Jane Austen’s Fight Club
Thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal for linking to this. Splendid!
A LibriVox Wiffiti thing
Just found a funky Flash gadget which pulls Tweets on my chosen topics of “LibriVox”, “public domain” and “free audio” together into a nice dooflip. Would be awesome at conferences, where everyone’s got a hashtag in common!
Visit http://wiffiti.com/ to make your own!
On cataloging invisible things …
I’ve been kicking around thoughts on how best to organise the LibriVox catalogue in the future, especially when the new design is implemented. LibriVox is a collection of people who speak many languages, and who record public domain audiobooks in most of them.
Currently, we organise by Category (out of Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Dramatic Works — one per book) and by Genre (list here — multiple selections possible).
However, as our catalogue grows, I think it’s going to get harder and harder to manage this very fixed structure. As we add more books, we’ll need to add more Genres, and it will be a lot of work to retrospectively look over our books when a new Genre is added. For example, Art was recently added to the list, and older books about Art were added to the Genre by people who remembered them. But even with a relatively small number of relevant books involved, some can get missed, like Ruskin’s Lectures on Landscapes. Adding a Genre which would cover a lot of existing books becomes a bit of a nightmare, and there’s little incentive to add new Genres of this type. My point here is definitely not to second-guess the labellers, but to note that it’s going to be very hard to keep using this system when we have 5,000 books. By the time we get to 10,000, we’ll have literally thousands of books in some Genres and it’ll be very hard for listeners to find books that interest them, using the Genre system.
“Levelling up” in 1873
I was reading “The Intellectual Life” by P.G. Hamerton the other day, as you do. It’s a book of hypothetical letters to some imaginary friends around the theme of being a proper Victorian intellectual (it was published in 1873.) And in one essay, I was much amused to find an unexpectedly-modern usage of the term “level up”. On a brief rummage around the internet, I find a number of people arguing whether the term first came from D&D gaming or video games a couple of decades ago. I’m sure Hamerton’s can’t be the earliest usage, but perhaps fairly early, since it was printed in scare-quotes, to make people think through the meaning of the phrase. Hamerton is talking to his fantasy recipient about how hard it is to be a modern languages student, learning a language that other people speak natively. By contrast …
The classical student has only to contend against other students who are and have been situated very much as he is situated himself. They have learned Latin and Greek from grammars and dictionaries as he is learning them, and the only natural advantages which any of his predecessors may have possessed are superiorities of memory which may be compensated by his greater perseverance, or superiorities of sympathy to which he may “level up” by that acquired and artificial interest which comes from protracted application.
(Part III, Letter VIII of The Intellectual Life by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. archive.org free book link)
Communication in modern culture
Another great video … this one is about the constant undermining of decisive speech by, like, you know, nambypamby fillers. I’d like it more without the audience noise, I confess, but that’s just a picky detail.
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo. Poem by Taylor Mali.
Via Tom Elliot (whose website seems to be having a funny moment, otherwise I’d link to it.)
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost – dance & music mix
Every now and again I search YouTube to see what people are doing with LibriVox files or saying about the site. And found a really lovely video – this is a dance to a remix of Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice. You can hear my read along with lots of other LibriVoxers (it was a Poem of the Week, so remixers have lots of versions to choose from.)
From the Youtube description:
Cera Byer, the visionary behind Damage Control Dance Theatre and Shoebox Studio, dances to “Fire and Ice” from Manko Eponymous’ 2008 cd “Kaihealoha.” Original poem by Robert Frost, performed by librivox.org volunteers.
The Pirate Library
My original idea for this website was to create an Encyclopedia Piratica, hence the domain name. However, I never found the time and energy to do the vast amount of work required; too much time spent proof-reading and recording audiobooks. However, this weekend I’ve sat down and used a few different resources to pull together a listing of piratey works … which can now be found at:
http://piratelibrary.com/library.htm
This is a bit of a hotchpotch at the moment, since contemporary and modern works are mixed, as are fact and fiction, and sea pirates with thieves of other stripes. I’ve simply labelled books according to source. So it will evolve over time, and I hope it proves of use / fun to someone somewhere along the way.
Collections included so far:
Project Gutenberg
LibriVox
The Internet Archive
To come:
Google Books (the public domain ones, anyway)
Other free online sources of piratical text & audio as I find them
A Belated Happy New Year 2009
My New Year Revolutions didn’t really get made this year, but I have some ideas in my head about numbers that I’d like to hit this year, including 100hrs of LibriVox recordings, something about posts, something about podcasts, something about blog posts.
I’m signed up to the One-Book-a-Week challenge again, but knowing the pace I normally read at, I’ve had a binge this month on short novels, and am currently have completed 10. Ha!
I also spruced up this website a little, adding actual widgets and Gargle Analytics. I’m not completely happy with them yet, I can feel a little tinkering with the CSS coming on, but still, close enough.
And finally, it was suggested to me that it might be much fun to Wordle the recordings I produce when I announce them here. Which is definitely a plan. I’ve already made the picture for the next (very short) piece I plan to record, which I know will have an audience of about one, assuming I listen to it myself. But perhaps that’s what Posterity is all about. Talking to ourselves and hoping mebbe someone else will want to overhear. We shall see.
6 not-so random things about me
I was tagged by LibriVox ductapeguy, Sean McGaughey, and while I’ve done my time as Meme-Servant and moved on … I thought I could spin this one on-theme, so … here goes.
* The most common background noise you may hear in my recordings is that of seagulls — their piercing shrieks go straight through double-glazing and my sound-dampener. Luckily for me, I love the sound.
* The modern book I would most like to read is The Hungry Cloud by Tom Ingram. it has cult-status amongst those of us who’ve read it — it is a formidably good fantasy story for older children. Sadly out of print and apparently unheard of by anyone who didn’t read it, I’d still love to meet its author and say thankyou.
* My microphone is a Samson C01U. It was probably the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought in pursuit of a hobby.
* I’ve contributed 293 audio-files to LibriVox, MCed 75 projects past and present, and recorded in 4 languages (mostly briefly and badly, though!) In addition to that, I’ve hosted 15 LV community podcasts.
* I have 3 solos on the go at the moment and am about to start a 4th (but will work on finishing up the others once it’s begun.)
* I like getting feedback. It’s fun knowing who’s listening to what, and which bits they’ve enjoyed or have reservations about.
At this point I’m s’posed to tag on to another six people, but I’m just going to leave it open to anyone who’s not done this meme in a while, and is in the mood … if you-who-are-reading fancy a go, the rules are below, and feel free to drop a comment here with a link to your own post.
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
James Henry and the Echo
As part of the LibriVox London get-together this weekend, we sauntered along to Greenwich, to record in the foot tunnel which runs under the Thames. We hadn’t planned it in advance, and simply took along a giant book of poetry to dip into. My dips were pretty random, but I’m most happy with how one particular poem came out — an untitled piece by James Henry. Google was determined to tell me all about Henry James but, no, I am not that much of a dolt … and when I titled JH ‘poet’, he popped up in Wikipedia readily enough.
James Henry (13 December 1798 – 14 July 1876) was an Irish classical scholar and poet.
At its best his poetry has something of the flavour of Robert Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough while at its worst it resembles the doggerel of William McGonagall. His five volumes of verse were all published at his own expense and received no critical attention either during or after his lifetime.
Could be my new favourite poet. The piece I recorded had more of the Browning than the McGonagall, not that McG isn’t very dear to my heart too!
I’d love to go back and work with the echo more, now that I have something of a feel for how it records … but … that’s probably not practical in the near future. This will have to do for the time being, unrehearsed and unedited as it is.
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(1:33)
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Currently ...
- Editing away on my new solo, am on part 5 of 12. Short parts, too, happily! 2010-07-05
- Have a bit of a cold; hence I sound like a soprano Darth Vader. Interesting but uncomfortable, don't expect recordings sounding like this! 2010-01-13
- Edited a quarter of the new mini-solo, while I impatiently wait for the right time to set up my new recording 'studio'. 2010-01-09
- More updates...
Public Domain – Events
- pdbooks: Fanny Burney, novelist, diarist, and playwright, born this day in 1752. Text: http://tinyurl.com/745pbs Audio: http://tinyurl.com/7pap85 13 June, 2010
- pdbooks: H.P. Lovecraft, horror writer, died this day in 1937. Stories: http://tinyurl.com/cqz7hq Audio: http://tinyurl.com/dgv2nl 15 March, 2010