Reading the articles for this weeks, rereading previous articles, and incorporating new sources, I had a framework in mind when I went to listen to the first audio book. This is something that I haven’t done in a very long time, so I was curious for the experience.
First, I found a copy of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and gave it a listen at home at my desk. The quality of the reading was high as it was done by a professional. The voice was clear, crisp, with strong Standard English enunciation. I followed story and kept my focus on it. About 1/4 of the way through I fidgeted as I didn’t appreciate a man’s voice for the narrator. Interesting, I thought. This put on the trail of other versions, which I found- 3 to be exact, all male voices. This gave me pause, so I went searching for another book- Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston.Again, I found a copy voiced by a male with high quality production which I listened to with the same reaction. Searching further, I discovered one voiced by a female. However, this wasn’t professionally done but was done by an academic. The quality was acceptable but distracting. The speaker was a Southerner which lent the voice a closer connection to the words, but the misspeaking and throat clearing were a distraction. This made me think of the points that English brought up in the article, “Teaching the Novel in the Audio Age,” where he listed drawbacks that have to be overcome as we incorporate aural books into our classrooms, a concern for me. This also made me reflect on D..E..McKenzie’s point in his sociology of text where he mentions text may be the same but the meaning is modified by page design, new modes of presenting scenes, and articulation of the parts. I continued and searched for Steinbeck’sChrysanthemums. This was off putting as the male voice was heavy handed for the male and lisp for the female. I continued and I searched for Gogol’s The Overcoat and was going in circles until I found that audio versions have it translated as The Cloak. I have very long daily commutes, where I usually read. One day, I put on my earbuds and listened to the story. I was happy to give my eyes a rest. Something I didn’t notice until half way through the story. I also found myself unwinding a bit by sitting back and closing my eyes. This was a treat. This made me think of Price when she was having an interview with Emre and she said that, no, her work is not to be a “killjoy” but the opposite and bring more into lives.
A new chapter is happening and I didn’t even turn a page.
The Tale of Genji (Genji) was written by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 970–c. 1019), a female attendant born into the middle ranks at the imperial court in the Heian Japan (794–1185). Japanese scholars believe that this work is a masterpiece that represents Japanese national character and therefore is a must-read for both Japanese and those interested in Japanese culture. The original text is written in Classical Japanese and is hard to understand for readers without years of language training. In addition, no single manuscript could be verified as the only source of this work. There have been fragments and different versions being passed down over the years. Since about the 1910s, modern Japanese translations that are complete and accessible have appeared, followed by translations in other languages.
The story is about the life of Genji, the son of Emperor Kiritsubo. Although the central figure Genji is fictional, many of the characters in Genji are loosely connected to historical figures during the Heian period. There are a massive amount of love and sexual affairs surrounding Genji in the book, but you could also read this book as an epic of Japanese aristocratic lives, profoundly depicting traditions, ceremonies, arts, politics, religions, etc. The whole book is so sophisticated in its plots, delineation of characters, and literary and aesthetic forms. I have read this work multiple times but am very curious about how we might “read” the text through audiobooks and appreciate/understand the stories in a radically different context from our own.
I found the audiobook version of Genji through audible: The Tale of Genji Volume 1 Audiobook This link only leads you to the first volume of Genji.
If you are a subscriber of audible, you could get access to this volume using one credit. You can also buy the audiobook version from amazon for $7.35. However, I had difficulties locating it at libraries and also am not sure how it works if I wanted to assign this volume to my students if I am going to teach about Genji. I could not imagine how to organize my class if I gave up the physical copy of a Genji translation and instead only assigned students to listen to this audiobook version. But this volume might be a good possibility to explore. It is an unabridged version based on Dennis Washburn’s recent translation. Washburn’s translation departs from the original but has excellent readability for modern and western readers, which, I think, is why this translation has been made into an English audiobook. The audiobook version sticks to the Washburn’s translation but the chapter numbers in the audiobook version do not match the actual chapter numbers in Genji, which will be annoying if we are going to refer to a certain episode.
The audiobook Genji is narrated by Brian Nishii, a professional voice actor born in Tokyo with a background in multilingual cultural activities. He delivers a flawless narration and pays special attention to Japanese people and place names. I appreciate his pronunciation and the varied tones he chooses for different characters. Heartfelt emotions are very well acted out, especially when he chants love poems. His voice is professionally recorded and edited, but I can still feel awkward when he plays female roles. You would still inevitably find in his voice an exotic Asian woman image. I am unsure if it is okay to assume a seemingly natural connection between high-pitched voices and feminization. But one scene in this volume impressed me a lot when he plays a role named Lady Rokujō whose spirit rushes out of her body, possesses Genji’s wife, Lady Aoi, and confesses her hatred and anger for Aoi. Nishii’s voice as Lady Rokujō is not adorable but emotionally rich and attractive, which breaks stereotypes of Japanese women. However, to what extent does the richness of this character come from the actor? To what extent is it derived from the work itself? If the producer decides to use more actors, would it help the readers capture more of the nuanced emotions?
I would say the process of listening to this volume is a smooth one. With textual close reading alone, we have a lot of room for imagination, although it can be challenging and uncomfortably inconvenient. This audiobook offers its readers convenience and smooth experience, but what would our imagined world be like with his voice? Is it possible to “read” a foreign text or foreign characters with an open mind while listening to a familiar/domestic and single cast audiobook?
Sharing a couple of articles I thought were interesting in relation to what we’ve been discussing in class for anyone with extra time on their hands. They are fun fairly quick reads, I promise! The first, is a response to a letter written into the Wired magazine advice column, Cloud Support, looking for reassurance that disdain for emoji and gif usage is valid. The second is an Ezra Klein piece (NYT) that contains interesting thoughts around content and platform pairing. The article, with quite a bit drawn from McLuhan (surprise!!), spends a lot of time discussing television’s tendency to create the expectation of being entertained in the viewer. The implication being—what does that do to news, education or other types of information that may not appropriately pair with that expectation? What does that mean for audio books? How has television influenced our expectation beyond that platform to be entertained? If you record a book without embellishments do you actually mimic the “blank slate” presentation of print that allows the reader to actively engage in world creation? If you apply sound effects, spirited embodiment of characters and music how are you changing the reception of the information (spoken and unspoken) contained in the text?
Before this assignment I had never listened to an audio recording of a work that originated in print. On the rare occasion, I’ve been engrossed in audio-native storytelling. It was easy enough to get swept up in Serial, a suspenseful telling of a twisty-turny real life mystery sitting on the border between journalism and entertainment. So this was new territory—and initially quite overwhelming. What would be the best way to become acquainted with the sensations, possibilities, and distinctions of this particular form of storytelling? Ultimately, I chose to visit characters who I am fully familiar with—partly to whittle down the seemingly endless list of possibilities, but also to provide a grounding and basis for comparison with my personal experience with the story confined to the page. I say confined, but in reality a fictional story is only confined to the page if it is left unread. As soon as we engage with the string words threaded together to incite emotion give shape to settings and voice to characters—the stories spring to life in our minds and intermingle with our own experiences and impressions. In fact, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, perhaps overly familiar to many, have long inspired interpretations in film, television, and, I’ve now discovered, audio recordings. The lengthy list of productions related to their stories could almost make you forget that they had been born in printed short stories to begin with.
For this assignment I chose to listen to three presumably amateur recordings of A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle. I chose all of my recordings from PubliVox, the non-profit open source website that allows anyone from the public to upload recordings of texts in the public domain. Each of my three readers brought the story of a Bohemian king’s panicked attempt to contain his scandalous association with a wily and charming female performer to life in a completely different manner. Each one approached the representation of Holmes and Watson as well as their relationship to each other with such wide variation that it was almost surprising to imagine that, after so many existing expressions of these characters more subtle shifts were left to be made.
Recording 1:
TBOL3
My first recording was created by the user TBOL3. No real information is provided about them personally, but if I were to guess this reader is an American male, 14-17 years old, who may wear braces. His reading style is halting at times, his pronunciation of both English and German vocabulary is spotty, and his recording instruments and techniquescreate a tinny distance in the sound quality. At times a shift is felt in the pace of his reading, as he presumably nears the end of a page and prepares to turn it…which you also hear. Paired with the gentle initial lisp dotted the recording—this created an almost endearing quality akin to peeking in on an older brother reading to their sleepy little sibling.
Although TBOL3 did attempt to render a British accent for our hero and sidekick, it was simply too difficult to maintain throughout the text or render the characters fully distinct. The accents come in and out of focus, never quite feeling authentic. Interestingly, as the text shifts from a solitary Watson to a visit with Sherlock, the attempt at an English accept ramps up—almost as though their proximity unconsciously prompted the reader to emphasize it. Upon the arrival of our Bohemian Prince, we find that the idea of a second foreign accent is simply too much or, maybe the impact of German on the English language is just unknown by our reader—our King speaks in an American rendering of a British accent, but emphatically—as if a more pronounce accent of any sort will help distinguish his higher social standing.
Overall, I was left wondering if perhaps this young reader was using the PubliVox platform to improve their reading skills,if this semi-casual hobby, or, finally, if this recordings stemmed from a class assignment as well (the recording of the full anthology was done collaboratively). The characters never quite stepped away from the basic assumptions that have been made about them—Watson the unassuming and even a bit childlike wingman to Sherlock’s commanding intellect. Beyond English, it is hard to interpret any personal details from the way the characters are rendered—our reader simply needed to get through the text. Mispronunciations, ( Prague as “pragooo” and carte blanche as “carty blanchy”), wavering accents, and the overall speedy cadence of someone unable to fully render the fullness of his characters made it impossible to become immersed in the story.
My second reader clearly has a bit more experience under his belt. A trained voice and professional equipment elevated the experience starting with the title page. An American male ~40-55 years old, he created an almost cozy rich “silence” to house his low velvety delivery of the material. Interestingly, his training may have hindered him at times. Despite excellent enunciation and a smooth flow, he fell into an almost robotic delivery and cadence that can best be compared with the swiftly spoken “small print” of a radio ad. Despite there being no PubliVox limits on his recording time, the steady clip suggested the awareness of someone used to squeezing into scheduled time slots and attempting to limit post production cuts.
The text starts off with Watson’s inner dialogue read in the readers American accent. Not until Watson shares space with Sherlock does the English accent appear—applied to both characters unevenly, and more pronounced when specifically British phrasing appears. (Example: usage of words like “Indeed” or “quite ”—“It’s quite too funny.”). Mr. Smith’s Sherlock feelsflippant and almost whimsical, a stark contrast from some of the more sober Sherlock’s we’ve seen in the past (Jeremy Brett!). It’s almost as if this Sherlock is deriving a bright joy from toying with his interlocutors and digging into a little challenge, instead of the almost dry misanthropic exasperation that commonly seeps out of the pores of some earlier Sherlocks.
Mr. Smiths attempt at a German accent in English is a loose approximation, possibly inspired my American tv or film, but not drawn from any first hand knowledge of the German language. Knowing how much Sherlock Holmes prides himself in his complete a thorough knowledge of any subject at hand, it didn’t ring true when he mispronounced the King’s title— and it became even harder to give into the story when the German speaker himself mispronounced German words and inconsistently applied German phonetic treatments to English words (ex. “Gesellschaft”’ss not pronounced like a “z”, “Ormstein”’s “st” not pronouncedas “sht”.)
Overall, this reading was just fine. It faithfully retold the story as it appears on the page, and there was a professional flow that kept the energy lively and engaging enough, but when compared with my personal experience with the characters or even existing renderings in television and film (and the final recording review in this blog), it felt like a missed opportunity to create a more engaging and rich experience. I would be concerned if this were someone’s first or only experience with these beloved classic characters.
My third and final recording featured a British woman, ~50-60 years old who is clearly a very talented professional audio book reader. Her PubliVox profile did, in fact, feature a link to her webpage which alludes to her professional recordings and experience. The production quality of the recording is professional and intimate, but without the almost overly smooth or cozy effect of Mark Smith. Ms. Golding’s voice is confident and smooth without needing to be buttery. This actually gives her more range, as she is not always trying to overlay a velveting quality on characterizations that do not merit it.
Her command of the material would almost lead you to believe she wasn’t reading at all, but speaking directly from the mind of the characters. Of course she has an advantage, naturally having a British accent and a better command on a range of possible expressions of it, but how she employs this in service of the story is what really struck me. At the opening of the story, Watson’s inner dialogue feels so natural as to draw you in—it pours out, as if following a spontaneous train of thought and exhibits emphasis on certain words and phrases as though the feeling had naturally come to light in the mind of our doctor. Watson is rendered as a man Infused with emotion and quickly clear, through Ms. Golding’s delivery, that he holds deep empathy for and attachment to Holmes. All this while Ms. Golding simultaneouslymaintains the balanced and sober delivery becoming a respected doctor of his time.
Where it gets particularly interesting is when Watson is in the company of Sherlock. Ms. Golding’s Sherlock has a drawn out speaking cadence, as though he is at all times coping with a tendency to languish. There’s a wistfulness, maybe stemming from his regular escape into deep thought and substance abuse. Overall he feels self-content, somewhat distracted, and unbothered. Watson’s tone however, now expressing himself vocally to Sherlock, shifts away from the sober flowing cadence of his inner thoughts. His voice becomes a bit high pitched and his speech is clipped and precise. This helps create a deeper contrast between the two main main characters, but it also creates a distinction between Watson’s inner and outer voices. This provides a depth and richness to the character and the story itself, that inspired an entirely new personal experience of the story. Watson is often depicted as “straight man” to Holmes’s moody brilliance. Holmes’s quirks and genius are set in relief by Watson’s more pedestrian presentation. Ms. Golding, in making such a stark distinction between Watson’s inner and spoke voice, asks us to consider the the characters inner depth and his role and expression in society.I, personally, had always looked at Watson as a kind of second fiddle, but Ms. Golding’s rendering of him made me question if I had not missed the point of the stories entirely. Was the anomaly of Holmes’s genius really just a catalyst to better understand the impact of being confronted with the deep awareness of human behavior and suffering that Holmes’ represents? Essentially, are the clever intricacies of the mysteries the window dressing, but Watson’s inner musings and reactions the real substance of the stories?
Ms. Golding continued to impress with her range of character voices—shifting her voice deeper to bring weight to our Bohemian king, and giving him the German accent he deserves (and Holmes the appropriate command of the German language). The dainty and high pitched renderings of the female characters might feel unexpected, but perhaps feeling the need to make a dramatic shift from her own female voice, she opted to render them unquestionably distinct. Like the other readers, she avoided sound effects, although she did give depth to a shouting crowd by overlaying several recordings of her own voice in different characters.
Ms. Golding’s recording really inspired me to reconsider my understanding characters that considered utterly familiar—known quanitites. Her telling fully immersed me in a world that was both familiar and surprisingly new all at once, rekindling the enjoyment I felt as a young reader of the same tales. Her talent showcases the distinct qualities and power of an audio rendition of an originally printed text, and the critical attention to casting an artist who can make all the different between a recording falling flat or truly singing.
“The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Lui is a short story told from the point of view of a young, Chinese American man as he recalls his relationships with his American father and his Chinese immigrant mother, who was trafficked from China to marry an American man. Being the child of immigrants, the story is profoundly moving to me and I was curious if the audio version would have the same emotional impact of reading the text.
The official Simon & Schuster audiobook is available on audible.com. It is narrated by a single, male voice. The reading is straightforward with no special effects or music in the background. The quality is very good and the narrator sounds like a professional voice actor. However, I did notice some odd choices in this audiobook version. In the story, the mother does not speak English well. In the text, when she speaks Chinese, the phrase is in quotes with the English translation presented in the next sentence (“Laohu.” Look, a tiger.). In parts of the audiobook version, the English translations have been omitted. Perhaps, the publisher or narrator felt providing the English was cumbersome or not necessary? I disagree with this decision, it would have been helpful for the listener to hear the English. Although it doesn’t take away the meaning of the story, it’s a small detail that did not need to be removed. Not being a Chinese speaker, I can’t comment on the pronunciation of these sentences in the audiobook. However, they blended seamlessly with the rest of the audio.
The narrator does change his voice for different characters. It was particularly noticeable when the mother is trying to speak English – at times, the narrator subtly attempts what appears to be a Chinese accent which I found slightly distracting and maybe even inappropriate. To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about this – we already know the mother is Chinese and does not speak English, is the audiobook enforcing a stereotype by having the narrator raise his pitch and speak with a (seemingly) Chinese accent? The narrator also changes his pitch (higher) when speaking as a child and lower when speaking as the father.
I also came across another audio version of the story in the “LeVar Burton Reads” podcast where Burton reads a short fiction in each episode. It was interesting to compare the two audio versions of the same story. Curiously, this version also omits some English translations. I’m a fan of this podcast so I expected a high production value. This version has ambient music playing in the background and each time a character speaks, it sounds like an echo coming from the right or left speaker. These details add texture and dimension to the story. And, although there is also a single, male narrator, Burton carries the story much better in my opinion. He characterizes his voice for effect but doesn’t attempt the Chinese accent, instead focusing on the emotion of the character, like speaking in a hoarse voice when the mother is sick or a loud voice when the young man is angry. Lastly, Burton’s version is almost twice as long as Simon & Schuster’s. His pace of reading must have been much slower but it was not noticeable. In fact, I appreciated his pauses and clear enunciation.
In some ways, the audiobook versions forced me to slow down and pay attention as opposed to speed reading a book. But overall, I still prefer the printed text version of this story. It’s hard to ignore the interpretive nature of someone reading out loud.
A/N: Natalie and I were coworking when we wrote these blog posts, so if you see any similar ideas, it’s because we had a conversation! Also, I remembered that read more tags exist so y’all can handle my long ass posts. Cheers!
First, a defense:
When considering what audiobook I wanted to do for this assignment, I had to first question what counts as an audiobook. Because obviously, knowing me, I can’t just do something easy; I have to sit here and question whether Tumblr posts count as a work of fiction. And I decided that hell yeah they do. First of all, they’re quite literally fiction (usually), but also they’ve created a large cultural canon. Tumblr users know these posts by heart, primarily auditorily (which I’ll explain why in a moment), and seek to locate and preserve them for future Internet users all around. In its heyday (the 2010s), Tumblr posts most often spread orally when offline/”IRL”, I can only assume due to wifi only slowly beginning to spread to public spaces and data still being LTE, but I truly couldn’t tell you precisely why. A major part of Tumblr culture is dramatic readings, perhaps because of the oral retellings of posts. These dramatic readings are exactly what they sound like- people read posts aloud a la Shakespearean monologues. Nowadays many Tumblr posts are hard to find; there are actually whole accounts dedicated to archiving historic Tumblr posts (especially ones that created phrases that are now used as references in speech to key people into the fact that they’re in one fandom or another, or a Tumblr user in general, such as “I like your shoelaces”).
Here, I present a video from four years ago (that I actually watched when it came out, so this video and I have some history) of dramatic readings of “3am” Tumblr posts (AKA posts that are unhinged like someone suffering from lack of sleep).
The creator, PM Seymour, is a hobby voice actor whose MO on YouTube who makes a lot of this sort of thing; he mostly reads out posts from Tumblr for this purpose of giving them to another medium to share and further document, and boy is he good at it. Seymour puts on a wide variety of voices and tones to illustrate these posts. Unlike traditional novels, Tumblr posts typically don’t have any cues that tell the reader how to perceive their speech, so Seymour adds an additional layer of characterization of to the speaker in the post with his voice acting. He’s been voice acting since 2011 with professional equipment, and started posting to his YouTube channel shortly after his voice acting career began, so his YouTube channel has fairly good production value aside from the graphic quality. He characterizes primarily by how the user types their message, with CAPS LOCK BEING SCREAMING, FOR EXAMPLE. He also assigns gender seemingly arbitrarily and tone in absence of indicators, adding a lot to the text and how it’s interpreted. Posts that I personally wouldn’t have found funny before I find funny when he reads them because of this. It is also in this way that he tends to deviate from the text, especially by adding funny vocal effects like screams (I promise it’s funnier than it sounds). It is in this way that his dramatic readings are not only transformative/transforming the text posts into a different medium, but he’s also adding an element to the existing fiction that I’d argue as before makes them audio’books’. Though, I suppose that that’s not really what makes audiobooks audiobooks, because they don’t have to be transformative in that way- they just have to read the thing out loud. Something to think about for the future…
Originally I intended to listen to the first episode of The Sandman audiobook. I love the graphic novel series—have read it multiple times—and just finished watching the series on Netflix. I’m not much of an audiobook person, having only listened to books on tape during long road trips. So I was extra curious to see how they would/would not be able to translate the color and the aesthetic that is prominent in the art of this series. I am still very curious to listen to this fully, but for my review I went in another direction. The teaser sample of this audiobook series is of such high production value and has many famous actors voicing the characters—if you didn’t know it was only audio, you would think it was from a big-budget movie—so I decided I’d be better served listening to something else for inspiration for our own project.
As my group is going to be working with short stories, I turned to one of my favorite authors and perhaps her most famous short story: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
This was the first hit that came up when I searched for an audiobook, and I appreciated that this seems to be part of a ghost story audiobook/podcast series, so I gave it a listen. The intro (and outro) are very stylized, with creepy imagery and very eerie background music with voice clips from other horror stories. It’s a bit over the top, but mostly fun. In contrast, the reading of the text itself is very plain and even understated.
Tony Walker reads the story with an English accent. At first I thought, ugh, is this to make it sound more literary or more serious in some way? Jackson has said the setting is rural New England. However, after he completes his reading of the story, he spends some time talking about the story, wherein he says he felt he could read this story in his native Northern English accent expressly because it feels so much like a story that could be set in any rural, anglicized area. I’m inclined to agree with him. It also made me curious to listen to some of his other stories and see how he chooses accents for those, and how well they fit those stories. From his discussion, it seems Walker is a bit of a voice actor and seems able to make decisions on accents based on the stories he chooses to record.
I read along as Walker narrated, and I noticed a few alterations in some words between his version and mine. The changes were so slight I’m unsure if it was human error while he was reading, or if there are subtle differences in versions depending on the edition you have, or if indeed he deliberately chose to change some of the language. (I have Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, published in 2010 by The Library of America, but here is a link to The New Yorker, where it was first published in 1948: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery). When he discusses the story after reading it, he shows a lot of reverence for Jackson, so I’m inclined to think he accidentally changes a couple of words as he’s reading it, or else there exist slightly different versions of this story. [Example: In the opening paragraph in my version of the story, it reads, “…but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours….”; the version he gives, and which I also see in The New Yorker, reads, “but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours…”.]
Walker reads slower than I would if I was reading on my own, but not so slowly as to draw the story out unnecessarily. His pacing is very methodical and even throughout, though he does slow down as we get to the climax and realize that something is very much amiss in the town ceremony. Indeed, he adds more repetition and emphasis on “the black dot” when we realize it’s Tessie Hutchinson who’s been selected for the lottery. Jackson wrote: “It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office.” But Walker adds in an extra “The Black Spot” so the spot is mentioned three times instead of two. I believe this change from the original text was an intentional editorial choice on Walker’s part, and that it enhances the audio experience.
Walker does slightly alter his voice for different characters’ dialogue, just enough to help a listener who isn’t also reading along, but not so much that he sounds cartoonish or mocking of any of the characters. And he slightly alters the level of his voice when people are talking versus whispering or speaking in hushed tones. Again, I think his choices enhances the text, rather than detracting from it. He does not use any background noise or add music or sound effects, which we know was a deliberate choice for him based on the way he’s chosen to style his intro and outro for his series. From his discussion after the story, I learned that he has specialty audio recording equipment, and you can tell the sound quality is very high, and his diction is crisp. He has a podcast, and he’s clearly very comfortable in front of a mic. I also learned that he started doing live readings, which included video of him, which his viewers gave mixed responses to. As such, he seems to be making two versions of each of his stories: one live with video of him reading; and another with some sound-editing that is just his voice. It seems like a lot of work, but I appreciate that he’s open feedback and understands there are pros and cons to each type of audio experience for his audience.
Overall I think his reading of The Lottery was very good. I felt very much like he could have been sitting in my living room and reading directly to me.
Of many things that the internet can do, the facilitating the formation of communities is—for better or worse—one of its most consistently preserved features. As ‘the internet’ becomes less of a worldwide web and more of a series of loosely interconnected pockets, these communities have become more insular. But by that same token, they’ve become more self-sustaining. The language, cultural canon, and tone of the communities are actively preserved by community members in the same way archivists and educators preserve the precedent of a field.
The text I’ve chosen for this blog post is a poorly written (not a read, just a fact) piece of Harry Potter fanfiction entitled ‘My Immortal.’ As a text, it ignores nearly every rule of the medium, eschewing grammar, spelling, punctuation, characterization, rules and tropes of the subject universe—the list goes on. Despite its many (many) flaws, it stands as a beloved piece of internet literature. So beloved, in fact that when the original iteration on fanfiction.net was deleted, a community site was erected dedicated to the preservation of its text form. As a text, My Immortal has a consistent pattern of spelling and diction that both adds to its inherent charm, and makes it nigh on undecipherable to the uninitiated. Because if this and its place in the hearts of many, as an icon of a specific counterculture, as specific time period, many audio renditions choose actively to celebrate these linguistic foibles as an integral part of the experience.
I’ve included two versions of this ‘audiobook,’ one done in earnest as a single cohesive (and solely aural) piece, and one recorded as a series of several videos with the text overlain on the screen, and occasional edited graphics to tie in the visual aspects of the experience. I include both because I find the first to be, shall we say, a connoisseur’s version. Or perhaps, a more purely verbal experience to be enjoyed by those delving further, or maybe delving for the first time. The second version is one for the community surrounding the piece. Whether you’ve read the piece in its entirety or are coming across it from another pocket of the internet, the immersive and edited rendition invites you to consume the piece outside of the vacuum of your own experience. The narrator stumbles over words and chokes with laughter, and shares inside jokes in the form of visual editing. The tone differential between these two versions is substantial, but they both offer a version of the text as it could’ve been experienced in its original form, on fanfiction.net. Whether that means listening to the narrator eloquently articulate each misspelling with care, as you would reading the text, or cracking up alongside the narrator like you’re reading alongside friends and sharing in the absurdity.
The two works also share the commonality of being created as a labor of love. And ultimately, with this piece, that’s what keeps it alive. It’s bad writing. Its content is deeply a product of its time. But because of its place in the annals of the internet, it refuses to die. And in that way, it has become, not my immortal, but our immortal.
When the subject of audiobooks arrived for this weeks topic, I thought instantly of surveying random recordings of the “General Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Although selected prior to reading Rubery’s The Untold Story of the Talking Book, the benefits of talking books listed as “dialects, foreign languages, and song lyrics” retrofit into the motivation of selecting Chaucer’s text (Rubery 9). My selection likely reflects the sentimentality attached to my reading of this particular text. Taking a course on the Canterbury Tales at Hunter College in Spring 2019 paradoxically lead me to both pursuing a masters degree and, counterintuitively on first blush, digital humanities.
(Except from The General Prologue of Chaucer’s “the Canterbury Tales”
read by J.B Bessinger Jr.)
The most persuasive version I found in my brief survey was digital rip from a cassette tape recording of J.B Bessinger Jr., excerpted above from the Internet Archive. Bessinger, an NYU professor, known for his thorough pedagogical schemas for teaching Beowulf, outshines competing recordings by criteria that’s meaningful to me as a listener of an audio performance in Middle English. One distinguishing factor that makes this audio version better than the others found online is the omission of line break pauses. Rhyming in oral traditions offer the memorial ergonomics to the performer, but weren’t intended to modulate the sentence pacing in a given stanza. For example, line five through half of line seven should be spoke all in one breath even though there are two line breaks.
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes,
Should be read as “Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth inspired hath in every holt and heeth the tendre croppes.”
Pausing for the line break is rampant in all the readings in of the prologue I could find online.
Bessinger’s intonation accounts for the flow of sentences, and he voices each character’s description in some semblance to the station and gender of the character described. The reading is extremely fluent, and the pronunciation matches how I was taught Middle English. It’s worth wondering to what degree I feel a heretofore surreptitious sense of authenticity when I hear the gentle pops of static build up created during playback and recorded to this digital version of the General Prologue.
Other audio recordings of the General Prologue sounded less convincing to my ear. Though the breath of the Ancient Literature Dude‘s Youtube Channel is impressive, his reading of the General Prologue has several unsatisfactory elements. First, his voice is impressively deep and gravelly, but doesn’t vary vocal characterization throughout the General Prologue. In fact, you’ll find that his tone appears to be flat regardless of ancient language or text read (e.g. a rune poem read in Old Norse ). The music in this rendition, a welcome addition given the audiobook medium, apes the general mood of medievalism, incorporating as much variation as the vocal intonation. This instruction video] prepared by the University School of Nashville offers a major assistance, albeit in visual aides. Still, flashing the image of a bird when speaking of the “smale fowles maken melodye” can help contemporary readers understand some of the meaning behind the Middle English they will recite at the end of the semester, even if it’s not strictly a property of an audiobook.
I am not well-versed in audiobooks, but part of what occurs to me while seeking out recordings of Chaucer is the surprising conservatism in this small subset of this format. I’d be interested to hear if anyone in the case can point me to audiobooks that use more sound effects or audio cues to help enhance a reading of an audiobook when compared to sight reading. Then again, maybe I’m confusing an audiobook for a radio play.
Here’s [a link to the General Prologue] on Gutenberg if anyone wants to read along with the audiobooks presented here. The first two stanzas are included below to give a reader of this blog a flavor of Middle English in written form.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
Bifel that, in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come in-to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,
That I was of hir felawshipe anon,
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey, ther as I yow devyse.
In April of 1959, American novelist Flannery O’Connor read her celebrated short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, to a crowd at Vanderbilt University as part of a panel with fellow Southern authors Robert Penn Warren and Jesse Stuart. Presumably produced using the recently commercialized and affordable reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders of the time, the muddled audio recording detailing the tale of The Grandmother and The Misfit exists as a rare glimpse into the reclusive and pious nature of O’Connor and the tonality with which she intended her stories to be told. The narrative is appropriately drenched in O’Connor’s thick Georgian accent and is delivered with an ease exclusive to an author reciting their own work, drawing forth laughter (and audio clipping) from the crowd as the Southern author delivers flares of wit and the grotesque to a crowd whose vocal engagement only amplifies the potency of O’Connor’s performance. Despite the mediocre quality of the recording, which includes incessant white noise buzzing beneath the “boxy” register of Flannery’s voice, the aged nature of the audio might be said to add an aura of authenticity to the piece, grounding it in the temporal context in which O’Connor was operating. Little information exists regarding the production process of the recording and from briefly engaging with it, one can surmise that this is likely due to there being little to report. Beyond a button being pressed on a machine akin to a Philips Single Speed High Fidelity Model Tape Recorder and a neighboring button being pressed to stop the recording, it is evident that no editing was involved prior to the recording being published.
Though Flannery O’Connor doesn’t dabble in distinct voice characterization, during the climax of the story she effectively oscillates between the panicked delivery of The Grandmother and the cool, murderous intonation of The Misfit. O’Connor’s elocution quickens until the point of The Grandmother’s death, her speech then slowing to match the reflective state of The Misfit in the wake of his act of violence before concluding the work with the murderer’s oft-debated statement (“It’s no real pleasure in life.”) to the sound of muddy applause. O’Connor’s zeal in communicating her moral fictions, undoubtedly laced with a clear theological intention that presumably drives her impassioned delivery, effectively renders this audio a captivating piece of literary history and an invaluable introduction to the Southern Gothic genre.
Having read A Good Man is Hard to Find multiple times, listening to the story as expressed by the author provided a novel experience and worked to emphasize elements of the narrative that had previously eluded me. Components of the aural experience of the story, such as O’Connor’s vocal urgency amidst the story’s conclusion and her playful diction exhibiting the subtle humor throughout the piece, worked to amplify both the grotesque realism and the absurd hilarity of her work in such a way that breathed new life into a story with which I’m wildly familiar. As an ex-Audible subscriber who has grown somewhat disillusioned with audiobooks for reasons primarily related to my own attention span and capacity for retaining information, my experience with this recording provided a pleasant reminder of what it is to simply be told a story.
Cash, J. W. (1987). Flannery O’Connor as Lecturer: “… a secret desire to rival Charles Dickens”. The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, 16, 1–15.
Fitzgerald, S. (Ed.). (1979). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Vintage Books.
O’Connor, F. (1971). The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
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