gattycat:
thingsareswinging:
caliginouspyxidion:
Letter to Robert Graves
24 July 1918 American Red Cross Hospital, No. 22
98-99 Lancaster Gate, W.2
Dear Roberto,
I’d timed my death in action to the minute
(The Nation with my deathly verses in it).
The day told off—13—(the month July)—
The picture planned—O…
If by some mad chance you end up blundering around east Kent (provided you’re wearing a badge or something that identifies you by your tumblr handle), you can safely assume that somewhere out there is a feckless youth with a terrible beard that wants to give you the greatest of high-fives for referencing the Molesworth books in a post about Robert Graves. And by greatest, I mean people would be put in the hospital.
If you’d only mentioned Raymond Chandler in there somewhere, you would have basically hit the Venn diagram of Literature I Consider As Vital As Oxygen.
Asjdhfs I am glad you liked my referencing. I feel it is my duty to throw in Molesworth wherever I can (would it be trying too hard to put in ‘as any fule kno’ here?). I also approve of the epic high five and meandering in the home counties. Sadly, I have never read any Chandler, to my detriment I imagine. I would check the local library but I don’t think it does anything other than Karin Slaughter in large print.
(Is this Kent University, because I am thinking of harassing one of your proffs for my MA diss)
Chandler is basically my favourite fiction writer. I think it’s because he’s so economical. Here’s one of my favourite lines from The Big Sleep, describing an aged elevator operator:
“He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.”
Chandler just summed up the entirety of that man’s life, his hopes, his dreams, his dashed expectations, the way his job has degraded him and dragged him down, the tragedy of the working man, in half a line of describing his coat.And the entire book is like that.
It also helps that Philip Marlowe, the main character of Chandler’s detective stories, is a fantastic character. He may have spawned the cliche of the trenchcoated, hard-boiled detective, but Marlowe himself is… well, he’s frankly wacky as fuck. From The Big Sleep again, he’s being confronted by the femme fatal du jour:
SHE: “If I had a razor, I’d cut your throat — just to see what ran out of it.”
HE: “Caterpillar blood” (without a hint of humour or self-awareness)
Anyway, it turns out I have strong feelings about one of my favourite authors of all time. Who knew.
And yes, I am a denizen of Kent Uni. It’s actually pretty good these days, if you can ignore the horrible campus. It’s real ’50s architecture. And two of the colleges were designed by a man who built prisons, and it shows. It really shows.
