Category: Clever

The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber read by Eric Conger

There is a kind of being found among artists, a being-with peculiar to art school graduates, children of artists, girlfriends of artists, gallery owners and oglers and agents and wives, proximate to art, attached to it but uncertain of it, what or where or whose it is. Both proximate and remote, like a cat in a black box of which one must say it is both dead and not dead.

Such is art. On occasion, the remoteness of art maddens the artist. Deflects him from himself. Forces him to account for what he both has and doesn’t have. Impossible. A problematic with the face of Chas M. Columbia graduate, with roots on 113th Street and Amsterdam, previously of Oyster Bay.

Someone one said life is just high school, on and on… The obnoxious little shit we recall from ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon performed by Peter Riegert

1948 is a strange time to be a Jew. For Lonzman, the hero of this tale, it is the year the Jews in Israel are driven into the sea, and get a small beachside strip of Alaska as compensation. It is the year Lonzman’s father arrives in downtown Sitka where blue kerchiefed Jewesses sing Negro spirituals with jewish lyrics that paraphrase Lincoln and Marx. It is the year Lonzman’s father plays chess “like a man with a toothache, hemhorroids, gas, and a headache whose moves are like successive pieces of terrible news for the survivor Jews who play him. The survivors populate The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with their chess, their holy books, their rabbis, their clans, their latkes, their typical and atypical habits, their policemen, their crimes.

But I’m curious, do you really feel you’re waiting for Messiah?
It’s Messiah, what else can you do but wait?

And Palestine? When Messiah comes all the jews go back there, to the Promised Land, fur hats and all?
I hear Messiah cut a deal with the beavers…
No more fur.

Landsman and Berkot confront Schmerle, the doorkeeper of the Verbove Rebbe, whose son, Mendele, has been found heroin-dead in a seedy hotel. Schmerle

“… looks east, looks west, he checks with the mandolin man on the roof…
“There is always a man on the roof with a semi-automatic mandolin.”

Fiddlers by Ed McBain read by Charles Stransky

We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives, elaborations drawing on gossip, rumours, and mother disciplines, percentages, abbreviations, brand-names, phrases in mixed tongues, side notes referencing the inaccuracies of the company we keep and the associations we accumulate.

Dialogue. Which is what McBain does. Consider Carella and Parker questioning an ex-boyfriend:

So tell us how you happened to break up?

It was the Passion. The Mel Gibson movie. I told Alicia it was Anti-semitic. She disagreed. I’m Jewish; we got into an argument.

So whose idea was it to split up?

My mother’s. I live with my mother. She said if we were going to fight already over a farkaktmovie that was just the beginning…..I hate Mel Gibson.

Thirty seconds to peel a character like an egg.

Ollie Weeks is asking Parker for advise because Ollie was kissed in the mouth by Patricia the other night after he played piano for her family. Yes, this is the fat, suspicious, comical sociopath who hates everyone equally. Except that now he has a sweet piano teacher, and a sweet girlfriend and is looking ten pounds less hateful.

Kling, meanwhile, is asking Carella for advise. About Sharon, who he loves and whom he followed and who now refuses to talk to him.

“Everybody’s always innocent, Brown said. Nobody ever did anything. Catch ’em with the bloody hatchet in their hands they say this ain’t my hatchet this is my uncle’s hatchet…Wonder anybody’s in jail at all there’s so many innocent people around….

Brown and Kling are interviewing the head of Baldwin University’s English Department who is wearing a purple butterfly bow tie and telling Brown that “we’ve never anything like this happen before….”. Brown is wondering if his wife Caroline would go for him in a tie like that one…

Because conversations are never just about information and even information is never just about information. Because even cops hear by drifting in and out of their own conversations. Hearing from where they are being heard.

The Tailor of Panama read by John Le Carre read by Le Carre

The relentless decomposition of the Oznard family has left Andrew in the position of so many young Englishmen, who had, for the first time in centuries, to feed themselves.

Young Andrew had thus determined from an early age that he was for England and more specifically, that England was for him… What he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away….

And what he chose was the Secret Service.

An exact and well cut commentary on the tradition of tailoring and its neo-colonial clientele.

The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller read by Blair Brown

Women are divisive. Among themselves and between their generations. Go to any academic women’s conference and see for yourself. Or listen to Blair Brown’s crisp, young, feminine voice reading The Senator’s Wife.

And listen for this divisiveness. In the pasteurized neighborly conversations of Miller’s two women: the 37 year old newly married Meri, unemployed, hypercritical and amoral, and the handsome, charming, well mannered Senator’s wife, Delia, archaism of a femininity shaped by different rules.

The light chatter of the women is seductive and irresistable and light, and unfolds their character, their virtu, as well as their style. Delia is a full-figured soul, a solid, generous, private collection of duties girdled by public beliefs and public habits. Delia is the effect of a life shared with her country, her party, her church, and a husband shared with other women. Tom Naughton, the Senator, has indeed had many women, some of whom Delia ignored and some of whom she didn’t. Her private life with Tom is ruleless. She lives more or less alone in their home in Massachusetts most of the year, and travels to Paris in the Spring. She is a privately sexual woman.

Meri, by contrast, is a patchwork of debts, impulses, and discomforts. She writes freelance pieces for a variety of journals and papers, faithful to none, committed to nothing. She finds a job at a radio station, she becomes pregnant. She loves her body, loves the pleasure it gives her, and is unhappy in pregnancy. To effect change, she goes shopping. She can assume the fantasy of a pregnant woman in the same way as she can assume the fantasy of a wife or a neighbor. Indeed she is enchanted by her neighbor, the senator’s wife. Enchanted in her very misconfiguration and misrecognition of Delia: who is (the copula) the senator’s wife but is not (the existential is not, the essential is not) the senator’s wife.

Delia is political in her own right, in her own shoes, at her own party:

My favorite of the entire group was Martha Mitchell. Old Martha critiqued the whole thing from home by the telephone… She’d call someone and announce one luny event after another with her big wide mouth. Remember Tom? When she said she’d been kidnapped by the FBI and it was true. They were all true, all these things that people assumed were dipsomaniacal….

The senator’s wife, like Martha Mitchell, is a political woman, a political animal. And then, too, a wife.

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer read by Dick Hill

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together–a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.

Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.

In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..

This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.

Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions — despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.

Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?

Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?

How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?

Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.

Next by Michael Crichton read by Dylan Baker

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

  • just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
  • just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
  • just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
  • just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
  • just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

(more…)

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club by Virginia Ironside Read by Sian Phillips

It is so civilized to recognize that one is old, so English. Mary Sharp is a spritely, frank, practical English lady, retired, and almost 60. She has lively, vivid opinions and wobbly upper arms and lives in a not very nice part of West London with a sweet young lodger. Five of her friends have died this year. The rest are about to die, one way or another. But dying is not the point: being old is the point. As she announces at a ghastly dinner part after asking the hostess to move the penis shaped flowers (“But I can’t see you, darling!”):

If you’re sixty, you’re sixty. Sixty is old. I’m just longing to be old and I don’t want to be told I’m young when I’m not. I’m fed up with being young. Boring. I was young in the sixties. … When I was 20, 60 was old. When I was 30, 40 and 50, 60 was still old and I’m not going to change the goalposts now….

And when her hostess says: “But I don’t feel a day over 30,” Mary responds:

But Marian, don’t you realize that that’s tragic? To continue feeling 30 for the whole of your life? So boring! A nightmare! I’m longing to feel sixty! What’s wrong with that?

And so Mary is happy to turn 60, to join the 7 million grannies in England involved in child care, to master the technology necessary to babysit an infant:

I tried everything…. I picked him up and sang to him… I offered him more milk… The only way I could calm him down was to walk him round the flat talking nonstop and pointing things out to him… Let’s look at these nice bannisters…. OOh! Here’s a mirror . I an see Gene in there, and granny’s looking a bit distraught and knackered, isn’t she? And now …. We looked out the window and watched all the cars…. occasionally people would pass by. Look, Gene, I would say in my gentle voice: there’s a man in a hood. He’s probably a mugger. He’s a naughty man, isn’t he? And look! There’s a nice drug dealer the other side of the road. He’s making lots and lots of money selling people heroin…..”

The Door to December by Dean Koontz read by George Guidall

For those of you who have been reading or not reading Koontz lately, it may not be obvious that there are two Koontzes: the early Koontz and the late Koontz. Like the early Heidegger and the late Heidegger. The distinction should open the door to hours and hours and hours of delightful, unadulterated intelligence, humorous rumination, and lines of imaginative flight: emotional transport, sideways, to use a Koontzian term. For those of us who know who Sammy Davis Jr. and Mr. Wizard are, add hours of being-with-a-member-of-one’s-own-generation type pleasure. The ease of recognition. The Door to December is early Koontz — performed by a seasoned master: George Guidall. The first actor, in fact, hired by Recorded Books, a New York City based studio that used actors (rather than babysitters) to read books out loud.

And now to the battle of principalities. Yes, principalities. Early Koontz is political and politics is always about principalities. Consider the ex-husband that kidnaps the daughter and disappears for 5 years. Consider the mother. These are characters, but they are also theories. She is a psychiatrist specializing in child psychology, and he is a behavioral psychologist specializing in behavior modification. Their theoretical differences underpin the moral-emotional ones. One theory locks the child in a gray room, isolates it, deprives it, shocks it, plays with it and forces it to change. The other theory lacks scientific rigour, but feels better. It is the theory of the mother who tries to heal the beaten child.

And alongside the good mother is the good cop. Defiant, tenacious, competent, the cop and the mother talk the child away from the institution of evil. Talk is play, talk is confession, talk is a technique which can organize both good and bad emotions.

Someday the totalitarians will take over and they’ll pass laws so you can’t pee unless you have permission from the official federal urinary gatekeeper. Then you’ll come to me with your bladder bursting and you’ll say Luther, my God, why didn’t you warn me about these people?

In Las Vegas…

…there were hundreds of people …standing around the craps tables, people in suits and evening gowns, people in slacks and jeans conscienciously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory.”

Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams read by Alan Nebelthau

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary:

Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and in several prominent museums, died today at INSERT. He was INSERT. The cause was INSERT according to INSERT. The self taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal but he was “no primitive” according to Kurt Palmeteer …. Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of N. Grafton on TO COME. He went to local schools where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling…. It was also at Georgetown that he met his wife Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in TO COME…

Delia is also the name of the sculpture that occupies the center of his house, and reminds his next ex-girlfriend that he is still, in some sense, married. The obituary is wrong about his wife, he tells the journalist at the NY Times. Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the U.N. The journalist is killed the next day.

And Roy himself is not well. He has a cough. His nose bleeds. His arm breaks. A doctor tells him that he has asbestos-caused cancer: . After his treatment in a Fung-Shui designed office, a man in a wheelchair, his age, but skeletal, is wheeled out or wheeled in by a nurse. Roy doesn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair, because from the point of view of the unconscious anywhere near = anywhere like. And Roy scales his way through the world more or less unconscious, feeling his way around like a hockey player or a hydraulic excavator.

Roy has shovel fulls of partial information. From Dr. Choo. From his now dead wife. From the past. And we imagine that Roy will piece together something like the truth out of what remains. Scrap metal, memory, curiosity.