a shared database of passwords? My freaking bank isn't this paranoid.

The designers here suck...

My Paper is due When? 12:45

12:45 PM - Nightmare on Hell Street


This will be a lovely livish blog of my personal nightmare. My class in the "Just Barely Accredited Master's Program" wants its final paper today as opposed to the traditional Sunday night. This is a thing I discovered while idly clicking through the bulletin board of the class and dismissing all my classmates as intellectual inferiors and hacks of the worst kind.

Which may well be true, but I bet most of them knew when the final paper is due and were prepared for it. I suppose there are different levels of hackery and I have found mine. So, to make the whole stupid thing interesting I'm going to blog it as I go... This begins with preparations.

I had breakfast on the way to my desk - you see that lovely photo up there on the left.

I also brought my books (I'm a big thinker) including my notes.

And, of course a brain can't work without some fuel, so I brought a couple of fuel pods... And the smart scientist never burns fuel without realizing their will be byproducts. And since the room my desk is in (I am at work not home) has no access to any porcelain conveniences I have brought my own fuel-discharge system or, as others might call it, a cup.

Now off to the writing of something.

Siiiiiiiiigh...


















1:08 I have a Thesis!

So, hopping, skipping and jumping over things, I have this thesis:

Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil

1:32 -- I have over 600 words and no more coffee

Time to move to the beer I suppose. Cranking my notes into the thing I now have over 600 words, if not a real direction on the thing. It looks like this:

Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil.

While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematogrpahical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.

My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.

Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself.

The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother

Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)

This passage is key in several ways. First

1:52 - First use of the styrofoam porcelain

and up to 800 words..

2:25 - 1,500 words reached.. first beer opened.

It has been flowing pretty well.. a bit of interlaced plagiraism here and there. ;-) and some substantial quoting and we may have a paper developing. Interestingly, it is veering towards a psychological analysis. Even though Ford regularly argues that fate and society are the hands that guide, they seem to guide through psychological events. This would be a nice paper to expand for my Capstone....

The words are like this now ---

“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)

Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.

While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematogrpahical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.

My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.

Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly


This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a protsitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion.


Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society.

The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother

Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)

This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man

This experience is given by the hands of a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.

The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”

This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.

Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so loittle, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.

3:21 - Interupted and up to 2,000 words.. first beer almost gone.

Of course that's a 24 ounce beer, so this isn't an admission that should be held against my hairy-chested manliness. ;-) The writing continues to go well and I wish I had that extra day I thought I had. This might be a bit rough. There is a whole class-related psycho-sexual thing in here that won't fit in my paper. All the sexual women in this book (Helene and Joyce for sure, perhaps not Amy?) are using their sexuality to break class boundaries... and they get punished. In some ways this is quite traditional...

I got a call from O - he was out drinking with us last night and regaled us with stories of strip bars and his nearly mythical endowment. He got so drunk he wasn't sure he had saved these stories til after the boss left. He had. We swapped work-related animadversions, and then I got back to the paper. Which now looks like this:

“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)

Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.

While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.

My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.

Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly)

This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.

Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is also one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper initiates and likes. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual fraiming, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, pering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)

Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society.

One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.

The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in many ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25)

The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother

Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)

This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man

This experience is given by the hands of a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.

The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”

This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.

Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so loittle, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.

WORKS CITED

Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996

4:08 - 2500 words (da minimum)

So now it's time to do some formatting and print it out for a first cut for sense and sensibility. Haven't even opened that second beer yet. What a loser I am. ;-) Took a short break to answer some stuff on the discussion board.. don't want to lose that .05% of the grade remaining over there.

So.. as it continues to develop...

“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)

Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.

While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.

My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.

Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly)

This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.

Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is also one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper initiates and likes. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual fraiming, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, pering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)

Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society and as other noir detectives, is not shy to say it, at least to himself.. In “The Killer Inside Me” this can manifest itself in unusual ways. Ford is downright protective of the downtrodden, priding himself on never having hurt any prisoners. In fact, he sees himself on the same side as the stoned Mexican that he semi tussles with, “Maybe I figured subconsciously that the prisoners and I were on the same side.” (Thompson 33). This admission has at least two roles. First, it quite traditionally places Ford among other, particularly later, noir detectives like Mike Hammer – Ford recognizes that he is a criminal. But it has a second meaning that is more important – Ford is not only explicitly to a criminal, but also to a prisoner. Ford understands that society has him just as barred in as a stoned worker.

One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.

The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in many ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25)

The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother

Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)

This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. For Ford, however, the specific experiences, as sexual as they are, are presented in terms of social and economic expectation. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man has scarred Lou and it is interesting to note that this scarring, the emphasis Ford Sr. puts on it has to do with social standing This is expressed in an exchange between Helene and Ford Senior.

“But a child! My child. My only son. If anything should happen –“

“”Uh-huh. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? Not him, but you. How it would reflect on you.”

“Get out! A woman with no more sensibilities than-“

“I’m white trash, that’s the term isn’t it? Riffraff. I ain’t got that ‘ol quality.”

Ford has an opportunity to deny the social issue after Helene brings it up, instead he acquiesces to her argument by beginning the comparison of her substandard “sensibilities” (a very refined word, there).

This experience, squeezed and formed by the subsequent control Ford Sr. exerts over his son, handed down by a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Lou clearly sees this as nothing more than traditional grinding of the big socioeconomic clock or of fate. People are essentially and inexplicably bad, and nothing can be done to alter that reality. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.

The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”

This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.

Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so little, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. This is a complete inversion of the typical noir detective whose outside status includes a complete lack of identification with the ‘other.’ Although Ford can kill without compunction and displays a general lack of concern for others that borders on the sociopathic, his lack of feeling does not alter his intellectual understanding that we are all in similar positions with respect to the larger world. This “large-mindedness” allows the reader a small entry to sympathy for Ford. Ford sees us all as doomed, perhaps even without control over what we do, even when we do have control. And he sees this as entirely in line with how the universe does and should work, “and you know that everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.” (Thompson 185)


He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.



WORKS CITED


Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996

7:55 After the Bar and the Sushi...

Printed the thing out.. looked at it in print and saw some changes. Oddly, it is above 3000 words by word count, but barely ten pages. I think I need to start using bigger words. A beer at the bar, some sushi at home.. about an hour of work and here is what will go off (it would have been far better with another day, but that's what I get for being a moron. ;-)

Name Redacted
Dr. Professor Redacted
English 666 - the Gates of Hell
21 October 2006

A Weed Is A Plant Out Of Place

Lou Ford, Jim Thompson’s ‘hero’ in “The Killer Inside Me” represents a final interiorization and to some extent an inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer. Ford also represents, in his inability to fight what society (I use the word in a political and economic sense as well as the traditional one) dictates, a step towards the ineffective J.J. Gittes in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” In Thompson’s lead character we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can. By being rotten apart from and because of society Ford also manages to fuse the two disparate ends of the noir hero scale: He is single, perhaps elite man but also, as we shall see, sees himself as substantially an everyman.

While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing novels for their usefulness as a source for film noir and their general “noirishness”, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). This is the kind of description that is rarely found in novels, most often in the pictures on their covers. To the extent that I do stylistics them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.

My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.

Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for clever language, invective and insult. Sam Spade’s “the cheaper the punk, the gaudier the patter” is a line of stunning sophistication compared to what Ford routinely passes off to the public. Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has the skill of extemporaneous language, at one point explaining to an annoying detective that Gittes has damaged nose as the result of the same detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly. This sort of repartee might occur in Ford’s head, but it would never pass his lips. Even his interior dialogue is unclever and elemental. As he prepares to murder Elmer Conway his inner voice is pedestrian and violent, “I wanted to leap on him and tear him to pieces.” (Thompson 43) This is slightly reminiscent of Hammer, but even Hammer could get off the occasional good line as he did when he tells the rather odd Friday, “Let's see how good you are at spelling. Can you spell the word "no"?

On the rare occasion that Ford does say something that seems clever, he immediately regrets it. After murdering Elmer Conway (in a convoluted revenge for Conway Sr. having killed Ford’s adopted brother) Ford spars with Conway who says he won’t let tender feelings alter his approach. Ford responds, “It’d be pretty hard to start in at your time of life.” (Thompson 61) This is pretty weak as a witticism, but Ford is immediately concerned that he has let something slip. There is a sort of confluence here, actually, Ford isn’t much a clever talker, and when he is he has broken what he takes as cover. He is more reminiscent of J.J. Gittes somewhat thick “associates” than he is of other noir detectives.
This limited-strike verbal approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.

Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper. Helene, initiates. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual framing, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, peering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)

Ford’s attitude towards women is “the sickness” and any woman he desires must surely die. This relates directly to his formative experience, scars and all, with Helene:
Since she was the first woman he had ever known, Ford says, "she was woman to me; and all womankind bore her face." He felt that he could strike back at any of them, any woman, especially "the ones it would be safest to strike at," and it would be the same thing as striking back at the housekeeper. "And so I did that, I started striking out," he says, and letting others take the blame (Whissen 120)

This is a complete reversal of the ‘normal’ noir detective who distrusts women so deeply that he largely refuses to become entangled in them. While Ford may share this distrust, he is unable to control himself in its face. When Ford meets the prostitute Joyce he is completely unable to control himself and beats her until his, “arm ached like hell and her rear end was one big bruise. (Thompson 14). Later, of course, he “kills” her to avoid the sickness and later kills his fiancée. This is the logical evolution of the noir detective’s distrust of women, but it is also an inversion of their self-control in the face of it.
Lou is, as the traditional noir detective, in opposition to society and as other noir detectives, is not shy to say it, at least to himself.. In “The Killer Inside Me” this can manifest itself in unusual ways. Ford is downright protective of the downtrodden, priding himself on never having hurt any prisoners. In fact, he sees himself on the same side as the stoned Mexican that he semi tussles with, “Maybe I figured subconsciously that the prisoners and I were on the same side.” (Thompson 33). This admission has at least two roles. First, it quite traditionally places Ford among other, particularly later, noir detectives like Mike Hammer – Ford recognizes that he is a criminal. But it has a second meaning that is more important – Ford is not only explicitly to a criminal, but also to a prisoner. Ford understands that society has him just as barred in as a stoned worker. I will return to this notion when I discuss the absurdism that inflects all of Ford’s thinking about society.

One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. In fact Ford’s location is “the valley of the shadow of death just outside the door of your home or local church” (Schwarz 149) and everyone is there. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.

The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in some ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25) Ford is repeatedly presented as a big thinker and his schemes, while ultimately failures, are certainly clever enough and thought through. This is also a contrast to the normal noir detective who, while clever, is a reactive planner (part of this is that the “normal” noir detective is not a serial murderer)

The essential absurdism of the entire world (to Ford) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother

Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)

This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. For Ford, however, the specific experiences, as sexual as they are, are presented in terms of social and economic expectation. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man has scarred Lou and it is interesting to note that this scarring, the emphasis Ford Sr. puts on it has to do with social standing This is expressed in an exchange between Helene and Ford Senior.

“But a child! My child. My only son. If anything should happen –“

”Uh-huh. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? Not him, but you. How it would reflect on you.”

“Get out! A woman with no more sensibilities than-“

“I’m white trash, that’s the term isn’t it? Riffraff. I ain’t got that ‘ol quality.”

Ford has an opportunity to deny the social issue after Helene brings it up, instead he acquiesces to her argument by beginning the comparison of her substandard “sensibilities” (a very refined word, there).
This experience, squeezed and formed by the subsequent control Ford Sr. exerts over his son is handed down by a much larger force than a mere abortionist or MD father. Lou clearly sees the specific traumatic events of his life as nothing more than traditional grinding of the big socioeconomic clock or of fate. People are essentially and inexplicably bad, and nothing can be done to alter that reality. If it is his father or Helene who is the proximate evil, it has little to do with them personally.
Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.

The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy or unimportant character, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly,” particularly the small and shabby coroner who Hammer tortures with the unlikely instrument of a desk drawer.

This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the Ford’s personal history. These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.
Ford concludes his narrative with a final judgment on society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so little, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group, similar to the way he placed himself among the company of jail-prisoners at the open of the book. This is a complete inversion of the typical noir detective whose outside status includes a complete lack of identification with the ‘other.’ Mike Hammer may call himself rotten inside and a killer (“Kiss Me Deadly”), but he would never associate himself with what he would consider the dregs of society. Although Ford can kill without compunction and displays a general lack of concern for others that some times borders on the sociopathic, his lack of feeling does not alter his intellectual understanding that we are all in similar positions with respect to the larger world. This “large-mindedness” allows the reader a small entry to sympathy for Ford. Ford sees us all as doomed, perhaps even without control over what we do, even when we do have control. And he sees this as entirely in line with how the universe does and should work, “and you know that everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.” (Thompson 185)

He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself. And this is perhaps Ford’s greatest inversion of the traditional detective in film noir. For unlike some other characters in noir, the femme fatale and the doomed hero come to mind, the noir detective is, in all cases, in charge of himself. This represents his separation from society, his allure to women, and the basis of his competence. Even when competence is in question, as it is in the case of J.J. Gittes, who gets results the exact opposite of what he aims for, the detective is his own man struggling against bigger powers. Ford recasts this relationship in that he even while he seemingly struggles against bigger powers he explicitly admits to himself that he not only can he not be successful, but more subversive to the genre, he will end up doing the work of his enemy.

At the time Thompson wrote, this notion was almost farcical, and it is not surprise that Thompson wrote his characters as psychopaths. It was likely the only way that these characters could be accepted. It is interesting to note that by the time J.J. Gittes was running around Los Angeles and losing every major battle he fought, he could be portrayed as successful and clever, but still a failure.

In the end, this is part of what makes Ford interesting. Not only has he swallowed noir whole and lives it completely, but he is squarely in the middle of the evolution that eventually kills the importance of the noirish detective. Well, that and the fact we don’t film in Black and White much anymore.

WORKS CITED

Durgnat, Raymond. Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir. Silver and Alain. 37-52.

Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996.

Schrader, Paul. Notes on Film Noir. Silver and Alain 53-64.

Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. University of Missouri Press. Columbia, MO 2002.

Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. . Amadeus Press/Limelight Editions. Pompton Plains. New Jersey. 1996.

Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. Quill. New York. 1952.

Whissen, Reed. Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. Greenwood Press. New York. 1993.