Friday, October 26, 2007
Friday Not Random
If you didn't know the season here, you'd probably guess late September or early October from the foliage. Last night was the first that had a real chill in it.
Tim Dorsey: I loved Hurricane Punch, his latest & the first of his books I read, featuring a lovable serial killer, Serge A. Storms, & sidekick "Coleman." Serge is the murderer inside us, a manic savant who whacks obnoxious, bigoted people, sometimes with Rube Goldberg contraptions & always suiting the victim's offensive behavior. So I read Dorsey's first novel, Florida Roadkill, it was less exciting because he was trying out the tricks he'd use in his subsequent novels up to Hurricane Punch, & they'd already lost their novelty for me. But I have soft spot for middlebrow writers who adapt experimental, formerly avant garde type techniques. I've done it myself many times. The Florida "detective" novel is a wacky subgenre going all the way back to John D. MacDonald's great Travis McGhee series. I also like that Dorsey concluded he made a mistake killing off Coleman in Roadkill & simply resurrected him with the rationale that it's only fiction & he had the power to do it. This is a lot more honest than J.K. Rowlings announcing Dumbledore is gay when she may have known it all along but never had the courage to make it a "fact" of the Harry Potter universe. With the Potter series ended, so has Rowlings' omnipotent power over the world she created.
Brahms: Complete Works for Violin and Piano; Ulf Wallin (Violin), Roland Pontinen (Piano). Arte Nova. Feel like I pulled a fast one getting this budget double CD for the cutout price of $3.50, & it being better than I expected, a pair of superb younger musicians. Timeless, classic music that, while posing no great challenge to one's ears, reveals itself slowly, no reason to hurry it along. Beautiful now, it'll be just as beautiful tomorrow, the kind of warm music that becomes a good friend. Listen to it a few times, file it it the Brahms section by the symphonies. Welcome to my CD collection.
J.A. Jance: Justice Denied, a J.P. Beaumont Novel. I like Jance's books about Arizona sheriff Johanna Brady, not so much the ones starring this detective who works for the Washington State Attorney’s Special Homicide Investigation Team or, as it’s often called, the SHIT squad. The crime plots in this book, involving the inexplicable murder of an exonerated former street gang member, a cold case about the disappearance of corporate whistle blower during the Mount St. Helens eruption, a pattern of deaths among ex-con sex offenders, & the connection between two of those cases, are essentially 1 1/2 episodes of a TV cop show. It turns silly, but Jance doesn't play it silly. She fills out 384 pages with details of Beau's personal life, & he's not a guy I find particularly interesting. He's kind of slow for a cop who's been through 18 novels & two marriages - the second to a psychopathic murderer. Sheriff Brady, on the other hand, compares favorably with Marge Gunderson in Fargo, but less droll.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Tim Dorsey: I loved Hurricane Punch, his latest & the first of his books I read, featuring a lovable serial killer, Serge A. Storms, & sidekick "Coleman." Serge is the murderer inside us, a manic savant who whacks obnoxious, bigoted people, sometimes with Rube Goldberg contraptions & always suiting the victim's offensive behavior. So I read Dorsey's first novel, Florida Roadkill, it was less exciting because he was trying out the tricks he'd use in his subsequent novels up to Hurricane Punch, & they'd already lost their novelty for me. But I have soft spot for middlebrow writers who adapt experimental, formerly avant garde type techniques. I've done it myself many times. The Florida "detective" novel is a wacky subgenre going all the way back to John D. MacDonald's great Travis McGhee series. I also like that Dorsey concluded he made a mistake killing off Coleman in Roadkill & simply resurrected him with the rationale that it's only fiction & he had the power to do it. This is a lot more honest than J.K. Rowlings announcing Dumbledore is gay when she may have known it all along but never had the courage to make it a "fact" of the Harry Potter universe. With the Potter series ended, so has Rowlings' omnipotent power over the world she created.
Brahms: Complete Works for Violin and Piano; Ulf Wallin (Violin), Roland Pontinen (Piano). Arte Nova. Feel like I pulled a fast one getting this budget double CD for the cutout price of $3.50, & it being better than I expected, a pair of superb younger musicians. Timeless, classic music that, while posing no great challenge to one's ears, reveals itself slowly, no reason to hurry it along. Beautiful now, it'll be just as beautiful tomorrow, the kind of warm music that becomes a good friend. Listen to it a few times, file it it the Brahms section by the symphonies. Welcome to my CD collection.
J.A. Jance: Justice Denied, a J.P. Beaumont Novel. I like Jance's books about Arizona sheriff Johanna Brady, not so much the ones starring this detective who works for the Washington State Attorney’s Special Homicide Investigation Team or, as it’s often called, the SHIT squad. The crime plots in this book, involving the inexplicable murder of an exonerated former street gang member, a cold case about the disappearance of corporate whistle blower during the Mount St. Helens eruption, a pattern of deaths among ex-con sex offenders, & the connection between two of those cases, are essentially 1 1/2 episodes of a TV cop show. It turns silly, but Jance doesn't play it silly. She fills out 384 pages with details of Beau's personal life, & he's not a guy I find particularly interesting. He's kind of slow for a cop who's been through 18 novels & two marriages - the second to a psychopathic murderer. Sheriff Brady, on the other hand, compares favorably with Marge Gunderson in Fargo, but less droll.
Labels: music, what I'm reading
