I had a dream about Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart last night. But I spent part of it telling him his fake vampire teeth were protruding and looked stupid. So I'm gonna go ahead and say that makes it okay and not think about why they were in my dream in the first place.
You know how sometimes you find a really good blog and you're like "WHY AM I EVEN TRYING THIS HAS WON EVERYTHING." By which I mean the internet. Yeah. That's also how I felt when I saw a particularly amazing Doctor/River vid. "WHY AM I SPENDING SO MUCH TIME ON MINE IT WILL INEVITABLY FAIL NEXT TO THIS." (oh WHAT'S that? you want me to link to my vid? why, surely: Doctor/River vid of Immense Sadness)
Yeah, so, I think we should keep trudging on despite these clearly superior specimens of internettery. Because what does the internet need more of? CONTENT. ALWAYS. ALWAYS MORE. This stream of consciousness isn't going to write itself. Wait...that's probably somehow wrong.
ANYWAY. Continuing after that brief crisis.
I cannot take Dashiell Hammett seriously, and it's so not his fault. I feel awful about it, but his "entirely unique" (said the NYT) style has been so copied by absolutely everything concerning detective fiction that it's difficult to read without laughing. It feels like a parody of itself.
For example, the second sentence of The Thin Man is "She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory."
Right?? It is NIGH IMPOSSIBLE to read Dashiell Hammett the way people in the '30s read him. The Maltese Falcon is equally if not more ridiculous. I enjoyed The Thin Man, because hello Nick and Nora Charles, but Maltese is pretty much the fount from which all detective cliches spring.
Maybe if you took a hill person and taught them to read and then gave them some Hammett, they could give us some idea of how people saw it back then. Or one could read reviews from the '30s. Either one.
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