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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Posted by Cori on September 23rd, 2007 — Posted in About LibriVoxing, Misc. audio stuff, Podcasts - LV
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
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
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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Posted by Cori on August 12th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
http://librivox.org/winesburg-ohio-by-sherwood-anderson/ (Chapter 23)
Usually, I just read and record the chapter text. This is the first piece I’ve spent a lot of time with beforehand, thinking about it. Which, I think, might mean this is on the unfamiliar side of reading vs. performing, one of the common differences between LV audiobooks and other publishers’. (As mentioned here on the LV samples page, which I look at from time to time, simply because it stars my first ever LV recording. Ego much?)
What I hope is that Elizabeth Willard comes through clearly, and there’s not obvious Cori hanging around catching the listener’s attention. I couldn’t have done it any other way (without even more performance angst), and the only thing I regret is the hideous sound cleaning process I used. Oh well, die and learn.
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Posted by Cori on July 28th, 2007 — Posted in My Recordings
In the Articles of War established for the government of the English Navy, in Art. 32, after providing with respect to this offence [sodomy] and other species of impurity that they “shall be punished with death” it is added without mercy. […] Of all the offences of which a man in the maritime service can be guilty, burning a fleet, betraying it to the enemy and so forth, this is the only one which it was thought proper to exclude from mercy. The safety of the fleet and of the Empire were in the eyes of the legislator objects of inferior account in comparison with the preservation of a sailor’s chastity.
Offences against One’s Self by Jeremy Bentham (c. 1785) The passage above is from the section of notes for the essay.
(No offence intended to modern sailors of any leaning. Note, the essay is entirely concerned with the suggested decriminalisation of homosexual acts a very long time ago - and has nothing to do with children, its subtitle not withstanding.)
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