To Dive and Lie in LA
Rereading Chandler; playing Mysterium; more
Creatures, if this is organized crime, I’d hate to see the messy kind. ...In this edition, I revisit Raymond Chandler, play a ghost game, and offer an alternative history of gay liberation. You can consider this election counterprogramming, I guess. I’ve said my piece about the election, in the last two paragraphs here. The only thing I’d add to that is that Donald Trump and his spokesmen seem to spend a lot of time thinking up ways to make America more racist. They’ve told you want they want.
Enough. Let’s get a breath of fresh air, with Philip Marlowe.
It Always Rains in Southern California
I’d read The Big Sleep a couple times before. This time, I noticed three things. First, it really is convoluted. You’re in a welter of interlacing half-planned criminality, where the “organization” of crime refers not to any kind of efficacy, but just to the fact that the criminals deploy the power of the overworld in service of the underworld. Second, we possibly do find out who killed the chauffeur! The thread of this sub-mystery gets so lost in the labyrinth that Chandler himself famously said he didn’t know whodunnit. But he does give you a story that might fit the facts.
And third… Chandler’s gaudy noir style cuddles up to genre horror more than once. Stephen King at his best reaches for effects like these:
The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
or
“I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
The General half-closed his eyes. “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”
I stared at him with my mouth open. The soft wet heat was like a pall around us.
or
I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman’s eyes.
Then her lips moved very slowly and carefully, as if they were artificial lips and had to be manipulated with springs.
There are other pleasures: “The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.” Marlowe’s tough-guy abjection, that Mobius strip that’s machismo on one side and masochism on the other, “‘I’m selling what I have to sell to make a living. What little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client.’” Philip Marlowe when things get sexy: “She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”
Chandler’s a master of the negative description. Nobody was following me, the rain hadn’t stopped, she hadn’t touched her cigarette. All of that is leading up to the last line. A life defined by the dreamed-of things that haven’t happened and won’t.
Rat Cafe
I’ve also been playing Mysterium, a game I discovered through Simcha Fisher’s invaluable Christmas gift list. Mysterium is ridiculously pleasing. The basic idea: You need a minimum of three players. One player is a Ghost, who has been murdered (I think—I still haven’t been the Ghost so I haven’t read the rules). The other players are psychics. The Ghost shows each psychic clues to the murder, but the clues are visions: gorgeously-painted cards, with mysterious symbols and dream-logic imagery. The psychics guess which suspect, murder location, and weapon their visions point to, and they advance through different stages of the game based on how well they intuit the way the Ghost thinks and what the visions mean. There are all kinds of fun little nuances—it’s a really well-constructed game—but that’s the basic idea.
Mysterium looks terrific. Spooky, lilting, all the classic pleasures of the haunted house plus the weird catercorner imagery of the vision cards. The Ghost gets a limited selection of visions to choose from, so the clues often require real leaps in thinking. Does this image of a knight and a lady in a tower point to the rope, because the lady’s hair is Rapunzeling downward from her prison window? Or is it the typewriter (yes, this is a game where the Clue-style solution can be, “The Nun in the bathtub with the typewriter”), because the image is like a fairy tale? Should you be looking for matching colors, echoing shapes, or something more conceptual?
Like, we had this conversation last night: “The books mean it’s the razor, because a book opens the same way a straight razor does.” (so true bestie)
“I think it’s the clock. I don’t know why. I just have a feeling, I can’t—no, it’s because a book stops time. You get lost in a book and then clocks don’t matter.”
And either one of those could have been the right answer! So, so cool.
There are several rounds in a full game, and you should not expect to get all the way through the game the first time you play. Expect to lose in the first or second round. Don’t worry, it’s still super fun. A huge part of the pleasure is learning how the people in your life think. What associations do they make? You end up finding out what kind of imagery they associate with death and the afterlife, with industry and nature; whether they think in shapes or oppositions or analogies.
We played on a black tabletop with black candles and some Halloween skulls and whatnot. Highly recommended.
icymi
I’m in Commonweal’s centennial issue: “There is a way of telling the story of gay liberation in which gay communities have been havens for expressions of love, selflessness, covenant, and care that were in danger of being lost in the modern world. This story opens out onto forms of beauty and even prayer that an anti-gay world would stigmatize. Let me sketch this side of history—polemical and partial but also true, hopeful, and intensely relevant to current pastoral needs.”
Links Losers Like
Stephen Adubato reposts an excerpt from his 2020 interview with Gloria Purvis, on politics and who rejoices at division.
Dracula sergioi orchid photographed by “Orchi,” found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
Reading the Commonweal article, and pausing around the mid-mark to salute this little refrain: "Which heterosexuals eventually noticed, to everybody’s misfortune."