Audiobooks

[jenks]

I don’t really like that rather theatrical English voice. The audiobook I heard had an Irish actor. I think, whilst being so obvious to be almost redundant, it’s pretty essential for Beckett to have an Irish voice reading him.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Thanks @sus and @version i asked because I’m not sure and do vacillate between those two poles. When an audiobook is at its best I do think it brings the text to life and gives it something I don’t get from reading on the page. The best example I can think of is the Murphy/Malone /Molloy trilogy. I had tried half a dozen times to get on with those books but the audio opened them out for me - the rhythm of the prose, the voice came through. I think someone like Beckett is a performative writer - he wants the ear as well as the eye. I think Dickens is the same - there are definite cadences in there. Melville wrote wrote huge chunks of Moby Dick in iambic pentameter - he wasn’t doing that just for the eye. However, there are other books I’ve listened to where I have felt it would be a more intimate experience with just the words on the page.

Way back “in the day” I taught myself to read absorb Shakespeare by going to the library and reading the text while listening to the audio plays on cassette tapes, lol.
I read ‘Finnegans Wake’ a year or two ago while listening to a really well read version of audiobook. It was magic! Going to do the same (thanks for the reminder) for the Beckett titles I own but haven’t gotten through.

 

[sus]

Way back “in the day” I taught myself to read absorb Shakespeare by going to the library and reading the text while listening to the audio plays on cassette tapes, lol.
I read ‘Finnegans Wake’ a year or two ago while listening to a really well read version of audiobook. It was magic! Going to do the same (thanks for the reminder) for the Beckett titles I own but haven’t gotten through.

Yes audio-text pairings for the Wake is the only way I think.

It's always been read, too; even back in the 60s recordpressings circulated as freely as the papertext. Robert Ashley was a huge fan. Ginsberg is rumored to have taken one of the discs with him to listen to during his first acid trip, administered by undercover CIA agents in a Stanford lab.

 

[sus]

So many of the puns and jokes and doublings only made sense to me when someone with an Irish accent read them aloud

 

[sus]

I am also inspired to do the same for Molloy etc. Nico loves them

 

[jenks]

I think as a kind of follow up question is what happens to writing if most of it is no longer consumed off the page. I'm thinking about the fact that we are now have the most literate generation ever in Gen Z - they have read more words and written more than any previous generation but not within a traditional format - it's all on screen rather than ink and paper. How does that change our relationship with texts? I'm thinking about how difficult Literature courses are finding it to recruit staff and how numbers of students taking Literature is falling, libraries are closing and stock being sold off for peanuts. I'm not necessarily suggesting that audiobooks are responsible but more about how the privileged place of the book is under threat and what happens next.

 

[sus]

I think it's good. The new orality. Coincident with a new Romanticism

 

[sus]

People are becoming better conversationalists better thinkers more collaborative talkers because for all their failings, podcasts like JRE are miles better than most public discourse. Compare an American presidential debate which is all bullying and preening

 

[pattycakes_]

The fact that a several hour long conversations multiple times a week are in is a nice development

 

[GhostofKinski]

Yes audio-text pairings for the Wake is the only way I think.

It's always been read, too; even back in the 60s recordpressings circulated as freely as the papertext. Robert Ashley was a huge fan. Ginsberg is rumored to have taken one of the discs with him to listen to during his first acid trip, administered by undercover CIA agents in a Stanford lab.

Y’know, I wanted to mention the experience of listening and reading that text as being almost hallucinogenic, but I didn’t want to sound like some shroom addled neo-Druid.

The only way I can describe the experience is like hearing a bird song and suddenly understanding (or at least having that sensation) what it was saying. The cadence, meter,…when read/recited well it made all the difference.

 

[version]

I think as a kind of follow up question is what happens to writing if most of it is no longer consumed off the page. I'm thinking about the fact that we are now have the most literate generation ever in Gen Z - they have read more words and written more than any previous generation but not within a traditional format - it's all on screen rather than ink and paper. How does that change our relationship with texts? I'm thinking about how difficult Literature courses are finding it to recruit staff and how numbers of students taking Literature is falling, libraries are closing and stock being sold off for peanuts. I'm not necessarily suggesting that audiobooks are responsible but more about how the privileged place of the book is under threat and what happens next.

On the lit. courses point, that's got to be at least partly down to the marketisation of higher education and dismissal of the humanities in terms of career prospects. It seems to have been drummed into people's heads that these subjects are a waste of time and everyone should be an engineer or scientist or run their own business instead.

 

[sus]

I don't mind. Too many people write these days. Everyone's a writer. Everyone thinks they have a book in them. Everyone sends out newsletters and calls themselves a critic.

 

[version]

I don't mind. Too many people write these days. Everyone's a writer. Everyone thinks they have a book in them. Everyone sends out newsletters and calls themselves a critic.

Maybe so, but I'm not sure that can be blamed entirely on the existence of lit. courses.