…a complex of …well … minor feelings. It was a pleasant day, as far as weather goes. It was Pigneto, an area of Rome that I like. I had been taking Italian classes at “Moby Dick” in Garbatella, meeting a lot of migrants. I liked the non-preachy quality of this graffito. It left me in a productive middle ground.
It’s the Great Depression and you can see it in their faces, even the baby’s. But they have dressed up for the WPA photographer: everyone is in their finest, except for Jack, whose oil-stained pants give away his probable profession of roughneck. When you check the background you notice that the walls seem to be made of cardboard, rather than gypsum or lathe (because they hoped they would be out of this place soon).
Learn why the film ended this way in American, Hard-boiled and Noir: A Guide to the Film and Fiction
Yes sir, time for cotton candy and brats, whirling rides that make you throw up, crowds that smell of smoke (and dope these days) and the livestock barns, the stock car racing. Damn, how did I do without it?
May 10 – November 14, 2021
This book takes a new approach to the American-ness of hard-boiled fiction and reprises the award-winning website detnovel.com. There are several new essays and author portraits, adding to the encyclopedic overview of the dark side of American detective fiction and film from the 1820s to today. No boy detectives or inquiring spinsters here, but if you like Dashiell Hammett, or the film Memento, or the writers Big Jim Thompson and James Ellroy, this is a book you need. This is American tough and noir. Scholar William Marling explains the roots of this side of the detective genre in the public fascination / fear of actual crime, then he traces the internalization of that dread more recently in “memory noir.”
That espresso pot, so coffee-stained now
a veteran of the Covid Wars, grizzled and wiser
like Grant writing his Memoirs after It was over:
how do you thank a thing, stamped from metal
in Milano, except to burnish it on Saturdays.
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