A couple of days ago, I hit an equally boggling, though less Lady Gaga-esque number: my reading of Dante’s Inferno, canto I, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has been on YouTube for four years, and just hit 250,000 views. Furthermore, it has 600 likes, 17 dislikes which is a pleasing ratio. It’s a very simple presentation, by a videomaker who hooked up our readings with the relevant illustrations by Gustave Doré, but effective. I find the comments thread mostly hilarious, since it covers the hotness of my accent, the intent of nephilim, the differences between panthers and leopards, general other-commenter abuse and which African-American actor people would most like to narrate this instead of my ‘sorry soul’.

I looked over at archive.org and the full work is only (“only”!) on 229K downloads, so unexpected as it may seem, YouTube can be an effective vehicle for getting recordings ‘out there’. That said, the video for Canto II hasn’t yet reached 50K views, and later chapters diminish even further, so there’s not an amazing conversion rate of viewers addicted to Dante. But still. There are a LOT of people listening to something I recorded five years ago (not actually very well. I really should do an updated reading.) And, for the most part, enjoying it!

Finally from the Department of Gosh Those Are Big Numbers, my top-listened solo at archive.org, Love and Freindship by Jane Austen, has broken 100,000 downloads. This is a combination of big name author and longevity of availability, but, I’ll take it. :) It’s a fun little piece of juvenilia that should please anyone who likes Austen’s writing, without taking too long to listen to or being especially memorable in the way her novels are.

And now, onward and upward!

Octave Uzanne’s The End of Books is a lively set of imaginings on Life in the Future, from 1894. There’s a brief consideration of geography, food, art — and then Uzanne’s ideas about what will happen to books. Most splendidly, he saw a complete upheaval of Print Dominance by the then-modern science of phonography and speculates on the ubiquity of audiobooks, played on portable gadgets or streamed straight to the home. So that’s Walkmen / MP3 players neatly predicted, and a very tiny sliver of the internet if you’re interpreting him generously. It all makes a pleasant change from the current “Will ebooks kill print books?”, “Will book-piracy kill ebooks?”, “Will anyone be reading in any form whatsoever when they can just watch a movie? Or YouTube video?”-type questions.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun and here’s a chance to link to a favourite video of mine, the Medieval Help Desk … a scene you can almost quite imagine happening as people struggle to change with the times.

To listen to my recording: Download audio file (snf025_endofbooks_uzanne_cs_64kb.mp3)

Or to download other formats (and check out the rest of the collection) visit Short Non-Fiction Collection #25

Yes, this is rather old … the original talk was all over the web earlier this year. But, it resonates for me again now as I work on Frankenstein and can hear that it’s not quite what I want it to be. There’s no obvious Thing To Fix, I couldn’t really say why I don’t feel like it hits the mark. But, I have to do it as it is, as I am, in order to improve at all and move a tiny bit closer to wherever it is I’m heading. And there’s no way to wait for that to happen, to put off recording the very best texts, because if I did that, I’d never ever be good enough to do them. A frustrating situation, but true for me.

Also, I don’t know what happens when I do Arrive. There could be a lot of rerecording to get through, while there are a LOT of other unread books out there waiting for me. Guess I’ll just figure that out when I get there. *smiles*

This is all.

Thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal for linking to this. Splendid!

Visit http://wiffiti.com/ to make your own!

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Via Tom Elliot (whose website seems to be having a funny moment, otherwise I’d link to it.)

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.