Category: Listen up

The Tailor of Panama read by John Le Carre read by Le Carre

The relentless decomposition of the Oznard family has left Andrew in the position of so many young Englishmen, who had, for the first time in centuries, to feed themselves.

Young Andrew had thus determined from an early age that he was for England and more specifically, that England was for him… What he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away….

And what he chose was the Secret Service.

An exact and well cut commentary on the tradition of tailoring and its neo-colonial clientele.

Power Play by Joseph Finder read by Dennis Boutsikaris

Jake is the kind of guy that tells his girlfriend to stop using some pheromonal perfume by Clinique because it “messes with his head”. But apart from perfume, he is singularly unfussed. He is streetwise, he is attentive, and he belongs inside his own body. But he belongs nowhere else.

I shrugged. I guess that ‘s the advantage of being a low level flunkee. Im not a member of the team – you know what they say – the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Jake doesn’t stick up. Sheryl, his new CEO, would lift an eyebrow to express disapproval for Jake’s iconoclastic white trash camouflage. But she has had too much Botox.

Instead, she brings Jake along on an ‘off site’ (an extended compulsory ‘breakfast club’ for naughty executives).

Where Jake sticks up, and saves the day.

The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller read by Blair Brown

Women are divisive. Among themselves and between their generations. Go to any academic women’s conference and see for yourself. Or listen to Blair Brown’s crisp, young, feminine voice reading The Senator’s Wife.

And listen for this divisiveness. In the pasteurized neighborly conversations of Miller’s two women: the 37 year old newly married Meri, unemployed, hypercritical and amoral, and the handsome, charming, well mannered Senator’s wife, Delia, archaism of a femininity shaped by different rules.

The light chatter of the women is seductive and irresistable and light, and unfolds their character, their virtu, as well as their style. Delia is a full-figured soul, a solid, generous, private collection of duties girdled by public beliefs and public habits. Delia is the effect of a life shared with her country, her party, her church, and a husband shared with other women. Tom Naughton, the Senator, has indeed had many women, some of whom Delia ignored and some of whom she didn’t. Her private life with Tom is ruleless. She lives more or less alone in their home in Massachusetts most of the year, and travels to Paris in the Spring. She is a privately sexual woman.

Meri, by contrast, is a patchwork of debts, impulses, and discomforts. She writes freelance pieces for a variety of journals and papers, faithful to none, committed to nothing. She finds a job at a radio station, she becomes pregnant. She loves her body, loves the pleasure it gives her, and is unhappy in pregnancy. To effect change, she goes shopping. She can assume the fantasy of a pregnant woman in the same way as she can assume the fantasy of a wife or a neighbor. Indeed she is enchanted by her neighbor, the senator’s wife. Enchanted in her very misconfiguration and misrecognition of Delia: who is (the copula) the senator’s wife but is not (the existential is not, the essential is not) the senator’s wife.

Delia is political in her own right, in her own shoes, at her own party:

My favorite of the entire group was Martha Mitchell. Old Martha critiqued the whole thing from home by the telephone… She’d call someone and announce one luny event after another with her big wide mouth. Remember Tom? When she said she’d been kidnapped by the FBI and it was true. They were all true, all these things that people assumed were dipsomaniacal….

The senator’s wife, like Martha Mitchell, is a political woman, a political animal. And then, too, a wife.

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer read by Dick Hill

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together–a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.

Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.

In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..

This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.

Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions — despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.

Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?

Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?

How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?

Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.

Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger read by Buck Schirner

Solid, sensible text hulled out of an old, heavy earth:

The farmer was a tense willowy man with a German name and a head as bald as a rock.

and

The farmer’s wife was fine cook and a generous woman.

Meals, too, are solid and heavy and bald: boiled ham, baked chicken, wax beans, mashed potatoes, corn fritters, brown bread, rhubarb pie.

Food centers the story and exposes economic differences. Sam’s Place is a local diner for poor white trash, where Minnesota Indians eat fried balony and jelloed fruit. The proprietor is an ex-sheriff with three children, a busy wife, and local loyalties. One of them is an old odd Indian who gives him a mission: find my son and deliver a message.

The rich, Canadian son does not want to be found. He is unmined, along with a local past, dirty, unpleasant, but rich with truth.

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 Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak read by Laurel Merlington

Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shalt not curse it. That includes the rain. No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how icy the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the heavens have in store for us. Everybody knows this, and that includes Zeli Ha. .. Rushing for an appointment she was now late for, swearing like a trooper, hissing one profanity after another at the broken pavements…

Incredible how 3, 4 sentences can cut open a life, a mood, a world. We read and are wet and late and Turkish.

Kingdom of Lies by N. Lee Wood read by Ralph Cosham

Kingdom of Lies (Unabridged)
Length: 16 hours and 13 min.
Release Date: 05-03-2006

First: ignore the Audible summary. There is an office bureaucrat sitting in Bangalore who listens to audiobooks in between doing customer service calls for Verizon and emergency care calls for Viagra wives. Which explains summaries that sound as if they were based on hearing every third verb, badly. So, forget the summary.

This is a well arranged, nicely plotted detective novel, featuring a depressive Yorkshire cop of the John Harvey variety, divorced, dedicated, and dieting. He is comfortable in his own melancholy, his own territory, with his own defeat. His ex-wife’s robust ambition has moved her and their twins to a monied life in London. His neighbor’s wife irons his uniform shirts. His cat welcomes him home.

One day, a woman academic disappears while at a local conference; she turns up drowned and drunk and is identified by a pretty American colleague on vacation.

The Yorkshire seargent and the pretty American professor begin to investigate the dead woman’s death, and then her life, and then her taste for sad encounters.

The coupling is obvious, the end is not.