For more than 50 years, Raymond Chandler sat unnoticed in a hallway in "Double Indemnity," neglected by film fans and readers alike. But the Guardian has reported that earlier this year, two careful watchers -- one American, one French -- each discovered what they thought to be Raymond Chandler making a secret cameo.
"It's just unmistakeably him. I'd lay money on it," says Judith Freeman, author of "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved."
While researching her Chandler biography, Freeman never once saw mention of the appearance in Chandler's papers, not at the Bodleian Library in Oxford or at UCLA. "Believe me, I really combed over both archives," she said. But she watched the film again. "And sure enough, by damn, there he was, and in my mind there is absolutely no question that it's Chandler."
Chandler had a notoriously prickly relationship with Billy Wilder; while the two were adapting James M. Cain's novel for the screen, Chandler wrote a memo complaining about the director to studio honchos. But, Freeman notes, "Chandler rather enjoyed the shooting of the film, being on the set." Perhaps his cameo appearance shows that the author and director eventually patched things up.
What would be the reason for slipping Chandler, the screenwriter, into the film? Cameo appearances go back to the silent film era; Alfred Hitchcock's first was in his 1927 film "The Lodger." That same year, Elinor Glyn -- a novelist-turned-screenwriter with a knack for publicity -- made an appearance in "It," which she wrote. So writers made it on screen.
But Glyn's walk-through was trumpeted by the film's interstitial titles. Chandler's was a secret for decades.
We will probably never know whose idea it was it to put Chandler in front of the camera, or if it took a few drinks to get him in the mood. And no one has successfully deciphered the cover of what he's reading, which would be nice to know too.
According to the Guardian, this is only the second known appearance of Raymond Chandler on film. And it's been right there, all this time.
Sounds like a good noir plot.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Image: Screen capture from "Double Indemnity." Credit: Universal Pictures
The social-networking-via-books site Goodreads has teamed up with the Mar Vista Public Library and author Lisa See for a book swap at 8:15 p.m. Thursday. The event is free, but RSVPs are required — so far, more than 100 people plan to attend.
Although space is limited, having a capacity crowd is good for book swappers — and for the library.
The way it works: Everyone brings books that they're willing to part with. Could be that kids have outgrown them, they will never get read, there's no room or maybe you're one of those who have decided to purge Kerouac. All the books are arrayed so they can be reviewed. And then, the swapping. Attendees browse and take any books they like, free.
All books that aren't taken away by Goodreads members and other swappers will be donated to the library.
The chic L.A. Public Library support group Young Literati is involved, and it is hosting a reading by Lisa See earlier in the evening (details here). See will be sticking around to sign copies of her book "Shanghai Girls" as the swap gets underway.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo by Flickr
 Robert Olen Butler is an author with a flair for the big concept. Inspired by the information that consciousness lasts for 1.5 minutes after decapitation, he wrote "Severance," 62 short (240-word) stories of the last thoughts of those, real and imagined, who've just lost their heads. Marie Antoinette, John the Baptist, Medusa, Cicero and a chicken all, uh, made the cut.
Then there was 2008's "Intercourse," the paired narratives of what's going through the minds of coupes as they copulate (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Napolean and Josephine). And up next is "Hell" coming in September. It's a longer narrative, one that bumps into more famous characters Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, popes and presidents.
And, since July 4, the Butler's Devil has been sending out missives on Twitter, as @TweetsFromHell. A sample:
July 11: Dick Cheney & Beelzebub secretly talk strategy for No. 2 guy to control No. 1, while Satan & G.W. Bush boohoo over disapproving fathers
July 4: A. Lincoln & J.W. Booth dissolve wailing as one in sulfur rain & share nights at the theatre: forgotten lines & shooting pains & bad reviews
Tweeting as the Devil is a pretty brilliant idea, promising fun and wickedness. But Butler's parade-of-the-famous is starting to feel a little rote. Dick Cheney -- really? Isn't that a little easy? Isn't the vice president who shot a friend in the face, well, a pretty obvious bad guy?
Butler is no slouch -- he won the Pulitzer in 1993 for his short story collection "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" and is a professor of creative writing at Florida State. But looking back, it feels like he's begun leaning on celebrity for a while to do some of the storytelling work for him. And celebrities are, by their nature, flattened out, little more than symbols -- can imagining Bill and Hillary's sex life amount to any more than a cheap laugh or two? Didn't Dante see popes in hell about 700 years ago? Isn't there a more interesting slant on evil than Dick Cheney?
Sigh. I imagine I'll burn in hell for saying so. On Twitter, at least.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Image: BBQ, 2004 by Shag. Courtesy Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana
Author and screenwriter Steven Paul Leiva has been hanging with Ray Bradbury -- even made a video for the Buffalo Film Festival -- and in an essay for our brother blog, Hero Complex, he tries to get at the essence of exactly what the octogenarian author is.
If you are of a certain age and read the works of Ray Bradbury in your youth, you probably read paperbacks emblazoned with the words: “The world’s greatest living science fiction writer.”... In almost everything you read about Bradbury his name was either preceded or followed by the words "science fiction writer," despite the fact that other things you read stated quite emphatically that Bradbury was either "not that" or "much more than just that."
The problem seems to be that we are all trying to label the wrong thing. If trying to label what Bradbury does is frustrating, maybe we ought to widen our vision and try to label him simply by whom Bradbury is. ...
Bradbury is a fan − of science fiction because it taught him to see the wonder in life, of life because to feel it intensely is a kick, of humanity because that is his tribe and he has found humanity’s striving to reach the stars a noble bid for immortality that is the action of doers and not dreamers. And what is “fan” but a nickname for “lover?”
Bradbury is a lover. It informs everything he does, especially his speeches where he informs the pubic to be lovers too. “Love what you do, and do what you love,” he often says. And it certainly informs his writing, which he does in an improvisational manner, like a jazz musician, or, more to the point, like a young lover.
Bradbury is also a gatherer of interesting honors. He's been awarded a National Medal of Arts; given a star on the Hollywood walk of Fame; received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; had an asteroid named for him; been given multiple Stoker Awards, including one for lifetime achievement; won an Emmy and a Saturn Award for television writing; and received the French Commandeur Order des Artes and Lettres medal in 2007.
With his 89th birthday coming up on Aug. 22, Angelenos' favorite science fiction writer -- or, if you prefer, lover -- is likely to land on Jacket Copy again.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
RECENT AND RELATED
Everyone's invited to Ray Bradbury's birthday party
Photo: Ray Bradbury in 2003 with a birthday cake in the foreground. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times.
Can a good story make something more valuable? What if it's entirely untrue? And what if the person telling the story -- like, say, a novelist -- is a kind of professional liar; does a professional lie give an object more value? And, hey, what if you could buy something like that on EBay?
When authors Rob Walker ("Buying In") and Joshua Glenn ("Taking Things Seriously"), each of whom is curious about the meaning and value we assign to objects, met in Boston earlier this year, they came up with the idea for the fiction-auction project Significant Objects. Well-known literary authors -- including Luc Sante and Lydia Millet -- write a short story that serves the description for a basically worthless object that is then auctioned on EBay. The first set of auctions has closed, and while the ending prices were all less than $30, Walker points out that with listing prices beginning as low as 29 cents, the final value increased by as much 4,000%.
Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg e-mailed co-editor Glenn and participating author Matthew Sharpe ("Jamestown") about the project.
JC: Kurt Andersen's story about an old Christmas nutcracker is the first so far to tie one of the objects (fictionally) to a celebrity. It's also the first to get a bit dirty. Are either of those themes that you expected?
JG: Based on some classificatory work I did for my book "Taking Things Seriously," I've determined that every participant so far has employed the thingamajig we've assigned them, in their story, as either a talisman (an object with magical powers, or one that's conscious), a totem (a tutelary spirit from the natural world), a fossil (a remnant of some vanished epoch or way of life, including childhood), or evidence (the object plays a role in a crime, or an historical event). If there are other modes of relating emotionally and psychologically to an object, I don't think our authors have tried them yet. Of course, it's how an artist performs within certain constraints that's so exciting -- it's been a joy to read these strange, funny, moving stories.
One thing that we didn't expect is a certain amount of competition among some of the participants. Andersen, whose story strongly hints that a novelty nutcracker (which I purchased at a yard sale, two blocks from my house in Boston, for $2) is probably worth thousands of dollars because James Dean was rumored to have used it in a particularly naughty way, is really playing to win! Rob and I loved seeing that. Alas for Kurt, so far, bidders have only offered $5 for the nutcracker. However, a cow-shaped creamer that a lesser celebrity, Norman Rockwell, left behind in a psychiatric hospital where he was being treated for depression, at least according to a story by Lucinda Rosenfeld, is going for a whopping $28.
JC: While the actual provenance of an object affects its worth, here you're inventing fictional provenances. Are you aware of any prior fictional provenances that have affected an object's value?
JG: I've heard stories about forgeries and fakes that -- once exposed as such -- became even more highly prized as collectibles than the originals. Edmé Samson's reproductions of fine china, for example. Speaking only for myself, I'd have to say that I regard all provenances as fictional to some degree. I'm skeptical about authenticity claims, whether in the realm of artifacts or that of Being. So ... the more obviously fictional and unserious a provenance is, the more charming I tend to find it.
JC: Do the authors get a share of the sale price? Are they paid at all?
JG: The authors get all the money, after shipping costs, that EBay pays out -- we're not even going to subtract the dollar or two we spent to buy the object in the first place. It's our treat!
JC [to Matthew Sharpe]: After you agreed to do it, did you have any trepidations?
MS: Just the usual seller's anxiety.
JC: After you received the object you were to write about (a mule figurine), did you have any second thoughts?
MS: I was actually given a choice among five objects and chose the mule. It spoke to me. Then I took my medication. Then I had second thoughts.
JC: Your story seems to take on the shape of an EBay listing, in language, tone and, well, oddness. Was that important to you? And how familiar were you with EBay listings prior to this?
MS: Several years ago I saw an EBay listing offering a service for sale, rather than an object, and the service was a beating, to wit: "If you win this auction, I will personally come to your house and beat you up." That gem has subtended not just my Significant Objects piece but much of the writing I've done since discovering it.
More from Josh Glenn on objects, value, and what you get when you win one of these auctions ... after the jump.
Read on »
Today, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks turns 76. His most recent book, 2007's "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" is, we wrote in our review, "not so much a greatest-hits collection as a purposeful set of remixes" of cases he'd written about before, shifting attention to the issues of music and the brain. The stories Sacks tells are so fascinating that his storytelling is, perhaps, overlooked. Take the title of his 1985 book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" -- it's wonderful, isn't it? It could easily have been called Case Studies in Neuroscience, or Perceptual Aberrations Today. But chances are it wouldn't have become a bestseller. In an interview with the National Review of Medicine last year, Sacks talked about taking time off after med school and traveling in Canada. I kept a journal, called Canada Pause, in 1960.
Canada Pause because travelling in Canada, especially
in the Rockies, was sort of an interim for me. I had
left England but was not sure what to do, not sure I
wanted to stay in medicine. I wanted to write, but I
had no idea what about. As he undertook his medical career, his writing developed in tandem. Tim McIntyre interviewed Sacks for the Whole Earth Review in 1985. TM: Your passion for literature seems to come through with the numerous literary references that you make in your books.
OS:
I don't think of them as "literary references." I don't feel like a
very literary person, but they just seem to apply. I mean, when I was
reading Donne's Devotions, which I quote a lot in "Awakenings," it just
seemed so close: "Diseases hold consultations. They seem to multiply
among themselves." This was not just poetry: it was actually what
seemed to be happening in front of me, and it was like a sort of
science.... I think that medicine, and case history in particular,
allows us a blending of art and science. That's why I like it. Sacks is devoted to classical music -- Bach over Beethoven, as he demonstrated when they filmed his brain as he listened to both for the recent Nova television show Musical Minds. Back in 1995, McIntyre asked him about the music, writing and reading.
TM: I think you can hear the music in a lot of the best writing.
James Joyce, for instance. His sentences have a musical feel to them,
and supposedly he had a beautiful tenor singing voice.
OS:
And for that matter there's Saul Bellow, whose "Mr. Sammler's Planet" I'm
now reading. Some of the paragraphs, you know they're obviously ...
This is a voice: this is the voice of the writer. There's the wit and
the observation of the writer and everything else, but there's also the
sheer music of the prose. And I think if that music runs through you,
you have to sing or write or talk.
Happy birthday to Dr. Sacks.
-- Carolyn Kellogg Photo: Oliver Sacks speaks in June at Columbia University in New York City. Credit: Chris McGrath / Getty Images
About a zillion years ago, a friend's roommate dated a nice, hardworking filmmaker named Hyatt. So I guess I wasn't thinking that the book by Hyatt Bass sitting on my desk could possibly be from the same person. When it dawned on me that it was -- and news came that she'd be reading tonight at Book Soup, with a wine-and-cheese reception at 6 -- I wanted to ask her a few questions about "The Embers," her debut novel. The book shifts perspectives between various members of the fictional Ascher family as they grapple with the early death of their son, Thomas.
You used to live in Los Angeles – and you’re reading here tonight. What about the city resonates with you?
When I lived in Los Angeles, I worked in film, and it seemed like everyone I met worked in film, and all we talked about was film. I regret that, because I now know that there is so much more to the city than that. I have a friend here who takes the bus everywhere, and I wish I'd done that at least, because I found being in a car all the time very strange. I actually put a lot of that isolation -- that feeling of ships passing in the night -- into "The Embers."
In "The Embers," how much does place inform character?
Place definitely informs character in this book. I really wanted to explore another place I know very well (and have tremendous fondness for), which is New York City -- as well as the Berkshires, where the Ascher family has a country house. The Ascher family is a very New York family. Joe is a famous playwright and actor, best-known for his one-man shows. He has a chip on his shoulder because he was raised in the Bronx and is "half-Jewish" -- and doesn't carry the waspy Upper East Side pedigree of his wife, Laura. Their kids, Emily and Thomas, are very New York kids -- precocious and, of course, exposed to a lot -- not just the culture of their city's museums and theaters and so on, but to the drugs and old-beyond-their-years ways that a lot of city kids have. The thing about the Berkshires is that it's this place where they all go to get away, and there is something very pure about the natural setting, and something more natural about their interactions there. Everything that happens in the Berkshires house, though, happens in the past, because in the present, the Berkshires house is gone. The house has been destroyed -- and the family, too, has fallen apart. Thomas is definitely the "purest" character in the book -- partly because he dies before he moves beyond the fairly innocent age of 18, and his ashes are scattered amidst an apple grove on the hillside above their former house. Emily is determined to hold her wedding -- a happy occasion, and one of new beginnings -- in this very grove, when the apple trees are in bloom. And the wedding will be the first time that she, Joe, and Laura have been reunited since Thomas' death 15 years before. About a place that's no place, and the symbolism of gardens.
Read on »
The first lines Graham Greene uttered in the literary universe are these, from his 1929 novel "The Man Within":
He came over the top of the down as the last light failed and could almost have cried with relief at sight of the wood below. He longed to fling himself down on the short stubbly grass and stare at it, the dark comforting shadow which he had hardly hoped to see...
We're introduced to the character of Andrews, who in the course of the novel attempts to flee smugglers he has betrayed. Future biographies, however, may need to replace those first lines with these:
Alice Lady Perriham had overloaded her piece of toast. She had done so in pure abundance of spirit, because the winter sun streamed in a crisp yellow glow across the breakfast table, and because everyone around her was happy.
This comes from an unpublished, unfinished novel Greene wrote when he was 22. The Strand Magazine is taking the five chapters of the manuscript and will publish them as a serial, starting with its forthcoming July issue.
"To me what is wonderful about all of this is that Greene published a few short stories in the old Strand," said Andrew Gulli, the Strand’s managing editor, "so I feel we’re continuing the tradition."
According to Gulli, the manuscript was discovered by Greene scholar Francois Gallix at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
"Gallix set up a team of people and transcribed the handwritten material," he said.
Gulli gave Jacket Copy a preview of this first chapter, which is titled "The Empty Chair." One’s initial reaction is that the novelist who wrote this is (understandably) a far cry from the one who went on to produce "The Third Man," "The Power and the Glory" and "The Human Factor."
How so? That's after the jump.
Read on »
 As part of our monthlong, fractured discussion of postmodern fiction, Garth Risk Hallberg weighs in on Joseph McElroy's weighty "Women and Men."
Given the decidedly premodern overtones of the word "canon," the idea of a postmodern one may seem like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, one approach to constructing a postmodern canon is to set the parameters so wide — Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Grandmaster Mele Mel — that the term becomes practically meaningless. In the narrower purview of literary critics, however, references to canonical postmodernism tend to cluster around a group of white male fiction writers of a certain age: Barth and Barthelme, Gaddis and Gass, DeLillo and Coover and Pynchon.
Obviously, this canon is as hobbled by omissions as the prepostmodern canon it subtends. Still, in light of its demographics, it seems doubly baffling that Joseph McElroy, who turns 79 this year, is so often left off the list of po-mo masters. Like his rough contemporary Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of eight works of fiction acclaimed for their encyclopedic embrace of contemporary life. The New York Times wrote:
- To ignore ["A Smuggler's Bible," 1966] would be as shameful an act of self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when "The Recognitions" and "Under the Volcano" were first published.
- ["Hind's Kidnap," 1969] is full of marvels.
- "Lookout Cartridge" [1973] is the rarest kind of achievement.
Yet Google Joseph McElroy, author, and you'll come up with about 5,000 hits, compared with roughly a quarter million for Pynchon. What gives? The short answer, it seems to me, is a single book, a behemoth called "Women and Men."
"Women and Men" belongs to the maximalist subspecies of postmodern novel that includes "Gravity's Rainbow," "The Recognitions" and "Underworld," somewhat the way the Chevy Suburban belongs to the "light truck" vehicular class, or Andre the Giant belonged to the World Wrestling Federation.
If those other books swing for the fences, "Women and Men" swings for the parking lot. If they represent, in their rigor, a form of literary calculus, "Women and Men" is chaos theory. And — no getting around this — if these books are big, "Women and Men" is bigger. At roughly 700,000 words (that's 1,192 closely printed pages), it is one and a half times the length of "War & Peace."
The book reached advance readers in 1987 in the form of two 600-page galleys. The reviewer for the New York Times made no secret of having sped through the book in a matter of days. And his tone, which mixed acknowledgment of the novel's ambition with barely disguised resentment at having to read the damn thing, typified critical response. Apparently the audience for literary fiction needed little encouragement to avoid a book that weighed 4 pounds in hardcover. "Women and Men," reportedly 10 years in the making, was not so much a publishing event as an anticlimax.
I happen to have a soft spot for underdogs, and another one for the postmodern mega-novel, and having some free time last summer, I picked up a "like new" first edition of "Women and Men" for something in the neighborhood of 10 bucks. I carried the book with me everywhere for six weeks, moving through it at a rate of about 30 pages a day. It quickly became obvious why the book is so rarely read. In persevering, however, I discovered some reasons why I think it should be.
Why it should be read ... after the jump.
Read on »
 Writer John Wray's third novel, "Lowboy," came out this year to high praise. In the book, a paranoid schizophrenic teen rides the New York subways as, in a parallel narrative, a missing person's specialist tries to find him. Our reviewer Akiva Gottlieb compared the book to iconic novels by Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem, concluding:
Wray fully envelops the reader in both the existential and quotidian concerns of his afflicted protagonist. Lowboy's hero-projections and hormonal overdrive are, in this author's hands, tragically epic expressions of an ordinary teenage fatalism. "The world is inside of me," Lowboy warns, and the author does not mean to contradict him. This poetic, stirringly strange novel offers an empathic reminder that, for many, the light at the end of the tunnel can be taken for a harbinger of doom.
Wray's first book, "The Right Hand of Sleep," earned him a prestigious Whiting Award, and he was named one of America's best young novelists by Granta in 2007. In a profile this spring, New York Magazine called him "a phenomenally versatile writer."
He's a writer with serious literary credentials, one who, by all accounts, is due for more attention than before. So why wouldn't Esquire ask him to write some short-short fictions to accompany a fashion spread? And why, like any writer who needs to make a living, wouldn't Wray say yes?
The result, Esquire's Collected Short Stories of Summer Style, shows that sometimes it might be better to make like Nancy Reagan and just say no.
The four pieces by Wray are inelegantly written and belabor the obvious: Objects in fashion photos are sexualized, or they're meant as signals for sex. Fashion photos are carefully created to tell stories -- yes, pants hanging on a wall imply that someone is, sexily, pantsless -- and in each instance, Wray fails to tell a better story than the photographer and stylist did in the first place.
Clearly, Wray is a gifted writer, one who is willing to experiment with his writing. Which means now and then an experiment is going to go wrong.
Or did it? Take a look and tell us whether you think Wray should skip the fashion next time.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: John Wray. Credit: Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
email: jacketcopyla [at] gmail.com
Assistant Book Editor
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times