5/7: "Mother Treason," a story from the collection, "Gordon Liddy Is My Muse," by John Calvin Batchelor. January 1, 1990. Read by John Batchelor.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Gordon-Liddy-Muse-Calvin-Batchelor/dp/0671690787
From Publishers Weekly
Posing as hack writer Tommy "Tip" Paine, Batchelor ( The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica ) offers a comic and often provocative look at contemporary America in this episodic "autobiographical" novel. In eight chapters, each self-contained, Tip roams from Moscow to Hollywood to New England to his ultimate destination, G. Gordon Liddy's Firearms Security Academy in Arizona. While in Russia, he watches a boyhood friend progress, over the years, from awed admirer of American western movies to KGB superstar to an official non-person, "disappeared" as part of that nation's changing politics. In Hollywood, despite the warnings of his decidedly offbeat agent, Tip falls into the clutches of a woman who is not what she seems. In New England, together with his "imaginary best friend, McKerr," Tip solves a multiple murder and uncovers what is possibly a relic of American history. Finally, in the Arizona desert, he posits an arguable identity for the still-elusive"Deep Throat" of the Watergate scandal. Other tales in this totally engaging work recount run-ins with famous literary personages, wealthy Texans and restless Vietnam veterans, or suggest a dark and ancient secret hidden in the heart of Germany. This may be Batchelor's breakthrough novel to the wide audience he deserves.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The narrator of this inventive picaresque novel is Tip Paine, formerly a spook for the National Security Agency and now a moderately successful sci-fi/spy writer. In eight exuberant episodes Tip ranges from Moscow to Hollywood. He provides mystery (a tale of murder and mayhem in a small New England town), commentary on international politics (an elegiac account of a Russian KGB agent who falls victim to glasnost), and wickedly funny satire of pomp and foolishness in Texas high society, a university writing workshop, and a desert training academy for mercenaries. By alluding frequently to the classics of American literature (e.g., Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans ), Batchelor creates illuminating but highly entertaining commentary on contemporary society.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc
1953 Cold War propaganda by US
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gordon Liddy is my muse. Mother treason. |
| 0:05.0 | 5. |
| 0:07.0 | When Tipp was coming back was the winter of 1985. |
| 0:11.0 | I wrote ahead this time because I wanted to see Trivia and Tina's reply said they would both be in Moscow and March. |
| 0:18.0 | The Correning Cold War had cancelled direct flights from the York, so I changed to air float in Helsinki and arrived in |
| 0:24.5 | Moscow in an ice storm that only a Russian pilot could enjoy. |
| 0:29.6 | I was traveling alone this time, three days in Moscow, Overlend and Leningrad, and out. |
| 0:36.4 | Tips ambition was the usual salesmanship. |
| 0:39.4 | The Soviet publishing house, there's only one, though it has many names, had upset common sense by The publishing skipping my anti-Stalinist trash and going for my running cur capitalism trash. |
| 0:56.0 | Who knows what they were thinking. I thought them clever. |
| 1:00.0 | They could package me as a revolutionary brother by using my name incorrectly, |
| 1:04.0 | Tom Payne. |
| 1:06.0 | Russians are balmy for descendants of famous rascals. |
| 1:09.0 | They have societies of them and one of the members, |
| 1:12.0 | a disembersed degenerate, met me at the airport with |
| 1:15.8 | my Intourist Factotum. The Decemberists were a fairy tale gang who one weird day decided |
| 1:21.8 | to oust that Tsar with glory. It was 1825 and they were executed for premature idiocy. |
| 1:29.0 | A century and a half later my Decemberist was named Boris Grumman, and he was happy ever after for |
| 1:35.8 | his dead forebear. Boris was also a member of the Writers Union, all the print that's fit to news, and started off oilily to me in English. |
| 1:45.0 | A distinguished colleague, a socialist poet, very glad, glad. |
| 1:50.0 | I returned to him in Russian that I regarded poets to be paper enthusiasts who clogged our |
| 1:57.2 | post with junk mail. Boris and comrade Intourists recognized Yankee Humbag and had me at the national hotel straight away. |
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