It's Raymond Chandler's birthday. Isn't Philip Marlowe a great character? I also like the fact that Chandler was over fifty when The Big Sleep (1939) -- his first novel -- was published. Writing was really a second career after the civil service. Like a lot of civil servants/artists, he had a number of unconventional relationships. Still, despite a wicked personal life and lots of booze, he managed to live to 70. And all his Marlowe novels have been adapted into movies.
Ah, grasshoppers, speaking of unconventional relationships, Monica Lewinsky turned 34 today. Bill Clinton's equivalent-to-cuckolded wife Hillary is the only woman now seriously running for president. Funny how things twist and turn. Lewinsky is now married, but not to Bill Clinton. So is Soon-Yi Previn, now 36 -- to Woody Allen, now 71. It should be pointed out that Allen and Mia Farrow, Previn's adoptive mother, were never married and he had no legal ties regarding her, and that Previn was 22 in 1992 when that scandal erupted. Lewinsky, incidentally, was 22 when she began her relationship with Bill Clinton in 1995. And these are smart people! C'est la vie. It's not as if Voltaire or Ben Franklin were immune to such behavior.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
Birthdays: Raymond Chandler, Haile Selassie I, Hubert Selby, Jr., David Essex, Theo van Gogh, Martin Gore (Depeche Mode), Philip Seymour Hoffman, Thea Dorn (Christiane Scherer), Alison Krauss, Monica Lewinsky, Seong Hyeon-ah, Stefanie Sun, Michelle Williams (Destiny’s Child).
Bon voyage!
6 comments:
Ahhhhhhhh, the ripe age of 22 - I just had an epiphany! Thanks for that.
Signed, Grasshopper Pythia
I am a civil servant, but I can assure you that my relationship is very much conventional.
I did read "Benjamin Franklin and the Women of Paris," back in my college days. Read his "How to" biography too. Neither book helped me in the dating arena.
I love Chandler. The prose alone is so brilliant and ironic. I forget the book it's in but he takes a gun away from a thug and winds up holding two weapons and says something like "There I was, Two Gun Marlowe, The Kid from Cyanide Gulch."
Haile Selassie I...get up, stand up, speak up, for your rights, let's smoke the ganja man.
OK so by this logic every 18-22 yr old who had hit on me when I was a superstar open mic host I was a fool for not taking to bed?
C'mon Erik legal tie or not he was the male parent figure in a long time relationship with Mia Farrow.
Yeah, I find Chandler an inspiration that he started when he did and did so well.
Chandler is a God.
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