carlos-m.net

After a delayed, then delayed some more then cancelled flight, we finally made it to Toscana, Italia a day and a half later than planned. Once we arrived, however, the experience proved to be quite enjoyable. The area has such a rich history and has produced such beautiful art. The only downside was that because tourism accounts for around 80 percent of the economy and the local universities cater to some 4,000 foreign (American) students, it did not completely seem like a foreign locale. In Florence, almost everyone spoke English and most the people we ran into were either tourists or students spending a leisurely semester with other Americans studying only a few things that were not really related to their prescribed course of study. All in all, however, it was a pleasurable experience. Photos documenting the even will be posted eventually.

Now I’m back home in Baltimore and it’s time to get back into the groove of studying, doing homework, writing essays and logging late hours in the ACM office to work on programming projects. Of course, now that I’m home I can once again shoot pool on a somewhat regular basis… something I was deprived of in Italy.

This essay was written during the second semester of my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins University for Hard Boiled Fiction and Film Noir with Dr. John Irwin.

Carlos Macasaet
Dr. John Irwin
220.399
5 March 2003

In The Big Sleep (1939), Raymond Chandler constantly compares the protagonist, Phillip Marlow, with a knight. We see this on the first page when Marlowe observes the stained glass window portraying a knight lackadaisically liberating a nude lady from the ropes that bind her. Marlowe comments that inevitably he will have to help the knight in the window to free the lady because the knight does not seem to be trying hard enough. However, Chandler makes it obvious that Marlowe is striving for an ideal that cannot exist in a modern world of corruption. How does Chandler define chivalry and the ideals of a romantic age in a modern-day Los Angeles that Phillip Marlowe fails to fit into?

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