Bent stalks of cane

James Cain's novels, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, & The postman Always rings twice, were turned into decent Hollwood noir flicks in the 1940's so I thought I'd give some of his other products a read. 

He tried to catch what he labeled the vividness of speech  the average's man.  The speech in Serenade, the story of an American opera singer who loses his voice while working In Italy but regains it in Mexico where he falls for a Mexican/Indian prostitute and takes her to the USA where he becomes a Hollywood star then  starts to re-kindle his opera career. He re-connects with a rich patron and spends most of his time with him  and ignoring his girl. This is where i got lost. All of a sudden, his girl accuses him of being a fag and in love with his patron.  A little more plot connection would've nice. Surprise, surprise, he acknowledged he was a fag.

While I was reading Serenade, i kept  wondering if William Burroughs used some of parts this style later in Naked Lunch and why was Henry Miller  banned during the same time frame. I understood more how Jack Kerouac could become a top seller in the 1950's. I want to clarify that I'm  connecting these writers by their rapid fire and, at times, disjointed plots, not that they wrote on similar topics and/or themes.

I thought about Kerouac's Tristessa while reading the parts of Serenade focused on Mexico.

I'm reading Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit looking for more noir and less vividness. 

2/1/13 

Definitely more noir in Counterfeit with requisite mobster back biting and political corruption

2/1/13- 

Butterfly stood for the birthmark passed down to sons. What appeared to be incest most of the story wasn't. Jess'wife took their two daughters and moved in with Moke. 18 years later one daughter Kady  returns and tempts Jess who doesn't give in until he finds out that Moke is Kady's father. He notices the butterfly on Kady 's son's belly then sees the same butterfly on Moke's stomach while they're secretly preparing to kill each other. Plenty of shenanigans in this backwoods tale.

2/25/13 

 Having chuckle thinking about how some members of the literary press who've tried to lump Henry Miller  & William Burroughs together. Obviously they didn't read past page 1 of books by either.

5/24/13: 

I'm not sure if we needed Ardai to make Cain's last work Cocktail Waitress available. The book is stuck in neutral or spinning around. Maybe some works are better left unpublished.
Thinking of a Henry Miller line again "everything has been analyzed to the point of nulllity."

7/4/13 

I watched Drugstore Cowboy (1989) again last night and got another mild chuckle seeing Burroughs as Tom, the junkie priest. His glee when the Matt Dillon character gave him free dilaudid appeared to be authentic.

9/27/13

Junkies need their sugar

10/21/13

Consider this old quote and inject the internet:

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. Henry Miller

11/7/13

 New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.

JAMES M. CAIN, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978

1/15/14

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.” 
Henry Miller from Tropic of Cancer

6/14/14

Henry Miller

“Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed”

9/12/14

  Henry Miller line..again

 "everything has been analyzed to the point of nulllity."

10/1/14

 Anyone else feel this:

 Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

William Burroughs

10/27/14

Line from Drugstore Cowboy

Diane was my wife. I loved her, and she loved dope. So we made a good couple

12/18/14

 “The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.” 
― Henry Miller, Sexus

12/28/14

From a 1969 NYT book review Here's Cain:

People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf. They paid me and that’s the end of it.”

2/8/15

Adding Walter Mosley to my bent stalks list: Quick review on Debbie doesn't do it anymore 

It starts with the scar tattoo target under Debbie Dare’s right eye, moves through finger pointing at the timeless contradictions of those who bash the porn industry while reveling in its product and lands nicely as Debbie the waitress raising her son . I read the book in a day and Mosley never fails to entertain, but has tended to become preachy through his characters on race issues.

Mosley’s efforts to capture Dare ghetto dialect remind me of Kerouac’s effort to capture a young southern black boy’s dialect in Pic.

3/27/15
Time is the only critic.

JAMES M. CAIN, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978

4/2/15

James Cain on  Mencken from a Paris Review interview: no 69

 I don't think Mencken would have lifted a finger to defend the rights of some colored man in Baltimore to get up and make a speech against the white society

5/5/15

 Burroughs vents for me today:

 My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”

7/27/15

Naked Lunch was published in the early 1950's:

 “Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.” 

― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

12/5/15

Headlines are full of gun control mania so I'll  dial back to a time  when censors  tried to control the pens of Henry Miller & William Burroughs.

5/25/16

Mull over this Mencken quote:

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

6/29/16

Still relevant old quote from Henry Miller

 “We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests"

10/9/16

The "trumpeting" of  vulgarity in the cybersphere takes me back to a letter from #henrymiller to his gal #anaisnin

“I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.”

While #hilary wants more gun control, I'll turn to a line from an old queer #williamburroughs who didn't have much use for women .

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it

5/7/17

I've watched quite a few reruns of the Perry Mason 1950s TV series and was hoping the 1930s novels were different and this one (The Case of the Velvet Claws: A #PerryMason Mystery #1 ) is. Some of the better elements:  Mason: Less time in the courtroom, more time on the streets, snappier back and forth with clients and others. Blunter Della Street. Grittier Paul Drake

What disappointed me is the publisher's foreword or fore warning that 1931 was a different time with different attitudes toward race and gender. Do we have to protect hyper-sensitive readers from the past and or can lawyers sue the use of words written 86 years ago?

9/1/17

Random thought: Maybe Hollywood will make a #PerryMason movie based in the 1930's and truer to #gardner 's books?

7/1/18

No Pockets in a Shroud by #HoraceMcCoy, the author of They shoot horse don't they, is a revelation. The books lead character Mike Dolan is a flawed man, muckraker, and an amateur thespian who gets his head blown off in the final scene.Depression era books are hectic and may not bore text- mad typists.

7/7/18

If I were on a tv studio set with these dead writers I'd ask   #burroughs about North Africa, #henrymiller about Parisian whores, and #kerouac about baseball.

11/11/18

“Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.” 
#ErleStanleyGardner

03/29/20 

“Married men get so they make a routine even of keeping a mistress” ― Erle Stanley Gardner, from The Knife Slipped 

8/15/20

 "A gun is like breath to a drowning man--it has to be drawn in haste." James M Cain

11/22/20

While reading Sulky Girl, a #PerryMason novel by Erle Stanley Gardner published in 1933, I was confounded seeing the word clews a number of times and wondered was the dude born in England? He was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1889, and clew is an archaic version of clue.

2/8/2022

I'm enjoying "Shills Can't Cash Chips" by Erle Stanley Gardner, featuring private detective Donald Lam, published in 1960 for   a vocabulary free of woke culture influences. It's part of the Cool and Lam series that Gardner penned as A.A. Fair.