To foil heavyweight, humorless William Blake, who would like to exert bossy mind control and take over my life, I have started reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. When I took the book off the shelf, I was under the impression that I'd already read it; but oddly enough, I think I've only seen the movie . . . that Elliot Gould 70s version, the one costarring a cat. I've read Chandler's The Big Sleep often enough, so I can't figure out why I haven't read this one as well. But anyway, the result is that I keep bursting into laughter. This is a very funny book--and the humor is almost entirely the result of Chandler's slangy, cynical, epigrammatic writing style, which just amuses me to no end. For instance:

"The [TV] commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles."

"At three A.M. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it."

"He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel."

"All tough guys are monotonous."

But my favorite parts are when he starts throwing out a bon mot and then gets carried away and can't stop--as when he considers the general subject of blondes. This extract I'm giving you is from the middle of a two-page digression on the topic:

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kakfa or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

If nothing else, this passage reinforces my joy in the power of and. When I was interviewed for the Sewanee Review, one question was "What's your favorite word?" I said and. And this is why: because it pushes me to keep writing, piling on those details, rushing down blind alleys and secret passageways, into slimy underground caverns or stuffy palace corridors. And never lets me sit on my preconceptions. It makes me keep imagining the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

But the other element I like about Chandler's blonde passage is the way in which he jerks that rhythmic door shut. And keeps us running. But then he slaps on a little declarative sentence. And then an even smaller fragment. It's like Richard Pryor with a nasty punchline or maybe like a jazz improvisation with a stiletto ending. And it feels so particularly American. Dickens could run for miles with an and, but he never ended a paragraph so that you felt like he'd ground a cigarette into your face.