Category: Listen up

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.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci

According to Cheney and the gang, some torturers are more equal than others.

This is the story of how one American becomes unequal. How an average guy, born of poor fishing folks of poor Maine stock, becomes a torturer. How a guy who knew boats, and joined the Marines, and learned Arabic, and went to Washington ended up scraping the truth from the bodies of men, like clams.

The guy lives a simple life. He dresses, he goes to work, he has lunch, he goes back to work. Sometimes, he dates. Indeed, there is nothing remarkable about this guy. Except that his job is to interrogate prisoners, and the prisoners are on a little island, outside humanity. Continue reading “The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci”

Eye of Revengeby Jonathon King

Nick, Miami news reporter, is a decent, semi-sad, semi-serious, guy. One day he is sent out to cover a typical Miami highway accident. Dead on the scene are his wife and one of his twin daughters.

One year later Nick is a decent semi sad semi serious guy with one daughter and an editor who doesn’t send him out to accident scenes.

The reporter should not be part of the story. Sometimes he is. Here’s how.

John Lee reads Ruth Rendell:End in Tears.

There are inside words and outside words. Sometimes outside words – like Inspector Wexford’s “They don’t have handbags anymore,” – sound like inside words because they form a running commentary on something like the world. Sometimes, like Hannah Goldsmith’s, they escape, aciduously, censoriously.

Throughout the course of this investigation into the death of an unlovely and overloved teenage girl, there is an exchange of words, between and across sides. Consider Mike and Wexford:

They got on, Wexford and Mike. “If they couldn’t quite say everything that came into their heads to each other… they got as near to doing this as two people ever can.”

Turn internal words into external words, that is.

For example, one of the things that came into the Detective Inspector’s head which he couldn’t say aloud was that his friend was just a fraction too old for Jeans.

And so a thousand inside words run across the bottom of the scene like a ticker tape across the real.

The real — well, let’s not exaggerate. Mike Burden is convinced that the girl was moving drugs. Selling drugs. Buying drugs.

“You remind me of that guy at the Roman senate who used to rise to his feet every day and say : ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ Delende est Cartago. Well, it was destroyed. Finally.”

“There you are then. It proves my point. It’s drugs.”

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.

Kellerman’s Gone

Couples. Kellerman’s shrink narrator is full of meticulous, obsessive, data-driven characterizations of L.A. couples and couplings. Milos and Rick, for instance.

Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high priced West Hollywood salon. Milos drives every two months to La Brea and Washington where he hands his 7 bucks + tip to an 89 year old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.

What makes a couple couple in L.A? What makes couples live and die in L.A. — as couples? Consider Alex Delaware and his exes. They come, they go, they come back, they go….

L.A. kills couples, sometimes permanently.

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.

Jennifer Crusie read by Aasne Vigesaa: Faking It

“Poker was second only to pool in Michael Dempsey’s skills his children should have.”

How can you not lose your shirt to the writer of such a genealogy?

This is Crusie as good as she was inTemptation read by the unrememberable, unpronouncable name who does Marilyn Monroe better than MM, and twirls the whole narration into a Macy Grey song.

Rogues: children of rogues, Tilda and Dempsey are lying in bed and Dempsey is trying to sink a pocket into Tilda and Tilda is explaining that she has a long term relationship with an appliance and besides, she has a headache. He tells her that this is the first time he’s heard the line spoken in real life….She stipulates:

“Hey do you pay any attention to me at all…?
“I paid attention to you last night.”
“To what you were doing. Not to me!”
“You were what I was doing.”
“It’s not like you talked to me. It’s not like you made eye contact.”
“Hey, my mouth was full. And my head was between your thighs. You want eye contact you gonna have to lean down….”

And then, a minute later:

“…How about a threesome: you, me, and the machine?”

Crusie is very very smart, very very funny, and so much more competent as a writer than the zoo of typists generating chick-lit that one finds oneself thinking: English Literature.