miker:
"If a child tells you that the knock in your car engine is
marbles bouncing around, that's an opinion. If the mechanic
tells you he thinks it's a rod bearing going out, that is
another opinion."
Shunryu Suzuki:
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in
the expert's there are few."
Sometimes I wonder if we don't lose something as we become
"experts" in our genre. As we read more and more in the
field, we inevitably become pickier, which is fine when we
are just talking about quality of writing. But do we also
start losing some of the simple enjoyment of being immersed
in a story as we simultaneously analyze it in the back of our
heads: Is this hardboiled? Noir? How does it relate to other
books in the field? Other books by this author? How does it
fit into the evolution in the field? I am still carried away
by books, but it doesn't seem to happen as deeply as
often.
Then again, we also pick up things a causal reader probably
wouldn't, homages, parodies, intertextual references, get
jokes a beginner might not. For instance, I mentioned
recently how I recognized a bunch of Chandler references in
Ted Lewis's Boldt, from a character named Florian to a club
called the Blue Dahlia. And in re-reading Sallis's
Long-Legged Fly, I picked up a passing joke I missed the
first time. Lew is looking at the names on some New Orleans
mailboxes and sees W. Percy and R. Queneau. I knew who Walker
Percy was the first time I read it, but I had never heard of
Raymond Queneau before, nor the literary movement he's
associated with, Oulipo (not that I've read him, but I did
recognize the name this time).
I recently read Cases by Joe Gores. I got a kick out of
recognizing Dunc's alias at the beginning, Peter Collinson,
as slang for "son of nobody," as the book eventually explains
but also as a pseudonym of Hammett's, which isn't mentioned.
However, it bugged me that Dunc was reading The Long Goodbye
in the summer of 1953 when I knew it didn't come out in the
US until March 1954 (and November 1953 in the UK).
Mark
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