Deus Ex Noir
I suppose it should be ex noctum or noctis. Maybe atrum. I don't know.
So anyway, in the midst of a schedule packed tighter than a hash smuggler's colon, I stole an evening of brief leisure time the other night. A couple of friends and I drove to the rendezvous point for the secret premier of the latest Dark Knight Returns trailer. You read that correctly. We drove. To see a movie trailer. The three of us went to a park in Daly City, as instructed on the "Why So Serious?" web site (it keeps getting better, doesn't it?). There, we joined a tribe of nomadic dorks who actually do this sort of thing for fun, while the rest of you spend your free time updating your Match(dot)com profiles or peeing through your locker grates onto the freshman chess club champion trapped inside.
Roughly a hundred and twenty-five people total showed up, most of them presumably leaving their parents' basement voluntarily for the first time in weeks. It was a lovely, warm Spring evening, and most everyone wore army surplus black festooned with Batman regalia; I counted sixty or seventy hardcore fans actually sporting Joker-esque clown make-up, a dozen clown masks, six or seven black trenchcoats and in all, maybe eight women.
At the stroke of 5:30, the clues went live on the web site and a hundred and twenty-five cell phones, laptops and pda's switched on in unison during this perfectly beautiful afternoon in the park. It was like Woodstock, only smaller and more socially awkward. And with grown men who collect trading cards and "action figures." And without Janis Joplin channeling your worst heartache years before you were born and without Jimi Hendrix setting fire to the national anthem and without chicks.
We began to move. There were landmarks to find, things to count, numbers to ascertain and website codes to decipher. The Homo dorkus travels in large packs to protect its lunch money. These packs move slowly. Its members have spent years hanging by their jockstraps from flagpoles and being snapped in the balls with coiled gym towels. We disengaged from the pack. We solved the clues ourselves. We went looking for the park with the cool kids to see if they'd let us hang out with them. We ended up at the theater, unable to deny our roots.
Everyone's preview pass was a Joker playing card, of which no two were alike. A pretty cool souvenir- mine looks like a Mayan deity as rendered by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. The trailer was cool. Vertiginous crane shots of Christian Bale swooping down from Gotham's skyscrapers; explosions and catch phrases; Heath Ledger's high-pitched snarl; explosions and catch phrases. The high point of the evening for me, however, was the final clue. The last set of double-digits came from the number of colorful handprints on a fence- part of a children's mural outside of a daycare center. Find the fence, count the handprints, crack the code. Simple.
I must, absolutely must, meet the person who orchestrated all of this before I die. Because anybody, and I mean anybody, who can get seventy-five guys to smear on psychotic clown make-up and then spend twenty minutes, en masse, lurking outside a nursery school... well, that person is my absolute hero. No question. That kind of irony could melt the polar caps.
Two weeks before that covert salute to John Wayne Gacy, I was privileged to be among the authors honored at this year's 2008 Library Laureates Dinner, an annual fund raiser held by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Each author was asked to give a five-minute speech to the attendees and, given the amount of crime writers in present- as well as the large audience of generous donors to the San Francisco Public Library- most of us spoke about our reasons for working within the genre and the larger significance of the library in our writing lives. Speaking about the genre and the library was easy (I culled a chunk of my speech from a history of noir fiction I had posted online some time ago); cutting my thoughts down to five minutes was not. What follows is the full version of my speech to the donors:
I'm often asked about my attraction to certain morbid works of fiction and film. It's easy for me to dismiss most of those questions, as they zero in on a tiny subsample of my overall tastes, as even a cursory glance of my library will prove. I'm not a fan of violence for its own sake, and most of my favorite works are not very violent at all. But they are dark. Yeah, really, really dark. My attraction to such works belies my background: I was born in Texas and grew up in middle-class, suburban Southern California. I served six years in Catholic school. I was an altar boy and a boy scout. I played soccer and built model rockets. I read voraciously and I seldom got in trouble at school or with "the authorities." In all, I was given the circumstances and opportunities most parents can only hope for their children. Something never felt right to me, though.
My reading was purely escapist, science fiction and fantasy which, for the most part, embarrasses me now. I knew I wanted to write, and I wanted to write the kinds of books I enjoyed reading. I saw no point in stories that took place in the real world because I wasn't happy in the real world, however sunny and idyllic it might have looked, but I was too young to understand why, much less articulate. I had many reading epiphanies to come, some from my college classes, most on my own: Italo Calvino, Steve Erickson, T.C. Boyle, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett to name a few. But my first epiphanies came upon being paroled from Catholic school, when I headed straight for the forbidden fruit isle of my college bookstore. I picked up (for reasons I can't recall) Equus by Peter Schaffer and The Stranger by Albert Camus. The latter pointed me in a straight line to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice; it was some time later I discovered Jim Thompson.
While I still don't consider myself in strict terms a crime writer, I can't deny that I've learned more from crime writers than any other; they get the most amount of milage from the simplest rules of writing. Nor can I deny that Cain and Thompson and the whole noir crew represented a huge awakening for me. I read science fiction to escape; I read noir to I learn what I was escaping from. Since then, my love of noir fiction- the classics and the neo-noir writers- has slowly crystallized over the years.
American morality was built on Puritan notions of God and the Devil; right and wrong have been black and white from the beginning. End of discussion. As America grew, a mythology emerged from our wild west that reflected these roots; the White Hat was always victorious over the Black Hat. Our cowboy mythology never considered stories where evil triumphed over good, much less conceived of stories where there was no good and there was no evil. The notion our world was built by the actions of men whom we chose to reward or punish for arbitrary reasons, with no thought of afterlife of eternal salvation or damnation well... that was too much for the Puritans' descendants who, by the 1950's, were enjoying a prosperity born of good triumphing over evil. The war was over, the White Hat was victorious (again); the Depression was long behind us and our optimism was at an all-time high. The middle class was growing and enjoying more leisure time than Americans had ever known. Horatio Alger would have been pleased.
But there was a secret buried beneath Ward and June Cleaver's lawn, and some people were cursed with knowing it whether they wanted to or not. In 1951, smack in the middle of Horatio Alger's dream, a humble, God-fearing gospel singer from Arkansas heard it whispered to him and wrote the words, "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." The idea that maybe, just maybe, our right and wrong were all wrong, that we lived a blind, deaf and godless black universe, this idea was sprouting like scores of alien pods and taking its deepest and fiercest roots in dime store pulp fiction. Tales of criminals, cops and salacious bedroom activity that everyone thought of but no one spoke of. Printed on cheap paper and sold for a few cents, these penny dreadfuls were penned by a legion of hacks armed with Underwoods who had no idea what they were starting.
Hacks paid by the word didn't keep the heat on by honing their prose. They hacked out story after story; forget character development and plot arc. They made a living by steroid-pumping their prose with adjectives, adverbs, corny dialogue and deus ex machina endings.
A few writers set themselves apart with pulp stories which were, in fact, honed and stripped bare. The prose stood out because it was "hard boiled" to the essentials and proved perfect for mouthing the sentiments of tough, jaded cops who were cursed with knowing the secret: No amount of prosperity or prayer could erase that fact that we had segregated schools, diner seats and even drinking fountains; that women were regarded as second class citizens; that sometimes a man killed not out of greed, jealousy or rage, but simply because, as Johnny Cash knew, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The characters in these stories were far from saints. They were part of the problem, they embodied the ugly secret that Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver didn't want to hear. Wrecking balls are not pretty.
Without an honest, candid assessment of a problem, no solution will ever come to light. The American turmoil in the following decade was nothing less than an prolonged and painful solution to the dark secrets of the Horatio Alger years, the racial segregation, gender inequality and political corruption. But before Howl, before On the Road, before Martin Luther King and before Malcolm X, before any of it, America's dark secrets were given a voice in noir.
Jim Thompson is, in my estimation, the absolute high priest of noir. At his worst, he was a hack; at his best, he was a willing scribe serving at the pleasure of our secrets. In Pop. 1280, the corrupt sheriff pauses for a moment and says to the reader:
"I'd maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I'd seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin'. Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books- nothing to look at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soaking' in on me here.
And then suddenly it wasn't here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to."
That's not a pleasant sentiment, and it's not one that's welcome in Horatio Alger's America. But some ideas are like that, they crack the rose-colored shell around our comfort zone, they remind us of the bigger world beyond our own, and that we share it with people who have ideas very different from ours and their own glass-enclosed comfort zones. Great ideas are like that, they're often dangerous:
The world is not flat.
We came from monkeys.
One God created everything.
There is no god.
Matter and energy are the same.
All men are created equal.
Slaves should be free.
Women should vote.
All expression should be free and protected.
The great heresies are the acid tests of history. Those societies which survive the upheaval of their home-grown dangerous ideas are the societies that leap forward, and this particular kind of history will never stop repeating itself.
I realize that I've made a large leap from pulp fiction to civil rights, from Jim Thompson to peace rallies of the sixties. I'll admit that yes, indeed, it's a very large leap, but I nonetheless believe it's a straight line. Consider that audacious connection between our great leaders and our lowbrow culture to be my own small contribution to this reserve of dangerous ideas.
That reserve is where we're seated right now. In the midst of our modern "marketplace of ideas," libraries remain the our first line of defense in preserving all ideas, regardless of who they serve or who they offend. Like all of us here, I believe that the protected expression of such ideas is my right, as inalienable as my own flesh and bone. But to stand here, in this institution which is dedicated to protecting these expressions at every cost, to be in the company of those gathered in support of that institution, that is not a right. It is a privilege and for it I am grateful.
-Craig Clevenger
18 April 2008
San Francisco, CA
I suppose it should be ex noctum or noctis. Maybe atrum. I don't know.
So anyway, in the midst of a schedule packed tighter than a hash smuggler's colon, I stole an evening of brief leisure time the other night. A couple of friends and I drove to the rendezvous point for the secret premier of the latest Dark Knight Returns trailer. You read that correctly. We drove. To see a movie trailer. The three of us went to a park in Daly City, as instructed on the "Why So Serious?" web site (it keeps getting better, doesn't it?). There, we joined a tribe of nomadic dorks who actually do this sort of thing for fun, while the rest of you spend your free time updating your Match(dot)com profiles or peeing through your locker grates onto the freshman chess club champion trapped inside.
Roughly a hundred and twenty-five people total showed up, most of them presumably leaving their parents' basement voluntarily for the first time in weeks. It was a lovely, warm Spring evening, and most everyone wore army surplus black festooned with Batman regalia; I counted sixty or seventy hardcore fans actually sporting Joker-esque clown make-up, a dozen clown masks, six or seven black trenchcoats and in all, maybe eight women.
At the stroke of 5:30, the clues went live on the web site and a hundred and twenty-five cell phones, laptops and pda's switched on in unison during this perfectly beautiful afternoon in the park. It was like Woodstock, only smaller and more socially awkward. And with grown men who collect trading cards and "action figures." And without Janis Joplin channeling your worst heartache years before you were born and without Jimi Hendrix setting fire to the national anthem and without chicks.
We began to move. There were landmarks to find, things to count, numbers to ascertain and website codes to decipher. The Homo dorkus travels in large packs to protect its lunch money. These packs move slowly. Its members have spent years hanging by their jockstraps from flagpoles and being snapped in the balls with coiled gym towels. We disengaged from the pack. We solved the clues ourselves. We went looking for the park with the cool kids to see if they'd let us hang out with them. We ended up at the theater, unable to deny our roots.
Everyone's preview pass was a Joker playing card, of which no two were alike. A pretty cool souvenir- mine looks like a Mayan deity as rendered by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. The trailer was cool. Vertiginous crane shots of Christian Bale swooping down from Gotham's skyscrapers; explosions and catch phrases; Heath Ledger's high-pitched snarl; explosions and catch phrases. The high point of the evening for me, however, was the final clue. The last set of double-digits came from the number of colorful handprints on a fence- part of a children's mural outside of a daycare center. Find the fence, count the handprints, crack the code. Simple.
I must, absolutely must, meet the person who orchestrated all of this before I die. Because anybody, and I mean anybody, who can get seventy-five guys to smear on psychotic clown make-up and then spend twenty minutes, en masse, lurking outside a nursery school... well, that person is my absolute hero. No question. That kind of irony could melt the polar caps.
Two weeks before that covert salute to John Wayne Gacy, I was privileged to be among the authors honored at this year's 2008 Library Laureates Dinner, an annual fund raiser held by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Each author was asked to give a five-minute speech to the attendees and, given the amount of crime writers in present- as well as the large audience of generous donors to the San Francisco Public Library- most of us spoke about our reasons for working within the genre and the larger significance of the library in our writing lives. Speaking about the genre and the library was easy (I culled a chunk of my speech from a history of noir fiction I had posted online some time ago); cutting my thoughts down to five minutes was not. What follows is the full version of my speech to the donors:
I'm often asked about my attraction to certain morbid works of fiction and film. It's easy for me to dismiss most of those questions, as they zero in on a tiny subsample of my overall tastes, as even a cursory glance of my library will prove. I'm not a fan of violence for its own sake, and most of my favorite works are not very violent at all. But they are dark. Yeah, really, really dark. My attraction to such works belies my background: I was born in Texas and grew up in middle-class, suburban Southern California. I served six years in Catholic school. I was an altar boy and a boy scout. I played soccer and built model rockets. I read voraciously and I seldom got in trouble at school or with "the authorities." In all, I was given the circumstances and opportunities most parents can only hope for their children. Something never felt right to me, though.
My reading was purely escapist, science fiction and fantasy which, for the most part, embarrasses me now. I knew I wanted to write, and I wanted to write the kinds of books I enjoyed reading. I saw no point in stories that took place in the real world because I wasn't happy in the real world, however sunny and idyllic it might have looked, but I was too young to understand why, much less articulate. I had many reading epiphanies to come, some from my college classes, most on my own: Italo Calvino, Steve Erickson, T.C. Boyle, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett to name a few. But my first epiphanies came upon being paroled from Catholic school, when I headed straight for the forbidden fruit isle of my college bookstore. I picked up (for reasons I can't recall) Equus by Peter Schaffer and The Stranger by Albert Camus. The latter pointed me in a straight line to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice; it was some time later I discovered Jim Thompson.
While I still don't consider myself in strict terms a crime writer, I can't deny that I've learned more from crime writers than any other; they get the most amount of milage from the simplest rules of writing. Nor can I deny that Cain and Thompson and the whole noir crew represented a huge awakening for me. I read science fiction to escape; I read noir to I learn what I was escaping from. Since then, my love of noir fiction- the classics and the neo-noir writers- has slowly crystallized over the years.
American morality was built on Puritan notions of God and the Devil; right and wrong have been black and white from the beginning. End of discussion. As America grew, a mythology emerged from our wild west that reflected these roots; the White Hat was always victorious over the Black Hat. Our cowboy mythology never considered stories where evil triumphed over good, much less conceived of stories where there was no good and there was no evil. The notion our world was built by the actions of men whom we chose to reward or punish for arbitrary reasons, with no thought of afterlife of eternal salvation or damnation well... that was too much for the Puritans' descendants who, by the 1950's, were enjoying a prosperity born of good triumphing over evil. The war was over, the White Hat was victorious (again); the Depression was long behind us and our optimism was at an all-time high. The middle class was growing and enjoying more leisure time than Americans had ever known. Horatio Alger would have been pleased.
But there was a secret buried beneath Ward and June Cleaver's lawn, and some people were cursed with knowing it whether they wanted to or not. In 1951, smack in the middle of Horatio Alger's dream, a humble, God-fearing gospel singer from Arkansas heard it whispered to him and wrote the words, "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." The idea that maybe, just maybe, our right and wrong were all wrong, that we lived a blind, deaf and godless black universe, this idea was sprouting like scores of alien pods and taking its deepest and fiercest roots in dime store pulp fiction. Tales of criminals, cops and salacious bedroom activity that everyone thought of but no one spoke of. Printed on cheap paper and sold for a few cents, these penny dreadfuls were penned by a legion of hacks armed with Underwoods who had no idea what they were starting.
Hacks paid by the word didn't keep the heat on by honing their prose. They hacked out story after story; forget character development and plot arc. They made a living by steroid-pumping their prose with adjectives, adverbs, corny dialogue and deus ex machina endings.
A few writers set themselves apart with pulp stories which were, in fact, honed and stripped bare. The prose stood out because it was "hard boiled" to the essentials and proved perfect for mouthing the sentiments of tough, jaded cops who were cursed with knowing the secret: No amount of prosperity or prayer could erase that fact that we had segregated schools, diner seats and even drinking fountains; that women were regarded as second class citizens; that sometimes a man killed not out of greed, jealousy or rage, but simply because, as Johnny Cash knew, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The characters in these stories were far from saints. They were part of the problem, they embodied the ugly secret that Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver didn't want to hear. Wrecking balls are not pretty.
Without an honest, candid assessment of a problem, no solution will ever come to light. The American turmoil in the following decade was nothing less than an prolonged and painful solution to the dark secrets of the Horatio Alger years, the racial segregation, gender inequality and political corruption. But before Howl, before On the Road, before Martin Luther King and before Malcolm X, before any of it, America's dark secrets were given a voice in noir.
Jim Thompson is, in my estimation, the absolute high priest of noir. At his worst, he was a hack; at his best, he was a willing scribe serving at the pleasure of our secrets. In Pop. 1280, the corrupt sheriff pauses for a moment and says to the reader:
"I'd maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I'd seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin'. Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books- nothing to look at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soaking' in on me here.
And then suddenly it wasn't here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to."
That's not a pleasant sentiment, and it's not one that's welcome in Horatio Alger's America. But some ideas are like that, they crack the rose-colored shell around our comfort zone, they remind us of the bigger world beyond our own, and that we share it with people who have ideas very different from ours and their own glass-enclosed comfort zones. Great ideas are like that, they're often dangerous:
The world is not flat.
We came from monkeys.
One God created everything.
There is no god.
Matter and energy are the same.
All men are created equal.
Slaves should be free.
Women should vote.
All expression should be free and protected.
The great heresies are the acid tests of history. Those societies which survive the upheaval of their home-grown dangerous ideas are the societies that leap forward, and this particular kind of history will never stop repeating itself.
I realize that I've made a large leap from pulp fiction to civil rights, from Jim Thompson to peace rallies of the sixties. I'll admit that yes, indeed, it's a very large leap, but I nonetheless believe it's a straight line. Consider that audacious connection between our great leaders and our lowbrow culture to be my own small contribution to this reserve of dangerous ideas.
That reserve is where we're seated right now. In the midst of our modern "marketplace of ideas," libraries remain the our first line of defense in preserving all ideas, regardless of who they serve or who they offend. Like all of us here, I believe that the protected expression of such ideas is my right, as inalienable as my own flesh and bone. But to stand here, in this institution which is dedicated to protecting these expressions at every cost, to be in the company of those gathered in support of that institution, that is not a right. It is a privilege and for it I am grateful.
-Craig Clevenger
18 April 2008
San Francisco, CA
You'll find out what I mean later.