Tell me your troubles and doubts

Elliott Chaze's stomping 1953 noir classic Black Wings Has My Angel is available in a new edition from New York Review Books. If you dream of becoming a writer the introduction by Barry Gifford will set you straight.

Chaze was a fairly large man, seventy-two years old when I met him. He was cranky, bitter about having been mostly ignored as a serious writer but making attempts throughout our visit to pretend he didn't really care.

That's one of the brighter bits. But the novel sings. Go buy it. Chaze is very dead so he'll never know it's being rediscovered but that shouldn't deny you the pleasure.

Trance state

"Once I'm writing a novel, it's like laying a few bricks every day to build a house until the house is done. I write early in the morning. I work from seven or eight until one o'clock in the afternoon. I just add to it. In general, I don't know where I'm going with it. I like to have a process of discovery, so it's kind of a mystery to me where it goes, but I know the characters well ... When I'm involved in a novel, it's really like being in a trance for the several months that it takes. I'm preoccupied. But the great thing, Todd, is that there are no rules. That's something I always liked about being a writer. However you get it done, you get it done."

 -- Barry Gifford interviewed by Todd Summar, 2015

Bedside reading

Crisscross

Philip Matthews has collected images and texts on my favourite David Lynch film, Lost Highway in an effort to trace its origins:

The beautiful-sounding phrase "psychogenic fugue" became the official explanation for the Fred Madison/Pete Dayton switch in Lost Highway but there is another source, one I'd never considered, one which seems obvious now given the timing (a mid-90s production, a 1997 release). The endless road, the car chase and police sirens, the homicidal jealousy, the murdered girl and her shady friends ... this was a rare instance of Lynch topicality, of stories ripped from headlines.

OJ Simpson? I think he's right.

Lost Highway is written by the great, great Barry Gifford who wrote The Sinaloa Story and Perdita Durango. He's also B-movie / noir movie buff and to understand where Lost Highway was coming from it might also help give a sideways glance to his collection of essays on the genre, The Devil Thumbs A Ride. As a fan and a critic Gifford is well aware of the effects of practical limitations on film making -- e.g. censorship, budgeting problems, arguments with studios, problem actors. To me Lost Highway always felt like a compendium of such "mistakes": two films mashed into one; the same role played by two different actors; one actor playing two roles, etc.

Later Lynch would double-down on the one-actor-playing-two-roles trope for Mulholland Drive, to great effect.

Maybe everyone else already knows this... I haven't read around.

Also: Patricia Arquette. Twice.

Gifford was published in the UK by Rebel Inc, an imprint of Canongate Books, so I was introduced to the full range of his work when Canongate were publishing Shirker. After I read The Sinaloa Story and The Wild Life Of Sailor and Lula, my writing changed.

Think I'll spend eternity in the city

The last, last edit, Pete, is stacking up real neat - I'm thinking Wednesday next week, in the out box by Friday and then God knows what. A day's break and back into the three other manuscripts (I'm serious – count 'em) or maybe - or maybe something new. There's nothing else to do except work. Although today was the sort of day, to quote Colin MacInnes, that only an old whore like London could throw up. Sunny and everything, and the cafe where I do most of my work was empty. Everyone was outside grabbing the weather while they could.

When I was 12 or 13 and totally into photography my brother recommended Absolute Beginners to me because it's about a photographer, but it turned out to be so much more. I clocked the Peter Blake cover – I was that kind of kid – but not the date of publication, and started reading it thinking 'Elvis' was Elvis Costello. Halfway through I realised I was wrong, went back and read the imprint page and clicked and started it over again: conscientiously this time, but still missing most of it. It remains in my syntax, I think, from the Soho imagery to the Dickens joke.

Most of my reading is secondhand now. Music, newer - things grabbed from all over, and cheap, oldish TV: X-Files, Medium. Watching Patricia Arquette reminds me that it's time to enjoy Lost Highway again.