{"id":124031,"date":"2018-10-18T10:11:24","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T18:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=124031"},"modified":"2018-10-18T10:12:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T18:12:24","slug":"what-is-steve-sailer-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=124031","title":{"rendered":"What Is Steve Sailer Reading?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve writes on his blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* I\u2019m 98% finished with Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson<\/a>. It\u2019s very good. It\u2019s my favorite Stephenson book that I\u2019ve read so far. I put it aside a week ago because I was staying up too late reading it. But now I have a chance to return to it and find out what happens, although I can kind of guess, but that\u2019s not a criticism: creating a structure of inevitability is a good thing for an artist.<\/p>\n

* Raymond Chandler wasn\u2019t hugely masculine in personal affect, but you can\u2019t exactly disparage his bona fides: e.g., he served as a sergeant in the Canadian Army in 1918 on the Western Front and was the only survivor of his platoon from a direct hit by a German artillery shell. And he didn\u2019t talk about it much, although it\u2019s kind of a subtext of his novels and his life, vaguely surfacing 35 years later in The Long Goodbye.<\/p>\n

My view of Raymond Chandler\u2019s Philip Marlowe detective novels:<\/p>\n

The Big Sleep \u2014 The first and most famous Chandler novel. This is the most reasonable choice to start with, although it\u2019s not my favorite. Vastly influential, second only to The Maltese Falcon. E.g., The Big Lebowski is a comic version of The Big Sleep.<\/p>\n

Farewell, My Lovely \u2014 The second and most lyrically beautiful. My favorite. Peak Chandler.<\/p>\n

The High Window \u2014 Forgettable<\/p>\n

The Lady in the Lake \u2014 Pretty good, but not as good as the first two.<\/p>\n

The Little Sister \u2014 Pretty good, and the movie industry backdrop is more interesting than the Lady in the Lake, which is appealing if you are familiar with Southern California mountain resorts, but if you aren\u2019t, 1940s Hollywood is a more interesting setting.<\/p>\n

The Long Goodbye \u2014 A famous comeback novel. It\u2019s excellent, but it\u2019s more of an old man\u2019s social novel, while the first two are those rare things, a young man\u2019s lyrical novels by a disillusioned middle age man. Personally, I don\u2019t find The Long Goodbye as much of a knockout as the first two novels, but it clearly had a lot of influence, such as on Larry Gelbart\u2019s musical \u201cCity of Angels\u201d and \u201cBlade Runner.\u201d The Mexican-American cop who despises but needs the Anglo detective hero is a brilliant innovation that\u2019s the foundation of Edward James Olmos\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t read the books past then when Chandler was old and drunk.<\/p>\n

The other major Chandler work is the screenplay to the great film noir \u201cDouble Indemnity.\u201d Chandler told Billy Wilder that James M. Cain\u2019s novel was terrific, but his dialogue wouldn\u2019t work in a movie so Chandler would have to totally rewrite it. Wilder was dubious and called up Cain, who didn\u2019t much like Chandler, and told him what Chandler had said about his dialogue. To Wilder\u2019s surprise, Cain agreed with Chandler, and told Wilder to have Chandler rewrite his dialogue.<\/p>\n

This was a pretty awesome moment of 1940s professionalism. I suspect the Coen Brothers have kicked around this scene a few times between themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve writes on his blog: * I\u2019m 98% finished with Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It\u2019s very good. It\u2019s my favorite Stephenson book that I\u2019ve read so far. I put it aside a week ago because I was staying up too … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14564],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124031"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124034,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031\/revisions\/124034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}