The line king

My reading has been scattershot this week, so this post follows suit. Instead of my usual rigidly systematic thought, here are a few good lines from that reading:

“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

— Raymond Chandler, The High Window

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“The scene would be an `execution-style' shooting. That meant a guy would get shot in the head. Morton figured that pretty much anytime a guy shoots another guy he’s trying to `execute' him. Not much style in it.”

— John McFetridge, Scott Albert, Below the Line 

That line is moderately clever in its puncturing of a journalistic cliché, not side-splittingly funny, but it has special appeal for those of whose jobs include looking out for such clichés. (Other such well-worn expressions, beloved of well-worn journalists, are "blue-ribbon panel," "eleventh-hour vote," "impromptu roadside shrine," the star athlete who says it's the team that matters, the killing that leaves an anguished neighborhood asking "Why?", the local people who call the killer "A quiet man ... We never dreamed he could do anything like this.")

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And, with apologies to two of this blog's more outspoken readers, a bit more from Claudio Magris, this time a passage that has much to say not about how we know or interpret history, but how we experience it:

“It seems to us impossible that what for us is still an arduous present is for our children already an irrevocable, unknown past. ... Anyone ten or fifteen years younger than I am cannot understand that the Istrian exodus after the Second World War is for me part of the present, just as I cannot really and truly understand that for him the dates 1968, 1977 and 1981 are milestones marking off different and distinct epochs; periods that for me are superimposed in spite of their considerable differences ...”

— Claudio Magris, Danube

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Down the Danube

I've taken a break from crime to read Danube, Claudio Magris' thrilling meditation on history, literature, time, national and personal identity, and just about everything else worth meditating upon.

Nothing much in it puts me in mind of crime fiction, as books outside the genre sometimes do.  But the following might interest people who think about or read ultra-violent crime fiction. It also sneers at a vogue word in arts criticism in a way you might enjoy:

"The rhetoric of transgression presents crime, maybe on account of the unhappiness which is assumed to accompany it, as carrying its own redemption, without the need for any further catharsis. Violence thereby appears as one and the same as redemption, and gives the impression of installing some kind of innocence among the psychic drives. The mystique of transgression, a word invested with edifying claptrap, deludes itself in exalting evil for evil’s sake, in contempt of all morality."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012