[wlug] Python and recording audio

I'm trying to write a program in python but I am _very_ confused about how to set audio parameters. I can find documentation but it doesn't make any sense. I can't seem to find an example anywhere that I can follow. In the past I've just used /dev/dsp with the default settings of 8 bit mono, 8k samplerate. This time I want to record 16 bit, two channels, 44k1, splitting the recording into left.wav and right.wav and stripping out silence in realtime. How do I do it?