Helen Currie Foster's Blog
May 23, 2017
Recording the audiobooks!
Open the door to the tiny soundproofed room. Enter solitary confinement. Close door one and door two. Stare at the large microphone. Don't rustle your clothes! Inhale off to the side! Don't smack your lips! No loud swallowing! Extraneous noises are verboten. Remember which character has which voice, and hey--who wrote sentences with so many "s" sounds? "She slid sideways..." --for heaven's sake!
Now Ghost Cave has gone live. The sound engineer is snipping with virtual scissors any unduly long gaps in Ghost Dog. Ghost Dagger is recorded and Ghost Letter is in the on-deck circle. I hope it's another way to connect with readers.
Because connecting with readers matters! Yesterday I met such interesting people at Lakeshore Library in Buchanan Dam, Texas. Fielding their imaginative questions, their perceptive comments, sharing favorite books, talking about genres, made me feel like I'd been at the best sort of dinner party, sitting with the liveliest and most thoughtful guests. On the watery way home, driving along the lake, crossing two rivers, braking down the steep hill to splash across the low-water bridge on Flat Creek, and finally making my way home to the three burros, I knew those readers' names and faces would stay with me, stay before me, as the next book begins to take shape. Which is happening.
Now Ghost Cave has gone live. The sound engineer is snipping with virtual scissors any unduly long gaps in Ghost Dog. Ghost Dagger is recorded and Ghost Letter is in the on-deck circle. I hope it's another way to connect with readers.
Because connecting with readers matters! Yesterday I met such interesting people at Lakeshore Library in Buchanan Dam, Texas. Fielding their imaginative questions, their perceptive comments, sharing favorite books, talking about genres, made me feel like I'd been at the best sort of dinner party, sitting with the liveliest and most thoughtful guests. On the watery way home, driving along the lake, crossing two rivers, braking down the steep hill to splash across the low-water bridge on Flat Creek, and finally making my way home to the three burros, I knew those readers' names and faces would stay with me, stay before me, as the next book begins to take shape. Which is happening.
January 19, 2017
Reading The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My LIfe by John Le Carre
How many of you have read, and re-read, Le Carre? I confess to going back every few years to reread Smiley's People...I do love George Smiley.
If you fell in love early with John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?), found his earlier books, and then followed his protagonists breathlessly through Hong Kong, Hamburg, Chechnya, Panama, the Middle East, you will revel in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carre shows us his charming abusive con-man father, popping up like a jack-in-the-box when least wanted, and his disappeared mother, refound later, a mystery and vacancy still. “Spying was forced on me from birth….” He describes his flight from English boarding school to the Swiss alps, passionate about skiing and German language and literature, and how that led to his first teen-aged tasks for the British secret service. We get vivid vignettes of his early service in the British embassy in post-war Bonn, including the daily exercise in mental discipline by a German death-camp escapee.
But then he’s writing, “writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafes.” He tells us his process: “Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining….” So to the stories that emerged from his spy work he adds research, “the search for the reality.” He latches onto a war correspondent and goes to the Mekong, visits Phnom Penh in the last days before the Khmer Rouge takes over. He visits Russia in 1987, followed everywhere, and meets Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, the watchers’ flashbulbs exploding in their faces. He returns to Russia in 1993 and wangles a chilling visit with a high-level Russian mafioso, learning about vory law: “Does one vor kill another for breaking vory law?” “If it is ordered by the council.” He pursues and receives meetings with Yasser Arafat, and an Israeli prison in the Negev, perhaps background for The Little Drummer Girl. In the hair-raising chapter “Hunting for Warlords” he persuades an intrepid reporter and a polyglot analyst to take him to East Congo and the border with Rwanda, in “the search for the reality” for The Mission Song.
But there’s whipped cream and a cherry as well, in the hilarious descriptions of his contacts with the weird world of movie-making—for example, the bitter feud between Richard Burton and the director of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
At 84, Le Carre has given us another absorbing read, with the eternal themes of spies, ethical dilemmas, betrayal, and upheaval in our world. I didn’t want it to end. Five stars.
If you fell in love early with John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?), found his earlier books, and then followed his protagonists breathlessly through Hong Kong, Hamburg, Chechnya, Panama, the Middle East, you will revel in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carre shows us his charming abusive con-man father, popping up like a jack-in-the-box when least wanted, and his disappeared mother, refound later, a mystery and vacancy still. “Spying was forced on me from birth….” He describes his flight from English boarding school to the Swiss alps, passionate about skiing and German language and literature, and how that led to his first teen-aged tasks for the British secret service. We get vivid vignettes of his early service in the British embassy in post-war Bonn, including the daily exercise in mental discipline by a German death-camp escapee.
But then he’s writing, “writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafes.” He tells us his process: “Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining….” So to the stories that emerged from his spy work he adds research, “the search for the reality.” He latches onto a war correspondent and goes to the Mekong, visits Phnom Penh in the last days before the Khmer Rouge takes over. He visits Russia in 1987, followed everywhere, and meets Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, the watchers’ flashbulbs exploding in their faces. He returns to Russia in 1993 and wangles a chilling visit with a high-level Russian mafioso, learning about vory law: “Does one vor kill another for breaking vory law?” “If it is ordered by the council.” He pursues and receives meetings with Yasser Arafat, and an Israeli prison in the Negev, perhaps background for The Little Drummer Girl. In the hair-raising chapter “Hunting for Warlords” he persuades an intrepid reporter and a polyglot analyst to take him to East Congo and the border with Rwanda, in “the search for the reality” for The Mission Song.
But there’s whipped cream and a cherry as well, in the hilarious descriptions of his contacts with the weird world of movie-making—for example, the bitter feud between Richard Burton and the director of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
At 84, Le Carre has given us another absorbing read, with the eternal themes of spies, ethical dilemmas, betrayal, and upheaval in our world. I didn’t want it to end. Five stars.
April 26, 2016
April 26, 2016: THE INVENTION OF LOVE
Reading Tom Stoppard's play "The Invention of Love" kept me up last night. Aren't there some plays we need to read as well as see?--because they go by too fast! Stoppard's A.E. Housman is so quick with a quip, usually based in Latin declension, that despite vivid memories of Miss Bertha Casey's fierce instruction in third year Latin I had to read and re-read. But the banter among rival professors Jowett, Pater, Ruskin, Pattison, as they play croquet (great image of professors treating as a game the lives and futures of their students) hinge on nineteenth-century theories of beauty and morality which seem arcane to us now. Since Housman spent his life searching for the truest translation of Latin love poetry, it's only natural to find him waiting for Charon at the Styx, and for Charon simply not to remember the lost line of Aeschylus which Housman aches to hear--a last frustration. The play centers on Housman's lost and unrequited love for a classmate, in the homophobic circumstances that led to Oscar Wilde's trial and imprisonment, and which life was worth living. I do love this play and heartily recommend it, seen and read, read and seen.
