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 15th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. audio stuff
“There are tens of thousands of audiobooks available in the world, in various languages, ranging all the way from education to entertainment.”
http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/audiobooks
One thousand of those books are, of course, by LibriVox. In a kind acknowledgement of that, when demonstrating beta software, Nokia have converted a few LV books to play as minature-size audio files on some of their mobile phones. Splendidly, when they were choosing five out of our wide range — they included Freud’s Dream Psychology, which I contributed a chapter to.
With regard to the freeness: our books are all free, the compression format is an open standard, and the converting software is freeware. Plus a chap from Nokia took the time to sign up to the LV forum to assure us of the latter, which gets them added Nice People points, too.
I don’t have a mobile myself, and obviously I can’t condone people irradiating their head just to listen to me, (though I will be flattered,) but I’m sure with some kind of hands-free equipment, and an adequate shielding of tin-foil, owners of various mobile devices can benefit safely. Enjoy!
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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 November 8th, 2007 — Posted in Podcasts - LV
This was a very random idea on Saturday morning, just before a very busy day offline commenced. “Hey, no-one’s gotten dibs on this week’s podcast. What could I do … hmm … ah, I know: something with crazy sci-fi sound effects.” By that evening, I had some support for it … by Sunday morning I had 4 interviewees lined up … and the audio parts for all 6 people was downloaded ready for editing by Monday evening. It took until Wednesday night to work out how to fit Holst in … and actually, the way that turned out was plain serendipity.
Though, GOODNESS, do these things take a long time to put together! 28 mins of audio = the larger part of several hours of tinkering about with it.
Notes on the show and credits
Direct download link (25.6MB)
And SFFaudio are among the first people to hear and comment on it — which is particularly nice, since I gave them a good plug for the lovely work they do in reviewing and promoting our recordings (in amongst many other people’s, of course.)
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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 25th, 2007 — Posted in About LibriVoxing, Podcasts - LV
So, my second ever podcast is out, making the LibriVox community chortle:
http://www.archive.org/download/librivox_community/
librivox_community_podcast_59_64kb.mp3 (16.2MB, 33:41)
Probably not so exciting to non-LV listeners, since this one is celebrating approaching 1000 titles in the Librivox catalogue. When I got dibs on the date for this podcast, a few weeks ago, I thought we’d easily hit the nice round number, but no, we’re still 11 off. Gah, frankly. Still, it’s got some great contributions, and — out of 34 mins of audio, less than 4 mins of that is me. I don’t know how that happened, I thought I recorded quite a bit. It also amazes me how long it can take to do a simple bit of copy&paste … this represents about 6hrs work, and that’s actual editing — there was another hour of planning, at least that of organising, and then there’s the time of the recording voices too … hope it sounds good for all that!
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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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Posted by Cori on September 28th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff, My Recordings
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.
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