Posted by Cori on December 22nd, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
The Bird’s Christmas Carol linked below just wasn’t enough. Additions to the Public Domain for this December now include the following three seasonal sillinesses:
A Cornish Christmas Play - recorded during a London LV meet, with four people, two rolling pins, a briefcase, a frying pan and no strict adherence to the script (just as its author intended.) (2.7MB)
The Conscience Pudding by E. Nesbit - I found this as a standalone book in the library, but actually it turned out to be the second chapter of a full-length book (in progress as a solo recording by another Librivoxer.) I thought it was too much fun not to put into this collection, not many other Chrimbo stories will include the wisdom which ends: “If this simple rule was followed there would not be so many wars and martyrs and law suits and inquisitions and bloody deaths at the stake.” (16.5MB)
To An Old Fogey (Who Contends that Christmas is Played Out) by Owen Seaman - Owen is an old friend of mine, back from when he used to edit Punch. When I saw that there was just one space left in this collection, and only a few hours to the closing date … well … it’s seasonal poetry time. Especially poems that start “O frankly bald and obviously stout!” (1.1MB)
And with these three, this brings my LibriVox contribution total to 200 recordings … about forty hours. Bring on the holiday time-off and New Year!
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Posted by Cori on December 11th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
I recently lucked into recording a section of Paradise Lost. I wasn’t planning to get a literature-nerd crush on Milton, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to have to edit “oooooh, cool!” out of the middle of a recording, once I’d finished reading a particular paragraph. But there’s a lot of unaccountable events in this life, and the above happened. Normally I wait until things are catalogued before writing about them here … but … c’mmon, movie tie-in! :D
The whole book is going to be well worth a listen — it’s much more accessible and vivid than I was expecting <imagine some muttering here about T.S. Eliot> But in the meantime, here’s just the minute of text Pullman sourced his trilogy title from: http://www.studioae.com/LibriVox/cori/misc/paradiselost_darkmaterials_milton.mp3
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Posted by Cori on December 3rd, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
Yes, it is heading towards That Time of Year again … and though I have plans for something of Nesbit’s to celebrate the season (note to self - get that copyright clearance, ASAP!) I rescued a poor little orphan chapter too, part of The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. A sweet little children’s story — I’m looking forward to listening to the whole thing … only not on the bus, because the ending looks to be sniffle-inducing, in a good way.
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Posted by Cori on December 2nd, 2007 — Posted in About LibriVoxing, Misc. text stuff, My Recordings
LibriVox Volumes 1 and 2 are now available to the public, ten stories in each … and now we’re busy filling up the third. I’ve contributed one story to each so far, and I’ll need to stock up with more readings, since these things tend to go quickly!
The strangest thing about my contribution to Vol 1 is that it’s the only text I’ve knowingly recorded by a still living author (not counting various recordings of forum posts and FAQs and stuff.) US copyright law is plain odd: where a story by (alive) Harry Harrison published in 1962 can fall into the public domain — but where Kafka, who died in 1924 (more than 70 years ago which is the current US copyright term) still retains a US copyright on The Trial and The Castle (in original German and thus subsequent translations) until at least 2021. Note, I am not a lawyer in any country. Even the limited calculation I do with these laws makes my head hurt. But this is my working understanding of the state of play.
Still, it’s not like there’s any shortage of books to record, and since my legal understanding includes the “rule of shorter term” which in dangerously-abridged form I think means “if it’s by a USan author, and Public Domain in the US, the UK will just go along with that copyright status, thankyewverymuch,” I can be kept very happy reading Sci Fi shorts amongst everything else.
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Posted by Cori on December 1st, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
http://librivox.org/insomnia-collection-vol-1/
I invented this before the Short Non-Fiction Collections came along, so it’s part-filled with people begrudgingly handing over things which THEY thought were really quite interesting, but conceded the rest of the world might find a bit nod-worthy. I contributed the starting piece of fiction on Shakespeare’s Insomnia … which IS a spoof, even if it does quote convincingly from his works at the start. Completely pointless literature. And if nothing during the recitals of reagents, walnuts and osteopathy gets the listener to sweetly slumber, I’m pretty convinced repeat play on the last track (first thousand digits of Pi) will do the trick.
During proof-listening, the only subject which incited actual snores was Some Mooted Questions In Reinforced Concrete Design but I’m looking forward to the ongoing feedback from a wider audience. Comments welcome!
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Posted by Cori on November 28th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
I’d never read any of Thomas Hardy’s poetry … it was enough to be forced through an entire novel (FFTMC) during GCSE English, and the bits of prose I’ve dipped into since convinced me to keep my distance. Thoroughly gloomtastic is our Mr Hardy.
But, given the opportunity to actually LOOK at his poetry, I was rather taken with various pieces, and picked out three to read for a new Librivox Collection. (33, 34 and 35)
To Shakespeare After Three Hundred Years is a really sweet tribute to Will. This Heart - A Woman’s Dream is the most ‘traditional’ Hardy, being a wife who dreams of finally understanding her husband - after his death. And Great Things has echoes of my previously-recorded Brooke in The Great Lover and starts off with an entire verse about how Great cyder is. And with that, I cannot argue.
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Posted by Cori on November 9th, 2007 — Posted in About LibriVoxing, Misc. audio stuff, My Recordings
Just finished making a static page which lists and links all of my recordings so far. Since I’ve completed 179, this has taken a while. Still, it’s a good list. And hopefully keeping it current won’t be too complicated, since a fair bit of what I record now, I am also organising behind the scenes (BCing or MCing in LV terms), so I’ll know exactly when it goes into the catalogue.
http://piratelibrary.com/hear-me/
After a bit of tinkering with a spreadsheet, I can say that this represents 35 hrs 46 mins of audio. Not counting podcasts, King Lear or Life in the Clearings, since I didn’t actually talk for very much of those (and it’s probably balanced by including all of the group readings - The Monkey’s Paw and Many Voices.) It also doesn’t count recordings completed but not yet catalogued, which will take me over 40 hours.
My longest single recording is 49 mins, the shortest 40secs (hardly time to get the disclaimer out! Hoorah poetry!) Longest work is The Water-babies, at just over 7 hrs.
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Posted by Cori on October 25th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff, My Recordings
Sometimes, things just get a bit out of hand. When a little sci-fi story by Fritz Leiber wasn’t renewed as per US copyright requirements, who knew that 49 years later, people around the world would leap upon it to record for audio posterity.
My version is first into the catalogue, thanks to the editing of Mandarine. (Here, 17MB, 35mins)
Kaffen has recorded it too, and submitted it to a newly created sci-fi short story collection. Thistlechick has ALSO recorded it, and once she’s edited, I guess perhaps she’ll pop it into a Short story collection.
It *is* a good story. I’m not sure if it warranted three recordings, but then, who knows why LibriVox has a full-cast dramatic reading of Richard II completed, but not Macbeth, Hamlet or Midsummer Night’s Dream. These texts seem to have a will of their own, sometimes.
http://librivox.org/librivox-short-story-collection-vol-019/
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Posted by Cori on October 8th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917
I finished my chapter of South! just moments before the LibriVox deadline — and what a great chapter it is! I have not however, found out why the Antarctic explorers’ place of refuge had been named Elephant Island. I probably just need to listen to the rest of the book to find out how terrified the trunked ones were on seeing these hairy, smelly men arriving, and that they exited the island en masse like giant bald lemmings.
Shackleton’s not a wonderful writer — he repeats himself, jumps about in his story’s chronology, and butchers any chance of tension by informing his readers in the first few lines of the chapter that no-one died, despite heroic attempts by people with heart-failure and bronchitis. However, he was writing at the time of Sugar Rationing The First, and perhaps folks just didn’t want that kind of anxious ambiguity in their adventure reading.
That said, it’s an innately exciting story, carefully described, and — my chapter was, at least — unexpectedly wry in several places.
“Now that Wild’s window allows a shaft of light to enter our hut, one can begin to ‘see’ things inside. Previously one relied upon one’s sense of touch, assisted by the remarks from those whose faces were inadvertently trodden on, to guide one to the door.”
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Posted by Cori on October 6th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
Ah, lovely Gertrude Stein!
From Bartleby.com:
By departing from conventional meaning, grammar and syntax, she attempted to capture “moments of consciousness,” independent of time and memory.
Or to put it another way, in Stein’s own words:
A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A season of many is not more a season than most.
It’s my cake day. I’m hoping my present to the world is going to be catalogued in time. It’s being proof-listened against the clock right now …
http://librivox.org/tender-buttons-by-gertrude-stein/
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