>remind me though, of something Ellroy said in one of
his interviews. The
>quote was to the effect that one of the reasons he
wrote about violence as
>efectively as he does is because he hates it and fears
it so much. Anyone
>who has ever gotten a really bad beating from a
serious person knows that it
>is a much more frightening and horrible experience
than it is presented in
>99.9% of the thriller writers. The mental shake-up is
often much worse than
>the physical effects and it can sometimes be hard to
shake off. Only a few
>of the hardboiled school strike me as able to
communicate this.
I just watched a Fox Network show about gang "disrespect,"
which is the
functional equivalent of "fear me -- or pay the
consequences." Scary
people. They'll stove your head in for a misinterpreted
stare.
I don't celebrate hardboiled experiences. In fact, I, like
Ellroy, fear
them and am years disassociated from them. I've changed. I do
like to
use the word "shit" in a sentence, however. Probably a
phrenological
phenomenon. Too many lumps in the old noggin.
In a serendipitous conversation, I was telling a woman today
that I
thought she would make a good actress. I could picture her
with a
Thompson sub-machine gun in her hands, I said, like that
4'11"
nymphomaniac Bonnie Parker. (Clyde Barrow was a 5'2" bisexual
and
largely uninterested in the bonnie Bonnie -- Peter Walker,
are you
listening?) We got to yapping and she told she knew a guy
that had
axe-murdered his parents and stuffed them in a closet. I
recalled the
story -- I remembered the actual events from years ago, as
related in
the papers -- and she told me that the fellow was a *law*
student at the
local university. My jaw dropped.
It almost made me believe in Willeford.
-- Ned Fleming # # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.