Good defense attorneys are familiar with the figures of vulnerability: the good father of a mad, ungrateful daughter, the young grieving widow, the secretary who knows too much. And they are familiar with the figures of corruption: the oversexed politician, the narrow-minded small town sheriff, the power hungry prosecutor, the greedy pharmaceutical executive. Vulnerability and corruption, however, are not enough. There must also be a reason, a lesson, a moral, and a story something a first year law student can outline and articulate and reference. Not too bloody, not too sexy, not too sad. Just long enough to make us want a fair and happy ending. Which we get.
The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver performed by Anne Twomey
A story of an FBI Special Agent, California mother and widow tracking a cultish killer. In between the pages of the story is a manual on how to read lies on faces, on bodies, on lips, in friends, suspects and children. The Agent specializes in kinesics: a science of lies…
There are 2 routes from Monterey to San Jose.
You can take Highway 1 which winds along the coast to Santa Cruz then cut over vertigo-inducting Highway 17 through artsy Los Gatos where you can buy crafts and crystals and incense and tie-dyed Janis Joplin dresses and, O.K., Robert Cavalli and Dolce and Gabbana….
Some authors are best at giving directions – in writing captions to mapquest. Even if one doesn’t really care about the female Agent or the Charles Manson wannabe, one is enchanted by the idea of driving down Pacific Highway to buy shoes.
Old Cops Meet New Technologies: Harry Bosch & Jack Reacher, 2007
Amusing this particular intersection of history where the living instruments of the law (cops, detectives, Special Forces, Army MPs) meet the live ones (text messaging, Live search, cell phones, Google…). What results is something Lacan called the ‘missed encounter’ — in other words, the subject is there, but somehow misses it, the thing, the point, the sense of it. So Harry Bosch meets the cell phone. And Jack Reacher meets the CD.
What also results is a humility, a vulnerability, a wry deference to the inscrutability of the new, the next, the insensible. Harry Bosch, stubborn, bullish, deductively logical, steps aside to let his farty new partner decode the victim’s cellphone. Jack Reacher manipulates the entire series of rational numbers in his head, but doesn’t own a cell phone.
Jack and Harry are both post-retirees. Jack flashes back to Heidelberg and Seoul; Harry to Vietnam. Neither are married, neither trust women, or men, for that matter.
Harry Bosch listens to Jazz saxophone and indeed so do we: Overlook features the original instrumentals of …. Jimi Hendrix’ second album, sixth track contains a secret message with the name of a DIA secret weapon. (Yes, this is a test. What song?)
P.S. The Coca-Cola Plastic Bottle Silencer in Connelly doesn’t work according to Childs. Not even if you use an Evian bottle.
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.”
Paint it Black by Janet Fitch read by Jennifer Jason Leigh
Well crafted words read by a dulled, depressed and depressing voice. Read it instead.
The Sleeping Doll by Jeffrey Deaver read by Anne Twomey
Do you believe the people who write the back page summaries of bestselling audio CDs actually listen to the CDs? I don’t. The girl left alive after the cult murder of her family has very little to do with this Deaver novel, which is about a female FBI special agent trained in the science of kinesics (sic?) Special Agent Kathryn Dance can tell whether her suspects are telling the truth by reading their bodies. Her children, too. But that doesn’t count. What counts is finding Daniel Pell, a magnetic, persuasive, good looking murderer who gathered around himself a group of depleted submissive females and included them in the scenes of his sex and his crimes.
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.
Drek, in pink: Wolves in Chic Clothing by Karasyov and Kargman, read by Gasteyer
When the big brained businessmen of Europe come home, they don’t want brainy, brilliant, succulent text. They want fashionable, gossipy, obscenely stupid words popping out of fashionable, gossipy, obscenely stupid secretarial types. On heels. They want to come to America, for a night. And wake up in England. For them, we suggest the newest round of Chic-lets: starting with Carrie Karasyov’s and Jill Kargman’s (Authors of The Right Address it says in slim pink letters, right on the cover, next to a picture of ultra-slim headless female figures in sexy business suits, pink shirts, stiletto heels) Wolves in Chic Clothing (it says in three tones of 18px serifated font, right on the cover, next to the picture of the blonde in the black turtleneck with tight nude panty-hose, sans skirt). No need to tell us what the book is about because the book is not about anything. Enough to know that Carrie and Jill both grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, that they are oedipalized, husbanded, and child-bearing. (Lucky like you, reader!) And that the lovely climbing thing reading this Chick-let is best known for her six year run on Saturday Night Live, that she (along with everyone else in the civilized world) has appeared in Law & Order. And that the pink plaid Random House Audio book cover was designed by Jean Traina and illustrated by Monika Roe. Everything a librarian needs to know to order a little drek for a European mind on vacation. Enjoy.
Draft: Paint it Black by Janet Finch
The girl reading this is California cool, with a strawberry blonde voice, that emerges just slightly bored from a long lean body, a finely boned neck, a tight mouth. John Lennon’s death begins not only a book but a mood: a being-in-a-fucked-world mood, a being-towards-the-next-cigarette mood, the mood of a population without prozac, without zoloft, without effexor. The girl is depressed, California is depressed, America is depressed.
The girl dresses in used clothes and old heels and wears fake fur to a funeral. Yellow. This is because her boyfriend went to Twenty Nine Palms, registered as Oscar Wilde and shot himself. His name was Michael.
Blogged with Flock