{"id":10199,"date":"2006-04-26T09:30:46","date_gmt":"2006-04-26T13:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/04\/26\/10199.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:54:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:54:50","slug":"book-report-the-dain-curse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/04\/26\/book-report-the-dain-curse\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Dain Curse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It has been a few years since I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780679722601\">The Dain Curse<\/a>. It&#8217;s my least favorite of the Dashiell Hammett novels\/series featuring the Continental Op, which means I like it very much indeed. There are plot problems, yes, and its unusually gothic for Hammett, but there are lots of lovely bits, and the language is of course breathtaking.\n<p>I had wanted to write about race and racism in the book, and examine whether the obvious signs of racism (Mr. Hammett&#8217;s and the Op&#8217;s) do, in fact, reflect an actual belief in the inferiority of people who have not-so-pale skin, but I haven&#8217;t the energy or the time to put into doing it right, and I haven&#8217;t any desire to do a half-assed job of that. There are so many jobs I should do at least half-assed, I don&#8217;t require another. Still, it&#8217;s an interesting topic. It&#8217;s hard to know if (or rather to what extent) I&#8217;m putting my own ideas into Mr. Hammett&#8217;s head and to what extent I&#8217;m reading what he put in the words. And, of course, there&#8217;s the general problem of how to read <I>anything<\/I> written before, oh, 1965 at the earliest without dealing with the racism of the author and his culture. Not that stuff written later <I>isn&#8217;t<\/I> racist, necessarily, but we begin at that point to have works, authors and cultures which share my own views, and which are therefore Correct.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has been a few years since I read The Dain Curse. It\u2019s my least favorite of the Dashiell Hammett novels\/series featuring the Continental Op, which means I like it very much indeed. There are plot problems, yes, and its&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17738,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199\/revisions\/17738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}