Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The word for the day, boys and girls, is catamite.

Tell me, is this lame? OK, the guy's a fan. He lives in what he suspects is the apartment the Great Man occupied when he wrote his best known work. So he sets up a period typewriter, places these props around and it all looks so neat and clean and completely phony.

Where's the paper? There's not a pen or pencil in sight. We have an ashtray, but no politically incorrect cigarettes or crushed butts. And what's a glass without a bottle? Jesus, he might as well have a toothbrush stuck in there.

I don't know, maybe I'm being a little hard on the guy but I think this is beyond pathetic, and I'm a huge fan of this writer's work.

What, you still need a clue? Here it is: This writer's editor complained about a few indecent words, so the writer slipped in the word gunsel, knowing the editor would assume it meant gunman, and not what it really meant, which is a young boy kept by an older homosexual man. A catamite. Nice.

So that's your clue. Name the writer and tell me if you'd ever be tempted to build something like this in your apartment.

I know Ray Banks has a shrine in his place, but it's a shrine to Ray Banks, so that doesn't count.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The master. Hammett. I wouldn't set up a shrine like this. I could never keep anything that tidy. Anyway, what's a shrine without a skeleton? Or at least a skull.

Anonymous said...

It's weird, but that looks just like my shrine to Al Guthrie. I had to take the Banks shrine down because there were too many handsome distractions.

And yes, I have a Maltese Falcon. And yes, my wife thinks it's ugly.