Herculodge

Boston Acoustics Receptor: My New Favorite Radio

For the last five years I've explored the radio world, spending about two grand on a diverse group of radios, including the Grundig/Eton S350 Deluxe, the Kaito 1103, 1102, and 1101, the Grundig G4000, the Sangean WR-2, the Eton Sound 100, the Sangean ATS 505, the Sony  ICF-M410V, the Tivoli Songbook, the Tivoli PAL, the GE Superradio III, the Sangean HDR-1, the Eton 10. I've bought Tecsun models, which are re-branded Eton. I even own a Bose Wave Radio, which I acquired about 10 years ago. But for powerful, clear speaker quality, efficient, user-friendly ergonomics, and reception, I have to say my very favorite radio is the Boston Acoustics Receptor Clock Radio. I made the mistake of judging one, unfavorably, inside a noisy, interference-filled Best Buy about a year ago and I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate its quality. Other factors made me avoid it: No remote control and no headphone jack. However, in spite of these impediments, I was intrigued about the Boston Receptor's unique anti-interference technology and attractive charcoal color, so I bought one from a vendor on Amazon ($110 plus $10 shipping) and received it recently. I must say, with sound being subjective, I am blown away by the Boston Receptor in ways I am not by my Tivoli PAL, Songbook, and Sangean WR-2, all of which are very good sounding radios by their own right. But the Receptor sounds like a powerful stereo. The sound is clean. The reception is sterling. The ergonomics are logical and simple.

My quest for the Holy Radio Grail is over. My present task is to sell as many of my radios as possible and fill all my rooms with the Boston Acoustics Receptor.

A Few Vital Novels Still Out There

MFA programs have rendered too many novels cookie-cutter types, with privileged, precocious kids flexing their muscles and trying to show how hip they are. Too many novels fall into this category. But the special kind of novel, the one that, to use Nabokov's words, sends a "tingle" up your spine, is a rare beast. Here are 5 such tasty beasts I've read in the last 7 years or so:

2007: The Little Girl and the Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre: An office worker lets his own brilliant insights into the folly of modern civilization get the best of him as he spews a tirade against politically correct sanctimonious politicians, office hacks, and the masses who have embraced a self-serving Cult of the Child.

2004: Little Children by Tom Perrotta. This facile novel seems to vindicate all the prophecies of Nietzsche who warned of the spiritual vacuum that would afflict "The Last Man." A funny parody of privileged adults, the novel shows parents with the emotional maturity of little children languishing through their narcissism and dysfunctional marriages.

2002: The Horned Man by James Lasdun. The fastidious, repressed narrator, a professor, is overtaken by some dark Jungian Demon, his "horned man" as we witness someone having a slow, steady meltdown.

2001: The Lecturer's Tale  by James Hynes. Using gothic and satire, Hynes writes a page-turner about a lowly lecturer who gains magical, demonic powers to ascend in power at a university. Hynes uses this plot as a vehicle to skewer all the tomfoolery and imbecilities that run rampant in academia.

1998: The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. A dry deadpan first-person narrator chronicles the conflict between bovine laborers and their diabolical bosses. The allegory begins in the very earthly world but becomes more and more surreal. There is no novel quite like it. 

Study Guide for The Little Girl and the Cigarette

The following questions highlight the major themes from the satirical masterpiece of a novel The Little Girl and the Cigarette by the French author Benoit Duteurtre.

1.    How does the author raise the conflict between common sense and the marriage of self-serving sentimentality and legalism in Chapter 1? (see also page 53 for the fetish of eloquence, elocution, and bloviating over substance) ESSAY TOPIC
2.    What do you think the author is trying to say about such organizations as the Associations for Defense of Public Health? Perhaps they micromanage our health and “morals” while losing the big picture. See 43. ESSAY TOPIC
3.    In what ways is Quam Lao Ching the consummate bureaucrat and how does his role push forward the plot and contribute to the author’s satirical theme? See Chapter 1. (no “firmness” 14, 17)
4.    In what ways does Maren Pataki embody the soggy-brained, self-promoting mediocrity? Chapter 1; 15, 19, 39, 46 (a true believer or do-gooder who hides behind movements because in truth she is a nonentity or a cipher), 52 (condescending and patronizing)
5.    What frustrations imbecilities of modern life afflict the first-person narrator in Chapter 2? 22; see also 59 and 60, “paradoxical pollution.” ESSAY TOPIC
6.    What is the source of the narrator’s contempt for children who, as a result of the Child Cult, have become thoroughly odious? 23-27; We see the cult of the child and all its discontents. See also 28-32 as children are used to promote the mayor and become an imposition at work. See 65 where it appears adults are held hostage to the needs of children who have become arrogant and emboldened by their sense of excessive privilege. ESSAY TOPIC
7.    What do the child “monitors” in Chapter 2 have in common with Maren Pataki? The marriage of surly, self-righteous certitude and bovine stupidity. A burning religious fervor in all their mediocre undertakings.
8.    What kind of life has the narrator carved out for himself on pages 33-37 and how is his life, as he values it, now threatened?
9.    Is his lifestyle selfish or reasonable? Explain.
10.    How does the legal entanglement result in good fortune for the tobacco industry? 42, 96-102; they sponsor the “moment of reflection” commercial with wild flowers before the planned execution, which, as the commercial’s dramatic narrative dictates, is cancelled because of a surprise pardon.
11.    How is “spin” the object of satire in Chapter 3?  (You might compare this theme to the film Thank You for Smoking). ESSAY TOPIC: How has spin in the media age revealed the public’s loss of contact with reality?
12.    According to the narrator in Chapter 4, how has the cult of the child debased or corrupted adulthood? 55, 58 (the narrator rebels and regresses to adolescence); See also 66 where adults are reprimanded like children. ESSAY TOPIC
13.    Do you agree with the narrator that public health authorities have become a suffocating nanny turning adults into children who must sneak a cigarette in the bathroom? 56 ESSAY TOPIC
14.    How is the cult of the child described in Chapter 4? 57, 61 we see the emasculation of adults who are forced to see salvation, purity and renewal in bratty children; on 66 we see that children have a sense of entitlement and their “rights” but lack character to the degree that they are spoiled brats; in other words, the Child Cult does not serve them well either as they exist in a sick symbiosis with the self-serving adoring adults; on page 67 we see the children have no boundaries; (check out this theme in the book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy and the World Is Getting Worse) ESSAY TOPIC
15.    In the context of Nietzsche’s Last Man (consumer satiety with spiritual emptiness), how might we better understand the emergence of the Child Cult? ESSAY TOPIC
16.    How does the narrator pique the mayor’s animus against him? 60
17.    How does the narrator’s brother-in-law ruin the narrator’s “bucolic expedition”? 63, 64; perhaps the narrator is overly sensitive and defensive to rules, especially rules that remind him of the major and government authority in general. Also the brother-in-law’s wife, affecting a coughing fit in front of the guest room door, behaves in a passive-aggressive manner.
18.    How does the narrator’s life take a turn for the worse on pages 69-72? By calling the girl an “idiot” he has committed a blasphemy against the Child Cult. Serious repercussions must follow. See 77-90.
19.    How do the narrator’s hostile passions blind him to Latifa’s needs on page 72?
20.    How is the narrator a societal freak? 83; he has no children; as a result he’s put “on trail” for the way he sneaks a cigarette in the bathroom stall.
21.    What is the police officer’s attitude toward the narrator? 88
22.    What evidence is there that the little girl (and later several others) will be coached to falsely accuse the narrator? 88, 114
23.    What redemption does the condemned man enjoy that must be denied the narrator and why? 101
24.    Do you sympathize with the narrator as an innocent victim who, with his brilliant insights, finds himself surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces” who are threatened by his vision of the truth or is he a paranoid egotist who can only blame himself for his troubles? Or do you see a little of truth in both positions? Explain your answer. ESSAY TOPIC
25.    What evidence is there that the Cult of the Child is not at all for children but for self-serving adults and that, paradoxically, the Cult of the Child emerges in a world where child abuse and neglect are on the rise? Perhaps the Cult of the Child is a feeble smokescreen to assuage adult guilt for their negligence, abuse, dysfunction, and, ironically, their childishness. ESSAY TOPIC
26.    How does the narrator’s life become entwined with Maren Pataki’s, much to his detriment? 106-114 (complicit with his girlfriend Latifa, late to court, uses the language “mad spell,” takes the word of the child, wants to make a plea for indecent exposure, she’s named “Sudden Death” by other prisoners all too familiar with her incompetence, etc.)
27.    Recount the narrator’s “slippery slope” beginning with his hostility against the major and children, which is established in the novel’s very beginning and how he ends up as Lulu’s wife. 118-123
28.    The celebrity of Desire Johnson and the demonization of the narrator say what about the theme of how perceptions are often more important than reality? How is this even more true in the modern media world? See Chapter 8; 125-140. ESSAY TOPIC
29.    What does the “reality” show Martyr Idol and its terrorist principals “John Wayne’s Conscience” say about how entertainment and the culture of celebrity are drugs that pervert our senses and blind us from substance, logic, and reason? Consider the satire’s influence from American Idol. 134-140. ESSAY TOPIC
30.    What contradiction is implied in Chapter 9’s “pure air” reference? Perhaps the pollution of the mind that afflicts us in the modern world as we labor to have “pure air.”
31.    What moral equivalency fallacy do we see on page 150? Perhaps his “sin” of disdaining children, especially children in The Child Cult Age, is, erroneously, equated with being a child criminal.
32.    What is the symbolic significance of the mock trial headed by juveniles? 151-166
33.    What theater or gimmick does the desperate narrator employ in his feeble attempt to save himself? 172
34.    How does the novel dramatizes the conflict between Christian and Nietzschean morality? ESSAY TOPIC