Convocation: Last Bastion of Pure Malarkey

I managed to get myself set up here in Columbia's Butler Library. (One not-quite expired Yale ID + carefully cultivated appearance as hassled grad-student + three manila envelopes with papers pouring out + sprinkle of toe-tapping impatience = one visitor access card good for two months.)

The task at hand continues to be summiting my incredible mental block to sending out cover letters and resumes. Instead, I am catching up on incredible amount of truly trivial email, looking at Priceline for flights to Chicago (I absolutely hate anything to do with booking travel, so you know it must be bad over there in that folder marked 'Cover Letters'), and generally catching a lot of surreptitious glances at the Columbia students surrounding me. So far, they look pretty much like the kids at Harvard and Yale, only without the same percentage of obvious athletes.

My treat, though, has been the ongoing Convocation held on the lawn beyond the reading room windows. I was able--nay, privileged--to hear almost the entire address by whatever dean they wheeled up there before the assembled frosh and 'rental units. Either they have a PA system here designed for holding commencement in Times Square traffic, or the university hasn't decided that double-glazed windows are part of their global-responsibility kick.

It is amazing the heights of cynicism I can work myself up to when trying to write an appropriately sycophantic cover letter while being force fed, 1984-style, some propaganda about how the assembled fresh faces down there should consider themselves lucky, because they are now part of the great tradition of the Columbia family, just as the University should count itself blessed to have gathered such an impressive new generation of spectacular and diverse talents. Did I mention that I am over-weight and not that attractive?

On and on, the droning dean continues with this rousing little summation of just about every Ivy-League stereotype (did he really just say 'Best of the Best'?--you bet he did), until it is time for some school songs. Now here I face an inner conflict. Do I continue with my affected grimace of post-post-graduate ennui, or do I go to the window and listen to a new example of those '30s-era school tunes that I find so endearing. Shameful as it is to admit it, I actually know and enjoy singing all of my high school's rally songs, and I've never heard Columbia's before.

Deciding that sneakiness is the better part of valor (ahem.), I wiggled over to a window at the end of my row, made sure I was hidden from view by a large shelf of the New York Times Indecies, 1917-1969 (perfect for hiding both me and George Jr.), and listned for the best of what was to come.

Unfortunately, these kids didn't know the words, and I guess no one had printed them in the back of the program because all I was able to make up was some strident brass marching music and a lot of rumble-grumble that sounded more like the soundtrack to the orgy-cult scenes in Eyes Wide Shut than the pleasantly drunken festivities of college louts in beaver-collared club coats. Maybe that's a little hyperbolic, but I think you get the idea.

So now I'm back in my carrel, about to try to come up with a convincing conclusion to the sentence that begins "I have always been fascinated by the work of you firm . . ." Have pity on my soul.

In case you missed it: Sunday Styles

From the corrections:

"An article last Sunday about transgender lesbians referred incorrectly to Judith Halberstam, a gender theorist and professor of literature whose books include “Female Masculinity.” She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; it has no San Diego campus."

All build-up, no punchline.

Los Angeles at My Doorstep

The man in the 10-gallon fedora.

Summer is wearing itself out here in New York. The last few weeks have been pretty good because if that. The city is warm, but the beastly weather is behind us. And with a big chunk of the vacation-taking class off taking their vacation, everything seems almost relaxed.

I give this description of New York because I’ve been spending a lot of my time in Los Angeles, at least in my head. For almost two weeks I’ve been gobbling down Raymond Chandler books and making some inroads into those by Reyner Banham. These two are becoming my favorites for the real champions of that city (sorry OJ). I’ve barely looked at a picture of the city—just a few posted on the web by a friend of mine living in Venice—and I’ve kept away from movies or TV on the subject. Instead, I’ve got a pretty good picture going in my mind, and I want to keep it that way, unburdened by modern interference.

Three years ago I finished my first slow pass through all of Chandler’s novels, but that’s long enough back now for me to go for seconds and thirds. Back when I was in college I had tried hard to work in some of Philip Marlowe into the papers I was writing about cowboys and western landscapes, but I never got to go as far with that as I wanted. Maybe the tutors thought that no one student should be allowed to get away with reading both cowboy and hard-boiled pulp when he should be writing on the reading habits of the housewives of 18th-century Maine.

What makes Marlowe a great cowboy is that he’s all in the approach. While description is there in everything written, I think one of the things that makes cowboy lit special is that descriptions unfold over time and space. This phenomenon is hard to reproduce in an urban environment: in the city, you don’t see much until you’re right on top of it. On the other hand, there are few places you get to see farther ahead than in the west and on the plains. From western stories to John Ford, the description that takes advantage of the development of description that begins in the distance and develops as the eye moves slowly closer is one of the key tropes of the cowboy and his environment. It is not merely that detail is added as the context narrows from the long range to the face-to-face. Rather, the long views become retroactively more powerful with every nuance that is added in the approach. Maybe the most hyperbolic expression of this is the attempt to capture a literary technique on film—in Butch Cassidy, where Conrad Hall, the cinematographer, shot the famous chase scenes from miles away using a super-telephoto lens.

The best of Chandler takes advantage of this principle. Like no other character I’ve read, Marlowe is a man of the approaching description. Chandler has taken the unfolding methods from the free range and somehow brought it into the city. A blissfully inordinate amount of time in his stories is spent describing the drives to a small town, or up a driveway, or in the walk across the room. Motion, and the time required to produce it, is the generator of observation. Characters are set not by their physical devices, which are presented late and at close range, but long before as Marlowe drives and walks through cities and buildings. No where else in literature is so much time spent—as it is so freely in film—on describing rooms and places that the character is only passing through, ones where no action or dialogue take place. It’s no accident that the most famous—and most often referred to by the knight-errant crowd—scene in Chandler’s books is the not a stand-off or a bit of dialogue, but in the passage that brings Marlowe from the street curb, up the lawn, through the front door, and back into General Sternwood’s hothouse of orchids. By the time Chandler gets around to introducing the General, its all gravy, because we know so much from the procession we took with Marlowe to meet him.

I’ve been wondering a lot about what Banham would tell me about Chandler. I’m sure he read him, and I’m willing to bet he loved the stories. After all, here’s a Brit who fell in love with the highways and sprawl of LA long before it was fashionable. Banham is hot on the possibility of passage in LA—the way it is a place to move through and a series of environments to be moved between. This seems like a good fit with Marlowe’s approaches, and I’ve been picturing a designer/detective pairing where Daniel Libeskind in glasses motors around with Humphrey Bogart in a fedora. I think USA networks would pick it up.

The latest in this orgy has been reading Killer in the Rain, a collection of the stories Chandler wrote for magazines early in his career that he then recycled into his books. They are shorts and rough drafts of the episodes that would come to dominate his best-known books. They are also filled with some of the most outrageous hard-boiled lines. Let’s end with some highlights:

“The road dropped to the lake level and I begin to pass flocks of camps and flocks of girls in shorts on bicycles, on motor scooters, walking all over the highway, or just sitting under trees showing off their legs. I saw enough beef on the hoof to stock a cattle ranch.” – "The Lady in the Lake," 1938

“The lobby—they called it a foyer—looked like an MGM set for a night club in the Broadway Melody of 1980. Under the artificial light, it looked as if it had cost about a million dollars and took up enough space to for a polo field. The carpet didn’t quite tickle my ankles.” – "Bay City Blues," 1937

Notes From TV Land, Vol. 1

Not much--actually nothing at all--has been going on here in the Hollow Scene. I remain remarkably jobless. Really, it's not that remarkable, since I've been doing everything I can to avoid sending out resumes. I've been trying to set up a complicated wireless network in my not-exactly gigantic apartment. I've been failing to coax my desktop out of some sort of techie malaise where it crashes every time it sleeps. I've read just about every Stanley Kaufman film review I can find on The New Republic. I think you get the idea.

My listless perusal of all thing not related to finding employment has led to some interesting discoveries. One is that a Netflix cue can only hold 500 movies at a time; apparently you will not be allowed to plan your movie rentals three years from now. Another is the varies and exciting world of daytime cable. Now, anyone familiar with me and my job searching habits will know that I can pack away a solid four hours of Law and Order a day if need be. Every once in a while, though, I need to dry out, and leave the guys at the 2-7 off the tube for a stretch. Woe is, that doesn't mean I turn off the TV.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of why a 28 year-old, presumably well-educated young man would wallow in his burgeoning weight problem and lack of gainful employment by spending so much time exploring the nether-regions of digital cable (will we ever get back to this?--I doubt it), I'd like to make a few comments on what is going on out there past channel 30.

Today's will be on David Foley and Brovo's Celebrity Poker Showdown. This show is a brilliant waste of airtime. The fact that Bravo can eat up two hours of programming at a stretch is incredible, and I hope it led to the rapid promotion of whichever mini-executive for scheduling thought it up. Why is it so clear that this stretch is a stretch, you ask? Because even the host seem bored--so bored that even post production can't hide that he would rather be almost anywhere else. Foley, who one must allow doesn't have a lot else to do with his time, often appears to be using his wildly-spinning eyeballs to suss out a means of escape every time the camera is on. In addition to this all-so-subtle body language, he makes frequent comments on air tipping us off on his desire that "this will end soon" and "it can't go on much longer."

Poor David Foley. He was so brilliant on The Kids in the Hall, and at least he got to make a real income while hanging around with Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney on News Radio, even if he was the straight-man. Now, badly overweight and obviously looked down upon by even the B-list celebs playing poker (how is it possible that the incredibly awkward professional poker player they have as his sidekick is more respected by the guests?), his grey hair and goatee put the finishing touches on his current incarnation as an alcoholic leprechaun. I used to feel sorry for the other Kids in the Hall that Foley, who never seemed quite as good as the rest of them, managed to get a mainstream career out of the whole thing. Now, though, a moment's consideration of how miserable and awkward Foley looks trying to pall around with a bunch of actors cranky for having just been closed out of a poker tournament leads me to the conclusion that they all most be quietly laughing. Can you imagine what it must be like in his special cable purgatory? Your co-host is on the show because he has perfected a card game through thousands of hours of on-line game playing culminating in a week-long tournament featuring guys wearing mirrored shaded and headphones pissing into plastic bags beneath the table. Your guests are always unhappy to see you, because when they do it means they just lost to, or were perhaps humiliated by, stiff competition such as Alec Trebek or Mario Cantone. Your audience is a bunch of Vegas partyers--probably soused--who have run out of money for their own gambling and are thus forced to watch others do the gambling for them. What a dream! This existence makes that of Bravo's other non-star, Kathy Griffin, look like a tropical paradise (hey, she occasionally gets to go outdoors in LA and appears to be surrounded by people who actually love and care for her, although we can't be so sure).

Anyway, I'm sure that Scott Thompson is probably having more fun doing whatever it is that he does these days, probably because he's doing it in chaps.