Synthetic Life & the Future

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

Heraclitus (Fragment 1)

Fragment 1

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται

1. Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to
understand it -- not only before hearing it, but even after they
have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things
come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be
quite without any experience of it - - - at least if they are judged
in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth
according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves. Other
men, on the contrary, are as unaware of what they do when
awake as they are when asleep. (1) (from http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/heraclitus.pdf

This fragment from the great presocratic philosopher Heraclitus gets one wondering about what exactly was the purpose of the whole work. In some translations we find differences:

according to its constitution

Other people, on the contrary

These differences can have dramatic consequences in the interpretation. When I first read this fragment I was awestruck by its metaphysical import, and its obvious connection to Christianity with its all important Logos. However, when I considered the context of the fragment, and the slant of its rhetoric, it seemed more and more as if Heraclitus was quoting someone else. These aphorisms, like Aesop's Fables, have an older original or source. The fragments are analogous to the analects of Confucius:

http://afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php?l=Lunyu&no=1

These guys were teachers. Teachers find their sources from earlier materials. The riddling and oppositions in Heraclitus also seem to have an Oriental equivalent in the koans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan

From my perspective, the fragments of Heraclitus entertain one with a curiosity akin to looking at a shard of a ancient pot, or a bone of a dinosaur. There is this element of wow. These are the thoughts of someone who lived over two thousand years ago. Wow. They are a magnet for philosophers who like Martin Heidigger who excavated/exhumed the presocratic philosophies. One can build a city of ideas on these fragments. But are they really more than Ionian Greek "soundbites"? We have little to go on. A pity that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Perhaps we would have been able to read the whole work, and our impression would be different. Indeed, often like "baggy novels", philosophy that is interminably long presents us with formidable hurdle - few of us have the patience to wade through long philosophical texts. We like ideas to be presented in texts of ideally one hundred pages or so. Same with politics.

Polluted Homes and Gardens.

Every householder and tenant lives in a toxic environment. Even if we discount the enormous number of bacteria and viruses to be found in the average household, some of which are harmful, our homes are full of chemicals that are harmful to our existence. True like rats and roaches we have built up an immunity to some, nevertheless they impair our development, our daily lives and shorten our lifespan. If we take for example a typical terrace property in England. If it is Victorian it is very likely to have been built upon contaminated land. During the height of the Industrial Revolution, the Victorians like others in booming countries, did not take adequate measures to tackle the toxins and chemicals. We find cases like this:

http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=16213

Everywhere in Britain the Victorians chucked out chemicals that are harmful. These shortened their lives, and they affect us still today. Of course this is nothing in comparison to the pollution in the 20th century. The mind boggles. New chemicals and compounds, and the proliferation of plastics, means that every single centimetre of UK soil has particles that are toxic. The same goes for the air and the water. If we add all this to the radioactive materials that have since the 1950's been added. Well. Of course we must include the power plants, cars, planes.... Imagine then when we have all this shit in our environment - what do we do? We buy more! Here is a basic rule. If you can smell it. Then that substance has entered your body. More enters through the skin and while you breath. Is it not about time we had assessment and analysis kits for every household - with cheap spectrometry sets so you can gauge just how bad your environment is. And like the geiger counter, would it not be useful to check products you buy and use for their toxicity?

Debt

We are told that Greece has a deficit of $405.7 billion. That is quite a sum. The State of California owes $34.6 billion. http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=15158

Wowee. Lots of money. Now interestingly the Mafia in Italy alone earns $90 billion. (in 2007)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/24/italy.johnhooper

I would reckon the the Worldwide earnings from crime would amount to a few trillion dollars. If the criminals earn a lot, it probably pales into insignificance compared to how much Government departments lose. For example, remember the unaccounted trillion dollars?http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-05-18/news/17491492_1_pentagon-gao-financial-accounting

Well add a few more trillions and one has an idea of how much is lost in military expenditure worldwide. But we have not even started to look at other losses and waste. Everyday, the individual throws money. We buy food and leave billions of tonnes of it. Look at every plate. How much is wasted. In the company, there is enormous waste. You just look at what is daily thrown away or retired before it has actually worn out. Trillions of dollars is spent on meaningless crap.

We spend much on needless and dangerous packaging:

http://earthfirst.com/drastic-plastic-from-floating-plastic-crap-to-toxic-food-chain-bomb/

If we were to add up the all the waste and losses incurred each year, we could probably manage to look after our planet for 100 years! Let's turn to Greece now. A convenient scapegoat as they have, well their government, cooked the books. Why did they do that? Oh to further their political goals. Yet, during this period, while they and other (lower)developed and developing nations were also cooking their books - they had ideological goals. They were putting a huge amount into welfare and actually caring for their people -even if they creamed a lot off themselves. This is totally different from those traders who were capitalising on poor households so as to make trillions. They did not give a f**k about those people, and still don't. Now, the countries who played and controlled the monopoly board, have decided that the banker must always win - so they are taking it out on soft targets. Health, education, and the like. Not the military! They are also, those countries that created the mess, taking a high moral ground against those who had weak infrastructures in the first place. So the US which has the greatest national debt on the planet tells Greece to change its behaviour!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

Now that is what they say in England, pretty rich of them to say that.

How a Poem is Made.

This short essay has been inspired by C. Day Lewis's advice in his Poetry For You (1944). I will take you through it, as if it were a procedure for something, hopefully in this case pleasant. We start with nature. I would like to capitalise Nature, but I am afraid she/he is not really around these days, and it is this thought that provides the argument or "spin" of the poem. When for example we read nature poetry of the Renaissance - Nature was wild. You could for example find bears and wolves on the continent roaming the woods, though in Britain they had been extinct since 10th century (for bears) and 16th century (for wolves in England). Though they were for the most part wiped out in England by the time of the Elizabethans, they, as representatives of wild Nature were still vivid in the minds, and a reality. Now, unless you live in the States or parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, they are something you see in zoos, in circus shows or on television.

So the bear, with heavy paw, through the woodland

of our history, baits us with her presence, as the wolves

in city and football, howl like Jack Nicholson in Shining,

Here we start with the bear, then as C.Day Lewis puts it, play with double or triple-barrelled comparisons. The reversal of "bait" as in bear-baiting. The reference to Wolverhampton and then the less obvious reference to the movie Wolf. Now we have the first few lines to work with. They are prose-like, but natural rhymes and associations come to mind in the acoustic patterning, we have heavy paw / this yields early thaw, and football, gives us footfall. We will use this to render and construct the poem, as the argument unfolds. After a hiatus, a trip to the city and back, I got to thinking about the Edenic conception of nature and how the birds and beasts

are now in the back garden in the UK. I also saw in the station a Danish magazine called "Big Game" which enraged me. The ladder is a reference to Aristotle's ladder. Entrained refers to the growing of vines and the training of zoo animals to present "wildness".

The birds and beasts of cigarette cards are from Eden

now inhabitants of the suburban back garden

Where in the midst of foreign plants and flowers

they make their home, their they past their hours

Domesticated by bulldozers and the pollution

Feeling safe and secure, the fox, badger and hedgehog

As the really wild growl and rage in presentation

Entrained like vine to demonstrate the Nature

Of man's good husbandry, the absent fathers

Leave tiny chicks and ducklings to the maw

of machinery, crushing the living daylights

As the early thaw of the wild, bleeds into captivity

The footfall of freedom only for the baby-headed

Some try to climb the ladder through appetites

changing, as fatty life, like porkers, decline

But then Africa and Russia leads the proclivity

For hunting and killing, wildebeest and zebras

Big game for big boys with small shoe size

On the sly, like collateral dolplins, the leopard

and big cats, for a few thousand, are extras.

A fix of Alexander Trocchi: Cain's Book (1960)

There will be readers (if there are any) who know of Trocchi's writings through the fairly recent movie "Young Adam" (2003) directed by David Mackenzie and starring A class actors Ewan McGregor a and Tilda Swinton. I came across his writings through a reference in a book, and the particular title in John Calder's biography, Pursuit: http://www.oneworldclassics.com/pursuit-p-305-book.html
At first glance, the book as autobiographical novel Cain's Book (1960) with its wonderful picture of a scow, is the usual tough-guy-delinquent-junkie-existentialist novel, the Jean Genet, Henry Miller, William Burroughs type. It has a quote from Sade for God's sake with MAINLINES running from top to bottom. But as soon as you cross that threshol, you find out that Trocchi belongs also to the naturalist school, the Jack London, Theodor Dreiser, James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) school.

My scow is tied up in the canal at Flushing, N.Y., alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinderblocks of the main building of the works, has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.
Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix. (page. 9.)

Pardon, the expression, but after this entree, I was hooked. We really get inside the hero's head. The intertextuality and self-reflexivity of this novel, where he often refers to the notes that went into the construction of the book, and refers to the novel itself throughout, breaks that golden rule - do not write about writing. Fuck that. I love reading about how writers became writers and the process. Next chapter, we have Cocteau in French, more details about what he was doing, i.e. working on the scow. A little piece on marijuana. Then later the description of two junkies, Tom, Fay and Tom's dog. He doesn't mince words in his description. The life of a junkie that has gone on beyond the possibility of "retreat", is really an end-game of self-destruction, sinking lower and lower - to become society's untouchable. Sad. Just think in Copenhagen they are going to have fix cabins that will have videos. The hero in the novel, at this point is able to keep the habit under control - therefore preach and be metaphysical. The kind of S.T. Coleridge approach. We as readers are fix-tourists.

Poets are Daft

A title like that is bound to get the poets rushing to the blog and all steamed-up ready to knock the stuffing out of the essay. Of course poets are not daft. Some of them maybe. But not all of them. The title or rather topic comes from a lovely little book by C. Day Lewis Poetry For You Basil Blackwell: Oxford. (1944). The intended readership was boys and girls. Boy, did CDL have fun with this book. He was really updating Sir Philip Sidney's Apology For Poetry (1597 around there). People in 1944, during the war and before, were not really appreciative of the poet's worth. You'd get these Colonel types stating with the authority of being in the Boer War, that poetry was plain daft and unmanly (memories of being buggered in public school) and others like Ernest Vanewright, an accountant at Grime & Grime would urge them to get a job, and perhaps a haircut. Then there will be the man sat in an armchair looking all Home University like, smoking a pipe, and arguing in a thick Lancashire accent, "No you can't, young man get anywhere in life by writing poetry." Then, and this is not in the order of CDL, you'd have the stockbroker dressed in pin stripes on the train platform at Barking, letting his Times slip down a crack or two, "Look you can't make money writing poetry." CDL uses these common truisms (a tautology but hey you need to double up sometimes, to supersize a point), to argue the opposite, so the little ones, those little mites, will move on from the Famous Five and tackle poetry. Not the stuff of the Victorians. Not the stuff you learnt by heart and could fart in your sleep. No, poetry you actually love. He starts with the assumption "Poetry is Daft". Now, I think he got to use a trope of that period, his poetic knickers in a twist. What he argues, in a Richard Dawkins manner, is that poets do think differently, but he does it...crazily.

Poetry who say poetry is daft are usually frightened of life, frightened of their own feelings and the mysterious of the world. (p. 1)

How true. You bastards who think poets are crazy - you need therapy! You need...poetry:

If you're afraid of having your feelings stirred in the way poetry can stir them, if don't want to see more of the world than meets the eye, if you're afraid to see beyond your own nose, then you certainly avoid poetry as you would a lunatic. (ibid, 1-2)

Not very convincing? Stirring. Like those stirrings under the bedsheets? Poets see things. Hear things perhaps. Regular Joan of the Arcs. Then CDL elaborates and makes the connection - poets and prophets. Jesus. The little kiddies are shitting themselves. Are poets really prophets? They have the "spirit breathed into" themselves. But hey,

But we must no assume, because of this, that poets are crazy.

Peter and Jane are trembling now. Was Mummy and Daddy right?

After all, you don't have to be a poet to feel "enthusiasm": each of you has moments when he feels a strange unaccountable excitement welling up inside him, a kind of "inspiration"; but you don't go whizzing off to the doctor and ask him whether he doesn't think you ought to be put in a lunatic asylum. Some poets do go mad, of course -- William Blake, William Cowper, John Clare, Christopher Smart did, and they were all fine poets. (ibid).

So Doctor, I have these episodes, when I look at a tree, and...

Yes continue Sonny.

I think it is...

Yes let your feelings out

Well Doctor I think that tree is like

Come on Sonny let it come out

Like a... banana

A what?

Doctor I see all these bananas.

Really Sonny, I thought you were going to be more imaginative than this displaced phallus simile

But Doctor...am I a ...poet

Rest assured you are not one of those, perhaps you might be a Music Hall comedian.

Oh my God Doctor - am I crazy

No Sonny you will make a lot of money...

For some daft reason, CDL has got into his head - it is only boys that want to be poets.

Reading Kenneth Rexroth's "Bird in the Bush" (1959)

Some writers are bold enough to tell you how it is. Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was one of those. He was experienced, went to the school of hard knocks, but like Nelson Algren, was urbane and sophisticated in his responses to the environment. He asked questions before sticking it on you. No, he had from an early period in his life as an orphan been a voracious reader of classics, positively hoovering them up by the set. Yet, in this instance, he was not a guy like Aldous Huxley who took volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica around with him in his suitcase - no the knowledge was palpable and streetwise. He was hip. However, like the hard-boiled Algren, Rexroth was a romantic of sorts. Always courting the ladies. All of them would leave him, bar one, who married him in the end as it was convenient. Rexroth had his soft and spiritual side - he was though in his way just as misogynistic as D.H. Lawrence. His rather phony idea of the sanctity of marriage is seen in his description of the epiphanic moment in Lawrence's writings:

Reality streams through the body of Frieda, through every place she steps, valued absolutely, totally, beyond time and place, in the minute particular. The swinging of her breasts as she stoops in the bath, the roses, the deer, the harvesters, the hissing of the glacier water in the steep river--everything stands out lit by a light not of this earth and at the same time completely of this earth, the light of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, whose source is the wedded body of the bride. from "Poetry, Regeneration, and D.H. Lawrence" (p. 189) in Bird in the Bush (1959.

I might get caught up in this erotic-mysticism if I was an adolescent kid just graduating from masturbating and looking or hankering towards something more meaningful. Sex is situated in the natural - but it is for Rexroth and Lawrence - one-way sex, not the I and Thou dialogue. Yet, Rexroth does catch the drift of the complexity of Lawrence, and in the next descriptive take on the minor prophet, echoes Lawrence's gift for communing with nature (probably his forte):

The accuracy of Lawrence's observation haunts the mind permanently. I have never stood beside a glacier river, at just that relative elevation, and just that pitch, with just that depth of swift water moving over a cobbled bed, without hearing again the specific hiss of Lawrence's Isar. These poems may not be subliminated (whatever Y.M.C.A. evasion that may refer to), but they are certainly pure and eternal. (ibid)

I like the swipe at the Christian prudery. Our Ken knew how to do those literary rabbit punches, hurt them good. He is also, as a poet, one who as a critic, which he categorically refuses to be in this collection, very good at quickly cutting to what matters in Lawrence. While some people have difficulty understanding the acoustics and metrical system of Lawrence - Rexroth, brilliantly captures it:

I think Lawrence was simply very sensitive to quantity and to the cadenced pulses of verse. In the back of his head was a stock of sundry standard English verse patterns. He started humming a poem, hu hu hum, hum hum, hu hu hum hu, adjusted it as best might be to the remembered accentual patterns, and let it go at that. (ibid., p.179)

As a poet, Rexroth excelled at finding out what was going on in other poet's works. In his other capacity as a translator, he had prejudices. He preferred the Chinese classics to the Japanese classics. Perhaps it was the bawdiness - like ranging Chaucer against Dante? I do not accept this approach. I can read the Chinese classic, The Monkey by Wu Cheng'en (translated by Arthur Waley) and enjoy its satire, and then lay it to one side and pick up the exquisite account of the Shining Price in the Tales of the Genji by Murasaki Shikabu ( translated by Edward Seidensticker). Nevertheless, one can really enjoy Rexroth's riff on Chinese literature and why he likes it. It is addictive. You really do want to go to the university library or onto Amazon/Abebooks and get a hold of the The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Water Margin . Yes, it is true, if you read these kinds of works, just like the sets of the classics you submerge yourself into another world, more than any role play game can do. That's the point of these essays. Enthusiasm. Eventually, despite wanting to lose your temper with Rexroth when he crudely deconstructs, but honestly, your taste for a writer or even a belief, you do want to thank him, because he got you engaged rather than passively sucking up literature - like a robot vacuum cleaner. In an essay on Martin Buber, "The Hasidism of Martin Buber", Rexroth like Edmund Wilson on the Dead Sea Scrolls, again gets you hooked on a different perspective to religion - not the Sunday school type. I suppose, Buber is in that group of writers and thinkers we (especially guys) like to incorporate into our worldview, a kind of intellectual brand statement. Today I am wearing Franz Kafka briefs, and Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский patent shoes, Martin Buber aftershave, a Jean-Paul Sartre white shirt. We are caddis-flies, really. Now, in the midst of reading the essay, and getting dreadfully lost in the Gnosticism, I spotted a typo. Thank (no)God/s for typos. It was the Idealist philosopher, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (3 September 1866 – 18 January, 1925). He had become a McTeggart. I do not think the two would have got along very well. McTag changed his name to inherit, and McTeg might imply a snipe at this name changing. Though it does in the ordinary language sort of way open up the possibility of discussing the reality of names. And (never start with and - but I do to flout convention), I once had a book from McTag's personal library. Not much kudos there. You cannot walk into a cafteria and say, look I got a book that once belonged to a British idealist philosopher. They would think you were completely crackers or daft - the subject of another short essay.

Anti-People Design

This park bench in leafy Montreal seems very comfortable, however, it is not the most comfortable bench to sleep on, since it has some curves that resist rather than accept the body. But no doubt you can sleep on it as that guy is doing. In the past year the Kings' Garden (Kongens Have) in Odense Denmark, has removed its wooden benches and replaced them with concrete cylindrical benches. These are fast-butt design. I mean you can't sit on a concrete surface for long without getting either cold or suffering from butt friction. These concrete benches also reflect a trend against nature. They are cheap and easy to maintain, but unsightly and not at all comfortable. So why on earth did they decide to litter the park with these benches? Well, the primary function was probably anti-people. They did not want homeless people, drunks, junkies or for that matter anyone, staying too long in the park as they like the trees that used to adorn the park, pose a threat to the ordinary citizen on a stroll or going to the station. Of course, nobody wants to be mugged or raped, nor do many people want to be confronted by people begging, or being obnoxious, However, some of us, in a meditative mood would like to take the time to sit and read or just look at the trees. These pleasures, of the solitary bench sitter, are gone. You now are exposed to all and sundry, and unable to relax at all - you cannot sit and rest your back - if you stay too long you will have to visit a chiropractor. So what is all this about, this anti-people design? It is targetting mostly those who need help. The unfortunates, a class which most of us avoid. However, this anti-people design of street furniture which includes toilets that are not free, sprinklers on lawns, spikes on fences, concrete defences, alarms, and generally anything that gets you to leave a space quickly - is also connected to anti-crime and anti-terrorism design. You can't throw away rubbish in some places, you can't sleep in many places, and more and more you simply can't enter a zone unless you have a credit card or belong there. Those apartheid housing estates now have armed guards to protect the American Dream of Disney values. Architects are now instructed to design buildings which can withstand explosives and a boeing jet crashing into it. Maybe the intelligent buildings of the future will class you through instant profiling. Those of a certain configuration will be denied access. What a ridiculously uncaring world we are creating, one that destroys nature because it harbours potential criminals, one that replaces natural coloured and comfortable seats with concrete blocks, so that one can sit for five minutes then move on. It is as if a neutron bomb was dropped on design.

Crime in America

As we watch the grilling take place in the recent hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one is reminded of the infamous Kefauver hearings of the early 1950's. Except in the case of the latter it was organized criminals on trial and not as hear criminal organizers - to paraphrase Kefauver. Both of these hearings revolve around communication and knowledge. The mobsters were tapping into the news cables and using information about racing results for illegal ends. They set up their own wire services to steal the news. It was all to do with results, (like insider trading). Of course as Estes Kefauver records in his "Crime in America" (1952) based on the hearings, the mobsters were so good that they could repair a connection after the wires were down in fifteen minutes, whereas as a whole army took three hours to get normal transmission then vital for the war effort. They were really organized. They bought people. People who they did not buy, they iced. Now what does this have to do with all these bankers and traders? They aren't in cosca, are they? No certainly not. But they do tend to defend their practices with the temerity of the mafia. When they are grilled. They start damage limitation exercises. Seek ways of offsetting the cost. Maybe they could blow it all away with a tax fiddle? But, you may argue, they are thugs. They are just doing business - one that enriched the US by trillions. Yes, however, the key products they created, the products of intellectual masturbation, the toxic debt repackaging of a Chinese mathematician, were just as insidious as narcotics. Everyone wanted them. Buy, buy. Those in the know, knew it was shit like the tulips of Holland or the real estate in Florida. They knew it was wrong and sold it on. Knowing full well that they would not have to pay - they would just take their commision. Even the mafia mobsters as cold-blooded as they were, would not rob their grandmothers - well some of them maybe. These people using every form of mathematical manipulation available, did a monumental shell game on billions of people. They did it on a scale that makes the mafia's operations look like a corner store robbery. Do they pay for it? Of course not, because like in the Kefauver Hearings, the reach of corruption is so great that if they were put on trial, the whole government at all levels would collapse, because so many politicians and those in the administration were made fat cats from these financiers. Then there is the Donald Trump law - if your billionaire goes down - don't worry - sooner or later he'll be back up again and the glorious system will be spinning its wheels again. What a pity there are no tough guys around to follow through, and kick the ass of what is a very corrupt system - which destroyed the manufacturing base of the United States, robbed people of their dream homes and caused collateral damage world-wide so that the poorer are poorer. The rich. Well they just dust off the insults off their Armani suits and get back on gaining money for themselves - and losing the money of others.

A Page from a Hard-Boiled Novel

There used to be a campaign in Britain to sell eggs, it had a slogan "Go to work on an egg". Now some of you like your eggs runny, and I am particularly fond of the yolky eggs that one can dip a soldier into (a soldier being a thin strip of toast with butter on it), but sometimes I'll have it hard-boiled. I guess if you were to sell the eggs today, you could have a mug shot of Nelson Algren, the quintessential hard-boiled writer from Chicago. Now Nelson was who the existentialists called in when there was a dispute over the meaning of life. Hard. Oh yes hard, but sweet on Simone de B. As you sit at your breakfast table taking in the latest news on the radio or tv or on the screen of your computer, you might take a break from the hard-core reality of a majorly fucked up world, and read some fiction. Nothing to take your mind off crime than reading crime fiction, or as they put it in the 1940's, a crime mystery. I have at my side "a genuine pock book mystery" by Raymond Chandler. It has a picture of a bald guy, and a hand lifting off a wig (toupee). Someone has kindly stuck what looks like a screwdriver (actually an icepick) into his neck. In the top left hand corner, the Pocketbook kangeroo, bless her heart seems all too cheerful about the guy's demise. For those of the 1970's, that red slip with a reference to Bay City tucked under the wig, might suggest the guy was killed for his lack of taste in youth bands. Since there is no tartan scarf in view, and the book was originally published in 1949, we can be assured that this cultural relativism can be put to rest immediately. As we breath a sigh of relief, we can move on to the title, "The Little Síster". Is that some clue or what? Well maybe. Maybe not. The slip or receipt seems to be one. The wig/toupee another. For darn sake are they spoiling everything? Then just to make sure you haven't hatched out your own scenario, they give you a cast of characters. If you go through those alone you might hazard (I like this word) a guess at who or what did what. I like the little bios, for instance:

G.W. Hicks

A sensitive type who doesn't like to be seen without his toupee

Mr Flack

House detective at Hotel Van Nuys; his salary is small and his cupidity great..

The guys or gals writing this stuff really soaked up the hard-boiled style! But they are amateurs. Wait until the supremo starts . We start with the door of the private dick. This is a wonderful entry, full of Chandler's powers of description and laconicism.

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black pain: "Philip Marlowe...Investigations." it is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in- there's nobody in here, but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if your're from Manhattan, Kansas. p. 1

Look how much Chandler packs into that paragraph. Firstly, he introduces the hero and his occupation, gives an idea of the layout and environs of the office, tells you something about the character's cynicism. Provides you with a brilliant metaphor of what the middle-class strive for - the American Dream ... "the all-tile bathroom". Establishes the style and tone. It is hard and informal. "in the sort of". Sets up an original duet with the hero and a bluebottle fly. Then anticipates what's going to happen next with that geographical oxymoron, "Manhattan, Kansas" What does Genette call this? Analeptic whatever. Now we are still on page one. In the next paragraph Chandler describes the season. Oh yes the season. It is not one of those laborious descriptions with layers upon layers of adjectives. It is cynical to hell:

It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rain are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains.

Economical, terse, but you get the picture. Next he follows this up by hard-boilerizing (what a ridiculous neologism :-))

The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

Look at how he plays with the constrast between the glamour of HOLLYWOOD and the sleaze associated with it. How he deftly moves from the call houses to the natural description of Californian spring. The purple-blue bloom of the jacaranda tells you this is a warm almost tropical place. So, after taking in the local exotica, Chandler gets straight down to business. Marlowe has to deal with that pesky "bugger" (as President Obama would call it) the bluebottle.

By the way, from my pov, I find the bluebottle and the greenbottle flies to be absolutely disgusting - give me a housefly or better still a greenfly any day. Back to the plot.

I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I,

end of page one.

He has you on the edge of your seat,what will happen next? And that brilliant cultural association - Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci (1892). Listen for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOt08kh_bew

Sublime.