Mike, from the shop, took his car in again. This is the luxury car that cost him $48,000. It was a lemon and has gone back to the shop 23 times for a cost of $32,000 in warranty work. Of course, everyone wants to know why the manufacturer doesn’t just give him a new car. Don’t know. That seems to be the one thing they won’t even consider. This time they had to pull the motor to replace the timing chain. Remind me to get you the details. Everything has been replaced on that car from the air conditioner to the wiper motors.All set for a partial book report on “The R Document”? As figured, 27 names have been introduced and the plot has yet to take its first turn. This 1970s style of writing has always stymied me, do we really need to know the names of everybody’s chauffeur and bodyguard? The book conceitedly expects the reader to understand inter-relationships between political offices, like anyone cares about the difference between an Assemblyman and a Legislator. Amusingly, the book has all the early vestiges of the descent into the made-for-movies cesspool of the next three decades. The second wife is pregnant, the protagonist needs to “stretch his six-foot-two frame” and the names of government people are truly poetic, such as Vernon Ryan and Noah Baxter.
I’m only half-way through but somehow the women so far have managed to be housewives and secretaries. It was not until after 1980 we learned all divorced women were black belts, nuclear physicists and aggressively self-assertive. The “hear me roar” crowd. They’re everywhere and they’ve had their hair kinked for that natural I’m-always-right hooker look, generally behaving like good examples for the next generation. People like Madonna know a lot about that.
Having a closer listen to “Hotel California”, I cannot believe the Eagle’s regular bass player had anything to do with developing that bass line. All previous Eagle’s bass work was downright anemic. What? After releasing several albums of virtually identical schlock, you don’t think the Eagles suddenly developed a completely different sound for that one tune, did you. They stole it from an earlier European piano solo called “Black Forest”, written some 25 years earlier. At any rate, to do a proper job, that bass line has to be custom re-written to include several passages that require a second guitar, a very unlikely thing to be seen on my stage.
Later, as in 1:17AM, I’m turning in. The book I’m reading, like most such books, captivates me, I plain like detective novels. Although two-thirds done reading, the story is still introducing new people, causing me to go back to my reference list in case I missed anything. The author has also stepped up the use of aliases and fake identities. I hope none of this is on the exam. I stopped keeping track at around 37 names, as the rate is slowing down and the important names are more evident through repetition.
Okay, sneak preview at tomorrow. I finished the book which assured us all the FBI and CIA will never be able to snoop in on innocent American citizens or abrogate the Bill of Rights over some cooked-up threat. While the book never stated any concrete examples, weapons of mass destruction and Homeland Security do come to mind. The book was also an interesting precursor of the “feed the facts slowly” style a few years later. There are no Clancy-esque sub-plots, but there is that constant annoyance that people’s names are the most important part of any action, said the President’s ex-wife’s third cousin-in-law, twice removed, what was her damn name again?
Last, the book is made unnecessarily long by sentences like “he slept fitfully on the sofa for the next two hours before boarding the airliner”. One message this brand of books put across that is never acknowledged is the massive waste that goes on in government machinery for authors to be able to cash in on it with these novels. Does that make sense? I'm saying these spy novels always talk about the luxuries of government work, never the cost. I'm curious about the reason they always leave that out.
As one of my favorite authors, P. J. O’Rourk, might say, the Attorney General does for justice what the Postmaster General does for fast mail delivery.
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