I've read only tiny bits of his prose and was never interested in such things, but I would recommend the Phillip Marlow series if you want a good place to start with modern private detective tough guy novels. His character was pretty much the model for American tough guys, while "The Glimmer Man" is a great Zen-like take on the same genre. Seagal is not exactly artistic, but he knows his Zen characters and Asian rubber faces. American private eye novels are more minimalistic, while the Japanese practically invented the genre 400 years ago. Living in the same room with your parents make literature even more valuable. Most classic spaghetti westerns are based on their novels and a wide range of science fiction. Thespians say there are really only 8-14 stories if that, and Asians prefer superfast dialogue and lots of bar room brawls. Everybody was kung fu fighting... They think Jet Lee is a great acrobat, but prefer Jackie Chan's fighting style. When you walk into an Asian bar full of pimps and thugs who come up to your armpit, you comprehend their obsession with martial arts.
Thank you very much for such an informative response! That is excellent advice. I'd read the theory, as I'm sure you have too, that there are 7 plots existing in total, but haven't heard of the Thespian theory. What stories do they believe exist? And is that where the fast talking dialogue originates in Western literature, plays and film? The Asian genre?
I'm a tribal Taoist and our tradition goes back 12,000 years to the Bagua, or Four Seasons. From the one came the two, from the two came the three, and from the three came the ten thousand things, which is also what quantum mechanics says about causality as we know it. Anywho, it means for practical purposes time can be thought of as flowing backwards upon occasion, like hubcaps spinning backwards, making it useful to think of everything as expressing four rudimentary pseudo metaphysics that all overlap and expand to 8, 16, 32. All you need is 8 stories, but 16 are much better for caricatures, and 32 are enough stories to lose yourself forever. We don't distinguish between characters and settings, and the walls can talk and act as characters. Japanese have relationships with their toaster ovens and love cute robots. They think of them as pets. I'm a writer and my words tell me what to write.
Ellroy wrote works such as L.A. Confidential and The Black Dalia. Good stuff. And although Ellroy seems to take a very global approach; no inferences to Japan. How can a thread go from noir fiction to Taoist tradition?
Japanese are not Taoist, but Shinto, and the connection is they are all salt-of-the-earth forms of literature that share many of the same plots and characters. For me personally, its all just so much mathematics. I can literally skim over pages of technical journals and prose and point out exactly where they make assumptions and logical errors, without ever having to read a word.
I guess some folks can find a little asian in just about anything. Correct , Japanese is not Taoist. Ellroy is neither.
