Category: Interesting

Whisper to the Blood by Dana Stabenow read by Marguerite Gavin

A town is the scene of what people do, become and have.

Stabenow describes happy slow small towns with unusual people who are ever so slightly insane. Who might shoot people over candy bars, or murder them in quaint hotel rooms or share fried bread with a wolf.

There are towns with female elders called “Aunties” who have outlived five or six husbands each, speak English as their third or fourth language, and who have enthusiastically and indiscriminately adopted every stray idiot that crossed their path. They have walnut brown cheeks, wear gold rickrack and are poised between misdemeanors.

Some of these towns are north and some are norther. It is cold:

He wore a balaclava and a knit cap, inside hood Gortex pro shell, ski pants, Patagonia capilene, beneath down parka guaranteed to 20 degrees (below), surround caribous guaranteed to 20 below…

Some are situated where there would be gold if it could be mined. And here there are problems.

Agatha Christie The Hollow read by Hugh Fraser

Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.

It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”

But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?

How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….

A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?

Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.

“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….

Agatha Christie, differently

A wagonful of new Agatha Christie audiobooks (“lesser” works?) shows us an Agatha knee-deep in Freud, perhaps, indeed, an “English Freud”. Here she experiments with the entire merde ridden hagiography of psychoanalytic terms: pathologies, neuroses, perversions, deviances, persecutions. Sarah has just finished her M.B. and is interested in psychology. She looks on as an old obese mother, an ugly wheelchaired figure wields a regime of psychological oppression over her “nervy” “nervous” unnerved family. The ugly Mrs. Boynton continues to perform her chores as the warden of a women’s prison, although she no longer performs them inside a prison. Instead she institutes prohibitions against the emotions, liberties, impulses, movements, of her step sons and daughters.

Sarah complains of the rudeness of Raymond Boynton, who ignores her in the presence of his mother, despite their earlier conversation. The tradition of English manners comes to Jerusalem not in opposition to rudeness but rather as a prophylactic to madness; madness is the excess of civilization, the bad habit of civilization. As the narrator in An Appointment With Death tells us about the horrific Mrs. Boynton: “In a savage tribe they would have boiled and eaten her up her years ago”.

The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pearlman read by Gabra Zackman

There is a yummy baked goods kitchen feeling, because the woman baking the cookies has an organized sense of her world, she has friends, one dead and one living ex-husband, girl-children, and flour in her pantry. But — and there are 50 years worth of buts– she also has a daughter that miscarries, and friends with bad husbands and gruesome stories, and fears that don’t go away with the rules of the Cookie Club.

Inside the Red Mansion by Oliver August read by Simon Vance

Oliver August, correspondent for the Times of London in China is learning Chinese. His teacher asks him what Oliver means. Oliver responds: ‘Since a man that works on a farm was a farmer, a man who harvested olives was an Oliver’. His teacher then couples two radicals – olive (gan) and farmer ( no ). The 26 year old reporter is thereafter laughingly referred to as Farmer.

“Nobody in their right minds called themselves a farmer. Millions are fleeing the land to become city dwellers, to partake in the industrial revolution, to become richer. When I introduced myself people guffawed to each other. A foreign farmer has come to our China… !”

Oliver August is a sieve of a China in transformation from below. We get the language, the images, the words, the emotions, the slogans, the mixture of groundlessness and lawlessness, the sense that a Chinese being can rely neither on the earth nor on the sky for his limits. “Modern China was a magic mirror: you could see whatever you wanted to see…,” writes Oliver.

The country was both free and oppressed, at once anarchic and authoritarian, totally chaotic yet highly regulated.

Lai Changxing is an emblem of this new country; hence his is the story tracked by Oliver.
But alongside the story of the legendary Lai, a rogue reminiscent of America’s 19th century captains of industry, Oliver gives us the gossip, the rumours, the news. And the only way to report this news is “to get out and report what you saw yourself,” in sideways glances, from overnight trains, from hired cars driven by monks, from the streets and the restaurants…

But still more, Oliver gives us economics, politics, philosophy. Not cut and pasted out of wikipedia but lovely, incisive, pieces of thought, fresh from the sea, still smelling of fish.

The more China modernizes the more ravenous its appetite for the past becomes….

These wealthy Chinese who finally thought it safe to return from abroad “were known as sea-turtles who had finally brought home their nest eggs…”

A myo tan low is a building that scratches the sky…

A big-faced building iDam yam zi dasha is a building that gives the owner a lot of face…

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers read by Bernadette Dunne

She is a portrait of competence. She works for the big distributor of computers that packaged itself after cows. She has a knack for customer relations. She enjoys convincing users, individual by individual, that the big company wants nothing more than to make nice and relate, long term. She has removed all excess from her life, all things huge, or insubstantial.

We find her in a hospital room waiting for her brother to come back to life, as if she is watching some overlong Swedish film… A problematic brother, liked by animals, but “…when it came to humans no one knew what to make of the boy…. “. The problematic boy, Mark, has been damaged.

The language is full bodied, rich, ripe, generously given. All in good time. Bernadette Dunne, as usual, is remarkable. She narrates people thinking in low, cool tones, as if she were playing jazz for a small group of friends.

Slowly, slowly, the author mixes in big words, medical words, technical words to explain the misadventures and mistakes of the brain, configuring the brain as a fabulous animal which never stays the same. Mark’s brain is not what it was before the accident; it cannot recognize the familiar as familiar, cannot recognize his sister as the same sister, his friends as the same friends, his dog as the same dog. This misrecognition effects another: the sister who is not recognized by her brother slowly doubts her own identity, which dissolves into a piece of a town, a piece of a bed, a piece of a river…

In the middle of fields of Nebraska wheat, one theory of the brain folds into another, from a brain that tells stories, to a brain which functions like boy scouts waving their flashlights in the dark, to the brain as a series of mappings of other brain-maps,

My brain, all those split parts trying to convince each other, dozens of lost scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night….

The brother, the sister, his girlfriend, a nurse’s aid, a cognitive neurologist from SUNY Stony Brook having a mid-life identity crisis…all of them unable to recognize themselves, unable, too, to recognize other beings, or other species… Hence, too, an ecological crisis: all species depend upon recognition, or go extinct….

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta read by Campbell Scott

Firm writing, good characters, heavy social issues, but no story.

Meet Ruth. A divorced mother who teaches sex education at a public high school is more or less forced to teach abstinence according to a rosy if delusional Christian fundamentalist agenda. Meet Tim: divorced, saved and reformed by an evangelic Jesus-loving pastoral group, coaching soccer. Imagine supper:

Tonight was Lemon Pepper Mama, a recipe she had gotten from Five Hundred More Ways To Cook Chicken or It Doesn’t Matter How You Cook It It’s Still the Same Crap or Eat Chicken Till You Die. Because there were nights when that was what it felt like. Like you were just some stupid animal put on earth to eat a few hundred thousand animals who were even stupider than you were, then to disappear without a trace…

And so we are left in between chicken, abstinence and temptation.

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.