Tag: mother

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 Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank read by Nanette Savard

Not all old women from the South are funny. Only the ones who know what they don’t want, and what they want:

All I want in this life is a reasonable man who’s self supporting, who’s nice to me, funny, you know, likes straight sex, not role playing modelled on a kinky Berlin night club from pre-World War II…

Dorothea (Benton Frank), like Virginia (Ironside, who doesn’t want to join a book club), has lived a life doing lots of things that other people want, and has decided to surrender her crossword puzzles, her unused silver, and her uptight charity friends, and rediscover her family, her mother country, and her self.

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.”

Hide by Lisa Gardner read by Maggie-Meg Reed

A family is a system. For Annabelle, aka Tanya, aka Sienna aka Sophia, it is a rigorously cheerful, rigorously protective, rigorously mobile system. It packs up and moves every 18 months. Until Kansas City, when the system’s mother drinks herself to death, and the rules are preserved by the father and the daughter.

The 32 year old remains of the system is now a woman, who wants to live in the suburbs,  plant roses, and forbid her husband to buy suitcases.

Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz read by

A book for a long inside day waiting for a hurricane or a war…. about a
man wired by a dream not necessarily of being a cop but of being the good
guy in the uniform, a hacker-ette, and a dog….. and about dainty compassionate
dinner hour executions by Roy, your average, everyday, pre-hysterical,
mild mannered, FBI psychopath, who may, at any moment, shriek or squeal
or giggle or break into some shower scene, and kill his mother, his kindergarden
teacher, the nice little old lady next door…
Far from being a horrorist, K is a very very smart and funny New Englander
or the prototype of what a New Englander would be if he could write his
own language and grin. At the same time. Heald sounds like every crazy
on every highway on every rainy night. The reading is relentlessly funny,
deadpan, narcotic. The real question is: why, and how, Koontz turns suspense
into hope, and human faults into mating calls.

CHORUS:”Never lie to the dog”

Best Scene: Chinese Restaurant

Message: Hope comes from the difference between a government and a people.

Alone. Another Abridged Morality Play by Lisa Gardner

Alone. Another Abridged Morality Play by Lisa Gardner

Sometimes one wonders whether books get written by stringing together the top keywords in Google. Sex-cops-beautiful wife-abused child-murder-guns-rich family-domestic violence-sharpshooter-alcoholic father-politics-doctors-baseball. (Never forget baseball.) Calculate the page rank, and you get: Good cop gets bad girl. Bad girl has good excuse. Good cop has bad night. Recalculate. Not a best seller yet? Add: bad mother-money-child abuse- sex-psychopath-incest-genetic disease-criminal investigator-kidnapping. (Don’t forget kidnapping). Here you go: Cop with alcoholic father shoots rich husband with gun and fucks wily wife-whore whose impossibly sick child plays baseball. Recalculate. Bestseller. Ho, hum.
Posted on Mar 22, 05 | 10:32 am |

Archives: July 2004

Fri Jul 30, 2004
The Last Juror. Written by John Grisham

2004/04/13 @ 00:23:44 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
The Last Juror by John Grisham by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Miss Callie is Clinton’s first black juror, the mother of 7 PhDs, a huge, prodigious cook and a friend of the mild-mannered Grishamesque newspaper publisher who narrates this cut of Mississippi history.
Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:33 am | Profile

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The Great Divide. Read by Buck Schirner. Written by Bunn Davis

2004/04/19 @ 12:24:10 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Editor’s Pick
Brilliance Corporation, 2000.

Unusually compelling tale of a mournful, failed, lawyer who has lost his family and is taken in by a neighborhood. . . A couple summon him to find their politico daughter, who may very well have been kidnapped by the Chinese affiliate of a big, bad, American multinational. Trusted by these parents to save a child, the lawyer who could not save his own is determined to succeed….

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:32 am | Profile

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Double Image. Read by David Birney. Written by David Morrell

2004/04/27 @ 16:29:50 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in New
Performed by David Birney. 1998 Dove Audio

Deception. Simulation. Misrepresentation. Sexual Sorcery. The classic, irresistable, inaccessible 1930s female seductress, surfaces from the past and does it again…..

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:30 am | Profile

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These High Green Hills. Written by Jan Karon

2004/04/13 @ 00:07:16 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
These High Green Hills by Jan Karon by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Weekly Recommendation
Luscious, lavishly heartwarming, unabashedly funny story of Episcopalian rector with new wife making the daily life of a small town a little holier, a little closer to God, a little more miraculous.

Posted by: on Jul 30, 04 | 4:29 am | Profile

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Die Dancing. Written by Jonathan Gash.

2004/05/01 @ 12:50:24 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Jonathan Gash Die Dancing by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Weekly Recommendation
Remarkable how cruel the truth about a woman, about women can be… All it takes is an account of how women think about men, how women deceive themselves about men, how women consistently misrepresent, misrecognize, the situation of being with a man.

This is a huge book, a book that should sit next to a series of psychoanalytic works about women, self deception, and the problematic of the couple (ie Deleuze, Difference et Repetition)

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:28 am | Profile

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The Last Dance. Read by Ed Mcbain. Written by Ed McBain.

2004/05/21 @ 13:48:25 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Ed Mcbain The Last Dance by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Editor’s Pick
Hearing Ed Mcbain reading Ed Mcbain. The Last Dance.

Somewhere in between your father and Woody Allen comes the thick angry Brooklyn voice of Ed McBain. Incredible. After years of reading this Hemingway of police procedure, (Rain banged on the roof of the car, rain drilled Carella’s head as he fumbled the key into the lock on the driver’s side, rain smashed his eyes, rain soaked the shoulders of his coat and plastered his hair onto his forehead…) with his hand scrawled police reports and his fictional city of Isola and his deaf beautiful wives … comes another Brooklyn Jew!

So when Detective Carella finally opens the door of the car and they start “idly talking” “about de trouble Meya was having with his brother-in-law who neva had liked Meya and who kept tryin to sell him additional life insurance becuz he was in such a dangerous occupation…. ” its funny. Now, it may not read funny because you can’t hear the way this guy spits out these words, like he’s got a bit of gefilte fish stuck in his throat and he hates gefilte fish and he especially hates his mother’s gefilte fish that he has to eat every Friday night for the rest of his life.

Eating and talking are two very important activities in the life of a cop and especially the life of Ollie, who is especially fat, and especially angry. “What brings you up here?” he asks. “The murder yesterday,” Carella said. “What murder?” Here in Zimbabwe West, as he often referred to his beloved 88th Precinct, there were murders every day of the week, every hour of the day.

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:26 am | Profile

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A Season for Murder. Read by Judith Boyd. Written by A. Granger

2004/05/27 @ 23:53:16 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
A Season for Murder: A Mitchell & Markby mystery by Ann Granger. Performed by Judith Boyd. Cliper Audio. CD c.2000

Meredith [Mitchell] is a witness. A pretty, youngish, positioned, opinionated, fickle, insecure twit who is, for no apparent reason, coupled with the decent, honest, competent, and divorced Chief Inspector Markby.

Murder after murder, Meredith pushes and nudges and buzzes about Markby, who, annoyed, horny, and hormonally bothered, wants to fuck Meredith, and all that that implies.

The murder is solved, through the series of contacts between M and M, through short bursts of frustrated sexuality, local sensibility, and superficial logic.

The couple survives, belligerently, peckishly, senselessly: the cop and the witness, the witness and the cop.

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:24 am | Profile

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The Stonebreakers. Read by Steve Crossley. Written by Philip Hook

2004/06/22 @ 14:00:51 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
The Stonebreakers ready by Steven Crossley by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Author: Philip Hook. Clipper Audio, 1999. WF Howest LTD. Unabridged CD.

A remarkable, well crafted work with an undercurrent of Le Carre, revolving around a painting destroyed, or presumed destroyed in Dresdens’ fires. The rather dry regularity of the life of an unspectacular art dealer is broken up. In its stead come the whispers and violences of an old and long dead cold war ….

Posted by: admin on Jul 30, 04 | 4:19 am | Profile

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Fri Jul 23, 2004
Perri O’Shaughnessy

Limping along after a series of court case transcripts passing as novels are a string of stories written by lawyers, ex-lawyers, and legal applications ….

Here’s one of them. It could have been a story about a female lawyer with an obnoxious son and her love-hungry private investigator, unable to turn an unwritten casual agreement into a contract.

In other words, the new American woman’s stubborn insistence on the primacy of work, her mistrust of the social image of wife, the social position of husband, and –for the sake of audience sympathy — herself.

Imagine Robert Crais’s detective stories told by the female lawyer. Erase the humor. The subtle intelligence. Throw in a pissy bitch of a mother-lawyer, an aggressive, sexually frustrated dick in waiting, and disc after disc of useless, boring, repetitive court transcripts….
Posted by: admin on Jul 23, 04 | 10:35 am | Profile

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Dick Francis: The Handicap

Flying finish [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1996.06/13/2004 07/12/2004

Wild horses [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1995.06/21/2004 07/19/2004

Straight [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1994.06/21/2004 07/19/2004

To the hilt [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1997, c1996.06/25/2004 07/23/2004

Risk [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1995.06/25/2004 07/23/2004

Bolt [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Recorded Books,
p1999.06/25/2004 07/23/2004

Smokescreen [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Harper & Row : Media Books,
p1990.07/01/2004 07/29/2004

Proof [sound recording] /
by Francis, Dick.
Chivers Audio Books ; Chivers North America,
p1993.
Posted by: admin on Jul 23, 04 | 2:07 am | Profile

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Reviews: March-July 2004

2004/06/22 @ 14:04:49 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Russell Andrews Aphrodite by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Brilliance Audio. Read by Buck Schirner. Copyrite 2004. 8 cassettes.

What begins as an inglorious death in a small long island town ends in the revelation of a huge and scandalous experiment in genetic calculation and manipulation

2004/06/22 @ 14:00:51 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
The Stonebreakers ready by Steven Crossley by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Author: Philip Hook. Clipper Audio, 1999. WF Howest LTD. Unabridged CD.

A remarkable, well crafted work with an undercurrent of Le Carre, revolving around a painting destroyed, or presumed destroyed in Dresdens’ fires. The rather dry regularity of the life of an unspectacular art dealer is broken up. In its stead come the whispers and violences of an and old and long dead cold war ….

2004/06/22 @ 13:47:14 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Black Maps read by David Aaron Baker by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Author: Peter Spiegelman

An in house look at the deterioration of the financial world and its morally desolate characters…

2004/05/19 @ 09:44:32 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Still Life with Crows by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in New

2004/05/19 @ 09:43:38 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
John Burdett by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
bangkok; humorous mother/whore-son/cop chatter, esp. dialogue about the investment potential of Viagra in re. brothel industry….

2004/05/01 @ 12:50:24 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Jonathan Gash Die Dancing by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Weekly Recommendation
Remarkable how cruel the truth about a woman, about women can be… All it takes is an account of how women think about men, how women deceive themselves about men, how women consistently misrepresent, misrecognize, the situation of being with a man.

This is a huge book, a book that should sit next to a series of psychoanalytic works about women, self deception, and the problematic of the couple (ie Deleuze, Difference et Repetition)

2004/05/01 @ 12:15:43 [ 2 comments – Edit – Delete ]
Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Weekly Recommendation
Read by Saul Reichlin
Shocking, exhilarating, spellbinding narrative of a South African ex-cop (murder and robbery)…his inner life, his fall into faithlessness and his resurrection in the shadow of his mother’s grace….

…I have read almost nothing of the day to day life of this emotional ogre of history, this political and military shadow academy of a continent… Here, in this piercing narration of Saul Reichlin, are new sounds — the sounds men and women make when they speak to each other in this other part of the world, this very very different part of the world…. all these, heard once, make one hunger for more….more mundanity, more history, more language….

Remarkable, this sudden hunger for afrikaaner voices . . .But of course, as it turns out Dean Meyer is no unknown… Here is a summary of the public tribute to Meyer: His four Afrikaans novels have been translated into English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Czech and Bulgarian, has won the French Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the ATKV Literary prize (twice) and has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award and M-Net Literary Award. He is passionate about Mozart, motorcycles, cooking and Free State Cheetas and Springbok rugby.

There is, as well, a web site and a picture: http://www.uhambo.co.za/pg_books/index_books.html

Unfortunately, the narrator “Saul Reichlin” seems to have spoken once and only once for this battering performance….and the translator Madeline von Biljou, too, seems to have disappeared after this one work….

2004/04/27 @ 16:29:50 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
Double Image by David Morrell by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in New
Performed by David Birney. 1998 Dove Audio

Deception. Simulation. Misrepresentation. Sexual Sorcery. The classic, irresistable, inaccessible 1930s female seductress, surfaces from the past and does it again…..

2004/04/19 @ 12:24:10 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
The great divide by Bunn Davis read by Buck Schirner by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Editor’s Pick
Brilliance Corporation, 2000.

Unusually compelling tale of a mournful, failed, lawyer who has lost his family and is taken in by a neighborhood. . . A couple summon him to find their politico daughter, who may very well have been kidnapped by the Chinese affiliate of a big, bad, American multinational. Trusted by these parents to save a child, the lawyer who could not save his own is determined to succeed….

2004/04/13 @ 00:23:44 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
The Last Juror by John Grisham by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Now hearing
Miss Callie is Clinton’s first black juror, the mother of 7 PhDs, a huge, prodigious cook and a friend of the mild-mannered Grishamesque newspaper publisher who narrates this cut of Mississippi history.

2004/04/13 @ 00:07:16 [ no comment – Edit – Delete ]
These High Green Hills by Jan Karon by audio qua audio (audio qua audio), in Weekly Recommendation
Luscious, lavishly heartwarming, unabashedly funny story of Episcopalian rector with new wife making the daily life of a small town a little holier, a little closer to God, a little more miraculous.

Posted by: admin on Jul 23, 04 | 1:56 am | Profile

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Maneater by Gigi Levangie Granger read by Uma Thurman

Sun Mar 07, 2004
Forty years ago, this would have been a Sandra Dee movie. Rock Hudson would have played the smart, rich, charming, befuddled and gorgeous groom; a french actress would have played the loopy, eternally foreign mother, and Chevalier would have played Teddy: irresponsible, felonious, a sexual misadventurer. And Sandra Dee would have been perfect as the beautiful, stubborn, rich little poor girl. Minus the bitchiness, the promiscuity, and the Blahnicks.

Cute, though.

 WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by Rupert Holmes. Read by Anna Gosteyer and Michael McEan.

  Published by Random House. Pub Date p2003.

Cutesy 70’s Lois Lane tells odd, offbeat, seriously funny story of buddy-comedians (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? Bob Hope and Bing Crosby?) bound by repressed hostility (Freud) and girlicide.

“. . .the world is divided up into four different types of broads. Sluts that I boff. Nice girls who in bed turn into sluts. Nice girls who remain nice in bed. These I generally leave for the working stiffs because civilians need to get laid too. And my mother. Her I don’t boff despite the name my manager calls me in moments of anger. I have no desire to boff my mother; I sort of have that in common with my father. [JOKE!]”

Absolute Rage by Robert Tanenbaum::Nick Sullivan

“Karp leaned back in his chair, swivelled to face the window, chewed on a pencil. Murrow, seeing this, left quietly, closing the door behind him. He knew these were the signs that Karp was entering Karpland . . .” as are we, God bless us, until Tanenbaum decides to make gefilte fish or Marlene (MarLEEYENE!) stops getting into trouble. Here is I LOVE LUCY, 2002, with a Jewish husband and twins. “Giancarlo burst in, grabbed two chocolate covered donuts, . . .snatched up a table knife and stabbed it into Karp’s breakfast cereal, while laughing maniacally. “Guess what I am, Dad.” “An idiot?” stated Karp. ‘No. A CEREAL KILLER!’ …the boy departed, hooting.” (paraphrased) Another typical morning at the Karp feudal ‘menage’ — before Lucy’s boyfriend’s mother and labor leader father get murdered, before Marlene decides to find out who did it, before Karp gets appointed to clean up West Virginia, before Giancarlo gets shot and Marlene calls in the VietCong to exterminate the bad guys. “Kill them. Kill them all.” Yep. Marlene always makes a mess. Can Karp clean this one up? Read and laugh and see.