#seenonlyfromadistance

[anintelligentoctopus]

seenonlyfromadistance replied to your post: Incidentally, in my search for whatever it was I...

duuude Level 7 is one of my favorite books! I love the way it crumbles towards the end… it’s a great piece of writing. I’ve read it three or four times. Didn’t know it was dramatized! I’ll have to find that!

Seriously? Awesome!

Oh yeah, the way it ends is so good- the random words -I don’t know if it’s the same in every edition but mine has them really widely spaced as well- like final blind scribbles, and the bit about the tape... When I first read it (when I was like 11- my granddad loaned it to me for part of a school project I was doing on the Cold War), the thing that really struck me was how there are absolutely no references to either the US or the USSR or anything and no way of telling where X-127 is supposed to be from, which I thought was really clever

They streamline the plot a bit and remove some of the subplots (not the one about X-117, though) to fit it into a 60-minute tv episode, but it ain’t half bad at all. And here it is on dailymotion

[anintelligentoctopus]

seenonlyfromadistance replied to your post: I do kinda want to read Playback, for the sake of...

It’s terribly disappointing, but I understand the need for completeness. I think Playback is a book better ignored. Read the short stories. Read “Poodle Springs”. Hell, even read “The Black-Eyed Blonde” which does Chandler better than Playback does.

Yeesh. That bad?

I did actually read the first few pages of The Black-Eyed Blonde at the bookshop and it seemed to fall short of his style, so if that does it better than Playback...

[anintelligentoctopus]

seenonlyfromadistance replied to your post: So I finally watched Robert Altman’s The Long...

oh man I have never agreed more with anyone. That movie doesn’t do any part of the book justice (the characters, the emotions) and it bums. me. out. I recognize that maybe it’s a good movie, but it’s not at all a movie of a book I genuinely love.

Exactly. As a movie on it’s own it’s fine, but as an adaptation of The Long Goodbye, it falls down and misses so much of what got me so emotionally invested in that book.

There’s so much you can do with the various elements in the book- the characters (Terry Lennox, who is such an interesting character, is wasted), the complex relationships between them all, Marlowe’s feelings towards Terry and it’s something you can really get an audience emotionally invested in. But it changes so much about all of that, that it doesn’t really feel like The Long Goodbye- the plot elements are there, but even then, it changes key things about those, which in turn changes what the book was going for in the first place

[anintelligentoctopus]

seenonlyfromadistance replied to your post: That was incredibly sad. I knew it would be sad...

oh man no book has ever been more utterly heartbreaking to me than The Long Goodbye. I read it a year ago and it continues to wreck me daily.

I know I’m not going to be over it any time soon. And I’ll probably end up re-reading it before too long and getting sad again

[ghostcat3000]

HEY HEY HEY I know this is late BUT I saw your post about The Long Goodbye and I want to talk about that book fOREVER. What are your thoughts??

It’s been a while since I had TLG-related feelings meltdown...

I love how the mystery manages to be both central and irrelevant. Its language and its atmosphere are so sad, the sadness of it permeates everything, and the kind of loss it touches on is the kind that happens so slowly that once you’ve realized it has happened, you’re too far away to do anything with it. You learn nothing other than what you already suspected.

The writing is out of this world beautiful.

“When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.” 

-Raymond Chandler

The book is exactly what the title says, a long goodbye. The slow process of grieving for something you never knew you had. In this case, a kind of love, a kind of friendship, a combination of both.

[erics-idle]

day 17. find the funny with these dudes

[siriuslyangela]

J!

At first I thought this was going to be tough but then I was like hang on a sec. (In no particular order)

1. J.K. Rowling2. Jensen Ackles3. Jared Padelecki4. Jewelry making5. Jenna, my first/previous dog.

put a letter in my ask box