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Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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105 Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory Yo, Viking dudes, who knew your big-dog cock-of-the-walk raping and pillaging would put us all here, right smack dab in the middle of a decade filled with the stink of war? Yes, sir, boys and girls, we’re eating an old sock sandwich, but we’re speaking English, kind of a weird fluke (a piece of luck, not the parasite), because the kickass Angles were illiterate hicks while the sublime Greeks had been writing poetry for a thousand years, heck, history and philosophy, too, though they did shellac the Trojans and a lot of other guys as well, stuck them with their Bronze Age swords, testosterone run amok, or so I’m thinking here from my present perch—a swank appartement à Paris, swilling champagne, clothes black, as if my past were un chef d’oeuvre by Jan van Eyck, the soundtrack written by Johann Sebastian Bach or his son, rather than the Three Stooges-Lawrence Welk debacle that really occurred. My mind’s a train wreck of two lingoes, twenty-six letters, and thousands of quick images from movies, French—yes, but mostly aw-shucksma ’am Hollywood Westerns or policiers in stark black and white, and I’m the twist, tomato, skirt, the weak sister who rats out her grifter boyfriend, palms a deck of Luckies she puffs while scheming with the private dick to pocket twenty large, or I’m the classy dame, sick of her stinking rich life and her Ralph Bellamy schmuck of a boyfriend. That’s when Bogart’s three-pack-a-day croak (dialogue by Raymond Chandler) sounds like music, maybe John Coltrane, and you’re up the five-and-dime creek, 106 ma chère, because love can turn you into a mark, punk, jingle-brained two-bit patsy who’d take a fast sawbuck for snitching out her squeeze to the cops. Or you’re the crack whore with an MBA standing on the corner in chic Versace rags, falling for the DA till the Czech drug lord plugs him. So who are you? Not the hippie chick of your early twenties or the Sears and Roebuck Christian drudge your mother became, though Satan still stalks you on a regular basis. Is that guy a slick operator or what with his Brylcreemed hair and pockmarked face? There’s still smallpox in Hell, so you push him back whenever you can, grow orchids and for dinner cook risotto alla Milanese, because knick, knack paddy whack, you’re counting on something, not luck or rock and roll, though you’ve been there—at the HIC with Mick Jagger prancing around like a hopped-up jumping jack on speed. No, ma petite Marcella Proust, this is the joke: when your mother prays for you, your stuttering heart ticks a little more like a Swiss-made watch, and when you speak, does French come out? Nah, it’s the echo of those shock-jock Vikings, hacking their way across Europe, red-haired, drunk on blood and blondes, and though your husband looks like the Duke of Cambridge, that’s not what you love so much, ya dumb cluck, but his Henry James-Groucho Marx-Cajun shtick. Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s Moe, Larry, and Curly, nyuk nyuk nyuk. ...