Category: Original narration

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen read by Carol Monda

This is a charming very digestable story about one sister told by another. The sister in the spotlight is a freckled lovable morning news show host, with a perpetual trousseau of people who dress her, praise her, and advertise her friendship. A black limo brings her from Central Park West to the television studio and back. The other sister rides the subway everywhere, works at a battered women’s shelter, and dates a cop. Her’s is a pedestrian perspective.

The poor sister looks at the rich sister succeed, and then, one day, fail. Accidentally on purpose, pretty, married, red-haired Megan Fitzmaurice says “fucking asshole” on morning TV, live, just before going to a commercial and just after interviewing a married California millionaire and his pregnant surrogate girlfriend.

It is not surprising that there is a release of glee and ressentiment from the usual fans and friends of the successful. What is surprising is the resentment the successful feel toward the incompetent, the ineffectual, the unproductive. Drunk but articulate, Megan tells her sister:

You’re the one who gets to have the illusions. I’m the one who has to deal with reality. That’s our deal. Someone has to be the bitch so someone else gets to be the nice one. Someone has to be the one who pushes so someone else gets to be the one who takes it easy. Someone has to be the driven one so someone else can take their time, and figure things out, and follow their bliss. ..Someone has to be in charge so someone else can relax. Someone has to be willing to do everything so someone else can do nothing.

This could be the New Yorker’s mating call. (Although it may have originated in New Jersey: “Trenton makes, the world takes”)

Interesting, eh? The huge burden of those charged with making things, and making things happen. Even when it seems as if they are only reading the news out loud.

Southern Living by Ad Hudler read by Cynthia Darlow

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’…Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women — a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife — track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.

PMS Outlaws::Sharyn McCrumb read by Barbara Rosenblat

A very clever book, horribly named.
Holly the perky divorced real estate agent shows Bill a very very big house after Bill’s partner tells him to buy Tara for their new law office. “Think what this house says about the people who live here….!” she says.

It says that they have spent a lot of money on a really big house and now they will spend even more money to keep it from falling slowly to bits. It says that they probably want to brag about owning the house to a lot of people they don’t like very much, so that those people will envy them and feel bad that their own houses are not so grand. This house could generate a lot of bad feelings…

Meanwhile, Bill’s newly widowed and melancholic sister, Elizabeth, has checked herself into a mental asylum, where she meets Emma O., who explains that she’s inside for the same reason that most women are: “I’m in here for not being beautiful.”

When you get right down to it there is only one universal currency, says Emma.
And that is?
Beauty. Beauty is the one status symbol that cannot be taken away. If you’re beautiful you can be set down anywhere in the world without your ID or your credit cards and people will treat you well… Anyhow, pretty people matter. The rest of us don’t.

Elizabeth thinks that Emma O would probably be a lot more useful to therapists outside the institution, drumming up business by making homely women even more depressed….

Nevil Shute No Highway read by Robin Bailey

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….

— John Masefield

Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.

Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.

India Knight’s My Life on a Plate read by Jill Tanner

More than a little over the top, Clara Hutt is dropping her 2 boys off this morning wearing her pajama bottoms (again) and wondering (again) why all the other mothers can arrive at school with perfectly starched blouses and expertly applied makiage. Not now, Darling, I’m Paaaarking,” and again, “I AM PAAARKING,” and again “Stop it, Charlie, don’t make me want to break your legs.”

There are so many things wrong with this picture that the fact that Clara doesn’t speak to her children like the mummies in books is, well, funny. Indeed, Charlie is six and already has a “vast panoply of hideous, faintly disturbing, terms of abuse.” “You tiresome retard” he says to his brother. Or to some hapless toddler on a play date: “God! You exasperating creature! What is it? Talk for God’s sake!! God. God. Bloody God!” She is, of course, to blame she thinks, while she watches Naomi The Perfect Mother and Crossing Guard doing her pelvic floor exercises. Hup two three four and hoooooolddd.

I think Clara is darling. In perfectly bad faith for the nought generation, Clara has all the elements of a mad Greek family member. But she is English, and thanks to Jill Tanner’s drawn out vowels and enthusiastic syntax, we are happy to relocate our tragic flaws.

Clara’s mother is, on the other hand, global.

Long Time No See:: Re-hearing Susan Isaacs read by Cristine Mcmurdo-Wallis

Who in God’s name could murder a woman who puts doilies on the bottom of guest-room wastepaper baskets? In this decade of the Mother, of Mommihood, of stretchy, skin tight maternity dresses, of preternaturally calm Nannies, Long Time No See is perhaps the precursor of a series of mysteries dedicated to killable mothers.

New! Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.

Death Match is the Beta version of Google Dating Search. Consider it:a small exclusive matchmaking service run by a brilliant lonely Geek charges 25,000 dollars per search. It mixes men, women and algorithms. It finds: perfect couples.

The metallic, mechanical voice of Barrett Whitener engineers the sounds of Miss Google. She’s the demented computer in the kitchen, the thing that produces the results. Eliza. And yes, like all things female, one day Miss Google goes nuts.

That’s when Southern, fay, tangy, overintelligent ex-FBI forensic psychologist Christopher Lasch is hired. To investigate the suicides. Of the men, the women, the perfect matches.

And shows us that jealousy is present in all human products, even search engines.

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile read by Christopher Lane

Imagine overhearing the comments of secretaries, girlfriends, GS-11s, GS-18s, CIA heads of station, assistants to CIA heads of station, busty, born-again Texan society matrons, outrageously charming right-wing politicians with more friends than God, superstitious immigrants and sons of immigrants, Muj(ahadeen) terrorists, Afghani torturers, Pakistani tyrants, Egyptian defense ministers turned mule and donkey merchants, so that you can actually see the pieces of history being pushed into place, so that a cult of personalities and a war become cause and effect. Almost. Because things are not so simple….

It is the genius of Crile, ace reporter, that manages these unmanageable personalities and tracks one mad Texan after another, one fanatic after another across the Washington political stage, quoting all the way.

“Now [Avracatos] was forced to recognize that without Charlie he would still be roaming the halls of the CIA without purpose….The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered he actually loved Charlie Wilson.”

He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking Congressman in the last 40 years have gone to bat publically to get the CIA more money? …Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles when the cold war was one big fucking goat fuck, noone was publically calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatamela or Cuba or anywhere.

This is not just a text read out loud. This is not a written momento of what was written about guns, mules, Afghanis. It is a tale of what was said, who said it to whom and how, with what kind of accent, and what they were wearing when they said it and who was looking at them when they said it and who wanted to fuck them because they said it …. and how they were fucked. Short, hard, telegrammic statements that moved men and things and boundaries. What Sartre would have called: the gossip, the rumours, the news. Told, and told again because it was originally told, this story which when read is re-heard, again. But differently.

Linda Fairstein Death Dance read by Barbara Rosenblat

Ghoul: An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.

There is a ghoulish, golemic, East European element that surfaces in the life of every dishy Jewish blonde A.D.A. in NYC. A specific perversion, a senselessness knocks at her door just before it becomes evil, or criminal, or comic.

She is buried alive in the Botanical Gardens by a paraphiliac with a love of Poe. She is held captive in the Metropolitan Opera while a stage hand fingers her inner thigh. She opens a letter which bursts into flames and spoils her hairdo.

Indeed, one of the most lovable qualities of Alex(andra) Cooper, daughter and heir of a man who invented a widget, is the way the forces of weirdness tag at her heels.

For example. She talks to a Turkish intern who likes to rape unconscious women while Mike and Mercer try to trace his number. They can’t. Alex groans: “How come this works on T.V. and in the movies but when I need it the system fails?”
Well, blondie, because the 212 area code is not from the Upper West Side but from Ankara, Turkey … It’s not incompetence. It’s not idiocy. It’s something else.

Frank Muller reads James Hall:: Red Sky at Night

It is wrong to suppose that language is about communication. James Hall does not communicate. He sniffs a piece of the invisible, picks it up with his mouth and lays it on our doorstep. What we call language is sometimes a body, sometimes a carcass, sometimes a feather, sometimes a bone.

Reading is not communication. It is something else.

Boom boom boom.