Thursday, July 12, 2018

It's a Noir World After All

You know what's nice? Listening to smart and insightful people talk about things that fascinate you. Reading them too. That's also nice. As I can't be around everywhere these discussions and lectures and all are going on I'm in need of reading material these days.

Enter Alain Silver and James Ursini to feed my need for smart, topical engagement. The editors of many illuminating books on film including the Film Noir Reader (vols 1-4) have been doing it more than twenty years, and their latest, Film Noir Prototypes: Origins of the Movement offers essays on the origins of film noir from Robert Porfirio, Julie Grossman, Homer B. Petty, Tom Ryall, Richard Edwards, James V. D'Arc and Todd Erickson that will stimulate the enthusiast in film and noir aficionados everywhere. Good shit - check 'em out.

Also a bunch of swell pieces to link to today.

Is it me or is Megan Abbott just everywhere these days? Last week I linked to her piece on our need for and attraction to True Crime, then there's this interview in Vanity Fair with Gillian Flynn on writing prickly female characters that piss people off and I just read another piece by her examining her relationship with Raymond Chandler and especially Philip Marlowe in the #MeToo era.

Woody Haut reminds us that it's a Noir World after all and always has been, but holy shit is it in your face in the age of Trump.

Not a new piece, but David Joy writing about gun culture in the New York Times was a good one.

Another not new, but perennially worthwhile read is Kim Morgan's essay on Warren Oates which I was reminded of as this week coincided with Oates's birthday.

One week from tonight I'll be at Left Bank Books reading with N@B alum Fred Venturini and Josh Woods plus Kea Wilson, author of We Eat Our Own - check out Max Booth III's review at LitReactor. Then join Max, myself, Scott Phillips, Amanda Gowin,Tawny Pike, Jen Egan and Chris Orlet for N@B at Meshuggah on July 28.

2 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

https://themillions.com/2018/07/a-mad-woman-on-fire-on-sylvia-plath-and-female-rage.html

jedidiah ayres said...

Jeez, missed that one