Tag Archives: Thomas Pynchon

The Long Goodbye: Altman and Gould’s Marlowe, the Scuzzy ‘70s, and an Imagined Soundtrack

Director Robert Altman called his 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled crime novel The Long Goodbye “a satire in melancholy.” The film stars goofily sincere Elliott Gould as detective Philp Marlowe alongside the beautiful Nina van Pallandt, baseball pitcher turned controversial memoirist Jim Bouton, film director Mark Rydell, the stormy Sterling Hayden, and Altman regularContinue reading “The Long Goodbye: Altman and Gould’s Marlowe, the Scuzzy ‘70s, and an Imagined Soundtrack”

“The Dream of the Gentle Flood”: Thomas Pynchon, Brian Wilson, Neil Young & Los Angeles

Listening to Simon Joyner and Tyler Wilcox’s recent conversation about Neil Young’s song “After the Gold Rush” for All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast, I recalled that I had written an interpretation of the same song in an unpublished essay exploring the recurrent imagined image of the flooding of Los Angeles in the workContinue reading ““The Dream of the Gentle Flood”: Thomas Pynchon, Brian Wilson, Neil Young & Los Angeles”

Time Passes Slowly

In 1940, the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote a piece called “On the Concept of History” as he was trying to escape from Vichy France. Within the essay, Benjamin shares a rhyme that was written in the midst of France’s July Revolution of 1830, when it was reported that people had shot atContinue reading “Time Passes Slowly”