On rather short notice I was flown out to Los Angeles by a friend who needed help moving cross-country. The 2 weeks I subsequently spent in California will provide the grist for a few blogs from me for a bit.

So, 2 days after a telephone call I found myself on a plane going to Denver, then Los Angeles.

I equipped my iBook with every novel written by Jim Thompson for the long flight. Thompson works nicely as a writer to read while going out to Los Angeles. Why? Well, for one thing, Hollywood ruined Thompsons’ creative life, as this article details. It’s always good to remember how fucking disgusting Los Angeles is while flying there. Remembering that it destroyed a writer this good is always helpful.

Also, Thompson’s work and characters always operate in a moral vacuum that seems to summarize the reason people arrived in Los Angeles. They may be may be dumb as an ox, hellishly empty and to not have any morals, but it’s also fun and kind of sexy. Reading Thompson allows one to empathize with that philosophy, if only for 120 or so pages.

Thompson, to get back to a basic introduction, is a crime writer from the fifties who writes at a fairly low reading level fast paced stories that value plot over description. While often writing basic noir stories, Thompson kept his books beyond the norm through his intense first person characterizations and themes which often subverted the traditional themes of a noir or crime story. This makes him, for me, the perfect airplane and/or ebook read.

The 2 I covered each way were 2 of his better books, “A Hell of A Woman” and “The Nothing Man.” Neither is a good introduction to Thompson, however, but instead probably best read as a 3rd or fourth or fifth book by him. If you’re picking up a Thompson book for the first time, the choice is easy. The Killer Inside Me. After that one you’ll either be hooked forever or leave him forgotten.

I’ll finish this Thompson summary with 2 paragraphs from “The Nothing Man” that tickle my fancy. They’ll also give you a better vibe of whether you would want to bother reading him:

Unfortunately, my laptop batteries do not last as long as the flight. So I was also forced to pick up a Spin magazine, but we’ll leave that until the next part of this….

A new installment of “Yak in the City” by myself and supahC.

“Saddam continues to try and hold up this war by not having weapons of mass destruction, and that is something we simply cannot allow. He consistently flouts the inspectors by not having a secret cave full of chemical warheads, with Tariq Aziz laughing loudly next to a giant map with a ring drawn round Chicago while a digital clock counts down, and that is, frankly, intolerable.”

From The Independent.

Rock flavoured bootlegs from the mighty Soundhog.

Base58 is the new boomselection.