Posted by Cori on September 28th, 2007 — Posted in * My Recordings, Book Reviews, Fiction, Quotes from Books, Utterly Random
My reading of the short story A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, translated by Ian Johnston, has just been catalogued. Hunger artists are, of course, people who starve publically — in a performance sense, not a documentary-on-countries-with-famine sense. Linking getting thinner with getting the public’s attention has media-anorexia overtones, though masochism and traditional views of Starving Artists come into play too. Before recording, I read around the web a bit, and found this particularly good study guide. If you have a spare hour, the interest and some brain energy available, I’d recommend it. I ended up being particularly struck by the sadism of the voyeurs/audience who encourage the starving artist, but there are a lot of other ways to interpret the story, depending on your own world view.
One other thing, this is where people adding to the public domain are doing such an amazing service. The translator here has produced various other Kafka stories too (mostly also in the LibriVox catalogue) and they’re recent translations which makes them very readable and accessible. Without him, I’d know nothing about this story, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to read it into the public domain myself. Many thanks, Ian.
Listen below … or visit the link above to download a higher-quality recording.
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64kbps, 29mins
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Posted by Cori on September 23rd, 2007 — Posted in About LibriVoxing, LV Community Podcasts, Miscellaneous Audio
Podcast – A LibriVox community show … of which there is one each week, and for which we were a bit short of hosts a fortnight ago, so, I thought, ‘I have a fortnight, why not!’
Dozens of messages to hand-picked readers and 12 days later, and I have a folder on my computer with oodles of funny snippets, and a very imminent deadline — which I beat. Ha! A podcast, for the uninitiated, is a geek-glamour phrase for online radioshow, and can be music, news, chat or me burbling earnestly away, punctuated by goodwilled contributors. It’s an mp3 file, so if you’ve ever downloaded any other audio I’ve linked, you can listen to it in the same way. If you happen to have an iPod, you’ll have a moral obligation to use that to listen with.
The podcast’s aimed at LibriVoxers present and potential, and lists some of the ways readings can suck, and what you-the-reader might do to avoid that hideous fate (bearing in mind LV is NOT a professional outfit and WILL accept almost any file, provided it’s basically audible and provably public domain. (But hey, it’s free. Come and do better if you like.) So this is mostly ironic, in a not-actually-very-ironic-at-all sort of way.) Feedback’s been mostly good so far, with some interesting negatives pointed out. More welcome :)
Direct link: (19MB file, 38 mins) http://www.archive.org/download/librivox_community/
librivox_community_podcast_54_64kb.mp3
Indirect link: (20th Sept 2007) http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_community
Exhausting, fun, might do another one, sometime not soon.
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Posted by Cori on September 12th, 2007 — Posted in * My Recordings, Book Reviews, Fiction, Solos
http://librivox.org/the-water-babies-by-charles-kingsley/
Seven whole hours of me. And a minute or so of Berlioz. Recording an entire book is quite a task … this has taken since June, but I’m happy with how it turned out — and I’ve learned a lot to apply to future recordings.
It’s funny how little of the book was *in* the version I’d read as a child … many characters left out, all the sidetracks and rambles left out. This is the unedited story (hopefully, anyway, because it can be hard to know with the earlier Project Gutenberg texts) and I love how sensible it is for the most part. Sure, there are some very dated references to people of various nationalities which I could have lived without reading, but the balancing of Science and Wonder, without discrediting either, is really nicely done.
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Posted by Cori on September 10th, 2007 — Posted in * My Recordings, Fiction, Solos
I thought another project would finish first, but no — Love and Freindship by Jane Austen is my début solo at Librivox. Clocking in at just over an hour, it still fits on an audio CD, and has some splendid Schubert to begin and end with (he was younger than Jane, but not by a long way, they overlapped a decade or two. So it’s not horribly anachronistic, I hope.)
Now to decide what to work on next … my To Do collection is vast and ever-growing.
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