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.
Short cuts to well told endings of British crime novels don’t usually work. They leave out the localized, linguistic pulp of English thought. And it is thought not plot that makes a novel so very relentlessly English.
Tim Curry’s reading resonates with localized, idiomatic, parochial, inherited sense, regionality, territoriality.
Listen up. Tim Curry turns this abridgement into an exception.
If you walk into a bar and hear a bunch of guys wondering about why angels have to sit on clouds “as if they don’t got chairs in heaven,” you’re probably in a Dortmunder novel. If the guys are hunched over their drinks with that 1000-yard stare that suggests that therapy is no longer an option, and the bar looks like that section of the socialist realist mural where the workers have been utterly shafted by the plutocrats, you’re reading the most exacting critique of the overfed, distracted unproductive children of America since Schumpeter.
Alternatively, you could just be a tourist having a real New York Experience, like spending 40 minutes in a Central Park buggy behind a farting horse.
Dortmunder, Kelp, Tiny, Stan and Stan’s mother, are crooks but they are crooks with values. Unlike the new huge indoor population who prop up and support a huge, useless service industry and its reality hacks. What, after all, happens to real thieves when property is virtual?
Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner
Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle.
Now, lets get flush. A few small and weary ancestors hammered away at a short list of ideas. They are museum quality, priceless, with some entertainment value.
But you don’t want to get behind an idea. Not in heavy traffic. It is all over the road. It is in your face. In the right lane. In the left lane. In the right lane. Then, suddenly, without warning, it stops. In the middle of the road. Miles in front of the light. Sitting pretty on some double line, any double line.
For ideas, substitute patterns. Pro cogito ordo est.
Lou the autistic works for a company that makes weapons systems and other good stuff. He spends thousands of hours in front of a computer screen recognizing mathematically gross patterns within data fields. Patterns take the place of knowing how to think.
Lou sees patterns, Lou makes patterns, Lou is patterns.
28% of Lou’s patterns span Margot: a very pretty normal he talks to when he goes fencing at Tom’s house every Wednesday. 5% span shopping for groceries (Tuesday), 5% span driving to work (8:02 -8:25), 1% span cleaning his car (Saturday), 7% span going to Church (Sunday morning).
This is a monstrous book. A brilliant book. A good book.
It shows us inter alia that normality depends on the undaunted recognition of patterns: social signals, facial expressions, vocal tones, and on the order and organization of appropriate reactions to such patterns….
Maybe.
I just looked up “undaunted” to see whether it means the same as dauntless. The OED reads: undaunted: not daunted. No! You think? We autistics protest. Why don’t normals say what they mean? Why don’t words mean exactly? Why should mathematically coherent, numerically aligned, literal, pattern-recognizing beings kowtow to semantic ninniness. Aarrrrgh.
But we do.
“Your cigar fell down. You told me how good it was and how all the women liked your big cigar. We hardly started smoking and your cigar fell down.” It is Havana radio. The whores are called hinateras, jockeys, to describe the way a girl might ride a pig.
In the Cuba of the “Special Period” however, they have run out of pigs. . . and medical supplies, finger print powder, condoms, batteries, cars, and everything else. It is never good to be Russian but especially not now, in Cuba, after 1992, after the big cigar fell down. But Police Investigator Arkady is in Havana, in his black cashmere coat. It is, after all, winter in Moscow.
Whatever else Ruth Rendell does or does not do, she demonstrates what might, could, would or should be said while helping the police in their inquiry. The mystery lies not so much in who did it but in who lies about doing it: who said that he didn’t do it and how did he say that he didn’t do it. Who is speaking? Who is lying?
Who lies, indeed? Well, Inspector Wexler already knows that once the media has been told, he “will get calls and no doubt e-mails from all the [i]nuts[/i] . . . We know in advance that they’ll have been seen in Rio and Jakharta and going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. . .” Note the rare use of the future perfect: “they will have been seen…” .
Children, one thirteen and one fifteen, disappeared. With their sitter. In a time of religion and heavy rains. And what the future perfect tells us about who is speaking is that such children will, in fact, not have been seen… And so we have a mystery…don’t we?
A nice little vignette of malicious 1990’s life with its Coke, its Sexual
Saturation & its top of the mornin’ Fuck You Very Much Sadism. P.I.
ex-con Harding is hired to track and video rich respected Plastic Surgeon
& wife-beater in the course of perverse sexual scenes.
Erotic, staccato descriptions of girls tied up, girls forced into double
penetration, girls sucking huge, rich, respected, well-educated dick. Then
things get ugly.
The job begins to smell like a set up. The dipsy Goth
girlfriend gets beaten up. The beautiful victimized almost wife begins
to look more beautiful….
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.
4 grandmasters of plot. Extraordinary Vietnam tale by King.
Posted By: admin () Date: 08/03/2005 11:02 am
It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.
