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Archive for the ‘Audiobooks’ Category

David Foster Wallace–Brief Interviews with Hideous Men [audio books] (1999, 2003, 2009)

Posted in Audiobooks, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace, Fears, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), History, Holocaust, Humiliation, John Krasinski, Language, Masturbation, Meta, Sex, Suicide, Unlikable main character on November 7, 2010| 8 Comments »

[LISTENED TO: End of October 2010] Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

There are three options for listening to Brief Interviews.

The first version is the original audio cassette which is read entirely by DFW (1999).  It’s out of print but you can download the audio for free at the David Foster Wallace Audio Project. The second version is the newly released audio book that coincides with John Krasinski’s film (2009).  This CD features some of the readings by DFW although most of the actual interviews are read by the actors from the film (see below for all details).  The third option is a collection of staged readings which were created by The Howling Fantods Brief Interviews Project.  They are available at the site and at the David Foster Wallace Audio Project.  [UPDATE Nov. 8: For the sake of accuracy, I wanted to state that George Carr is responsible for all of the work down for these recordings.  The Howling Fantods site simply hosted the results].

None of these recordings include all of the stories from the book.  Although the stories that they do include are unedited (this is officially listed as “unedited selections from the book”).  The stories that are not included in any of these recordings are:  creepy organ music

  • “The Depressed Person”  [this would have been a tour de force to read]
  • “The Devil Is a Busy Man”
  • “Think”
  • “Signifying Nothing”
  • “Datum Centurio” [I can’t imagine trying to read this out loud]
  • “Octet”
  • “Adult World (I)”
  • “Adult World (II)” [I would have liked to hear how these were handled]
  • “The Devil Is a Busy Man”
  • “Church Not Made with Hands”
  • “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)”
  • “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” [this is my least favorite bit of DFW work and I would have really liked to have heard it read aloud to see if I could get anything more out of it].
  • “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon” (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–readings [audiobooks & downloads 2000-2005–David Foster Wallace]

Posted in Audiobooks, Boredom, David Foster Wallace, Death, Depression, Essays, Funny (ha ha), Harper's, History, Language, Short Story, This American Life on October 31, 2010| 1 Comment »

[LISTENED TO: October 20, 2010] Readings

This (all too brief) collection of readings by David Foster Wallace includes several excerpts and a few shorter pieces.  I’ve noticed that there seem to be more and more videos (audios) of DFW reading on YouTube.  If I had time I would try to gather all of these videos (or even just try to watch them), but for now, I’ll stick with what’s at the David Foster Wallace Audio Project.

The Consider the Lobster reading is an excerpt from”The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”.  I’d never heard him read this piece before and it is a fascinating look at the events of 9/11/01 from Bloomington, Indiana.  I haven’t read the piece in a few years and it was quite affecting to hear him read it aloud.  The introduction was also interesting because he mentions that this is the quickest piece he has ever written (I wonder how many drafts he was able to do in that short period). (more…)

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James Joyce–Dubliners (Part II) (1914) [audiobook 2004–Jim Norton]

Posted in Audiobooks, Death, Drinking, Dublin, Ireland, Holidays, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Language, Marriage Trouble, Religion, Short Story on October 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: October 20, 2010] Dubliners Part II

This collection covers the last five stories from the book.  They are all longer stories, especially the fantastic novella “The Dead,” which runs well over an hour.  The titles included in Part II are:

A Painful Case
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
A Mother
Grace
The Dead

These last five stories look at (continuing the theme from my previous post) middle age and later life.  The protagonists are all older, and as with the first part, they all must deal with harsh realities and even death.

“A Painful Case” is the first story in the book where the title doesn’t directly apply to the protagonist (even  though, of course, it does).  Mr Duffy is a solitary man.  He goes out from time to time but is not really social.  At a concert he meets Mrs Sinico and they form a friendship.  Her husband approves of the friendship because he believes that Mr Duffy is really after their daughter.  The relationship grows stronger and stronger and Mrs Sinico feels closer to him than she does to her husband.  Then, Mrs Sinico make a gesture indicating she’d like a more intimate relationship.  Mr Duffy is immediately turned off by this and vows to himself to see her no more.  This leads to a quote that I assume is not original to Joyce, and yet it is still common today: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”  The strange thing about this story is that it then jumps ahead four years.  We learn that Mrs Sinico took the dissolution of their friendship very hard indeed.  And naturally, Mr Duffy is made to rethink his life choices.  It’s yet another story of despair. (more…)

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James Joyce–Dubliners (Part I) (1914) [audiobook 2004–Jim Norton]

Posted in Audiobooks, Drinking, Dublin, Ireland, History, James Joyce, Jim Norton, Marriage Trouble, Religion, Romance, Short Story on October 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: October 5, 2010] Dubliners Part I

I found listening to Ulysses to be rather satisfying.  And, since I have recently commenced an indoor exercise regime, I thought it would be “fun” to listen to some audio books during the workout.  I started with Dubliners because and because Jim Norton is the reader (and I enjoyed his style on the abridged Ulysses) and because I own it.

It’s disconcerting to read/listen to Dubliners after Ulysses because Dubliners is such a conventional collection of stories.  There’s nothing untoward about them, there’s nothing scandalous (except for drinking and mistreating wives), and there’s nothing to be confused about (except maybe early 20th century Irish political references).  But one thing that  is abundantly clear is that Joyce was a great writer, right from the get go.

This disc’s stories are mostly between 10 and 21 minutes long, although “A Little Cloud” runs to half an hour.  The titles included in Part I are:

The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay

I’m not really going to review the quality of the audio.  It is uniformly very good, with Norton conveying accents wonderfully.  And those accents really bring the stories to life.  There is music in between each story, and the songs are all relevant to the time, if not the individual story. As with most of these audio books, it could be mixed louder, but that’s a minor quibble. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–interviews [audio] (1996-2005)

Posted in Audiobooks, Big Books, Bookworm, Consumerism, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, Depression, Dictionary, Essays, Infinity, Language, Math, NPR/PRI/PBS, Radio, Suicide, Tennis, Word usage on October 22, 2010| 3 Comments »

[LISTENED TO: Week of October 10, 2010] David Foster Wallace interviews

There will soon be a group read of Consider David Foster Wallace, a book of essays about, yes, David Foster Wallace.  In a sort of preparation for the group read, I decided to immerse myself in the available audio files online.

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project hosts quite a vast collection of audio files, including interviews, readings and eulogies.  Even the Howling Fantods points to it.

I started with the interviews.  They cover the period from Infinite Jest to Consider the Lobster.  For the most part, the interviews took place on various NPR stations.  There are not a lot of details given about the items on the site (which is the only flaw that I can see with the site), but you can more or less tell from the titles given what book is the cause for the interview.

I know that DFW was not a fan of interviews, yet I can’t help but be surprised at how few interviews actually seem to be extant (or at least preserved online).  You can see a list of all of the interviews on the site.  I’m listing and giving very brief notations for some of the longer interviews, but I just don’t have the time/inclination to go into great detail. (more…)

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Consider the Archive (2010)

Posted in Audiobooks, Big Books, Books about writers, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Essays, Suicide on October 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: September 27, 2010] Consider the Archive

On September 14, 2010, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas commemorated David Foster Wallace through an evening of his readings and (I love this) Wallace-themed refreshments.  It was also the opening of the Wallace archives at the Center.

[UPDATE: November 8, 2010: The research archives have gone online, details are available here.]

There was a live videocast of the evening, which included excerpts from several of his books. I didn’t get to watch it, but I was able to get an audio copy of the event.

The evening’s readers were:

  • Molly Schwartzburg –Introduction
  • Wayne Allen Brenner, L.B. Deyo, Kurt Hildebrand, Shannon McCormack–The Broom of the System (Grand Ohio Dessert excerpt)
  • Doug Dorst, L.B. Deyo–Correspondence with Don DeLillo
  • Owen Egerton —Infinite Jest (1960, Jim’s Dad)
  • Jake Silvertstein and Kurt Hildebrand–A Supposedly Fun Thing (skeet shooting excerpt)
  • Elizabeth Crane–Infinite Jest: (Avril & Mario)
  • Chris Gibson–Commencement Speech (This is Water) (more…)

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James Joyce–Ulysses (1922) [abridged audiobook 2000–Jim Norton & Marcella Riordan]

Posted in Death, Drinking, Dublin, Ireland, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Jim Norton, Language, Marcella Riordan, Masturbation, Prostitution, Sex on October 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: September 27, 2010] Ulysses [abridged]

Because I am a glutton for punishment, I decided to listen to the abridged version of Ulysses as well (what’s 4 more hours of my life?).  (This edition is by Naxos, which Amazon is selling as a download).  I decided that the main reason was that since I have the text so fresh in my mind, it would be interesting to see what they abridged.  I mentioned in a recent post that the abridged version is 4 discs (just under 5 hours).  That is a serious abridgment, from 40 to 5 hours (actually the Naxos unabridged version is only 22 discs…how come theirs is so much shorter?  It seems that Jim Norton reads much faster).  And I am curious to see what they consider the “essential” text of the book.  Plus, realistically, I would never really want to do it at a later date.

So this version is read by two different people: Jim Norton (who read Dubliners, Portrait, and an abridged Finnegans Wake too) and Marcella Riordan.  There are a number of places where the two interact (she is Molly in the early scene in bed and she is some of the whores in the nightwon scene…it adds some real dramatic resonance to the story). (more…)

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James Joyce–Ulysses 16 (1922) [audiobook 2013–Donal Donnelly and Miriam Healy-Louie]

Posted in Big Books, Donal Donnelly, Drinking, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), History, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Marriage Trouble, Miriam Healy-Louie, Prostitution, Sex on September 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

[LISTENED TO: Week of September 13, 2010] Ulysses

Episode 15 is a huge one, so I finished up that and 16 this week.

One thing I noted about Episode 15 is that in this section:

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rot, Aiulella!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Dooooooooooog!
THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Goooooooooood!

the texts that are printed backwards are played as the forward recording flipped in reverse.  It was a cool effect.

I really didn’t enjoy Episode 16 while I was reading it.  I felt it was overly long and perhaps too focused on the mis-named sailor.  Plus, I was really looking forward to Episode 17 (which is my favorite).  But this time, with someone else reading the hard words, I was able to appreciate quite a lot more about this Episode.

Lar’s comments about Skin-the Goat also helped to give some background to this odd character.  And this leads me to a question that I sort of thought about while reading, but which comes up a lot more for me in this listen:  Joyce’s opinion of Ireland and of Irish independence.  The Citizen in the earlier episode was all about the Irish language and Gaelic sports.  And now in this Episode there is a lot of talk about Parnell returning.  Was this all included because it is what old men in Dublin talked in Dublin in 1904, or was it something that Joyce had a vested interest in (even while he was living in Paris where he wrote the book).  [I could investigate this, but that seems like an awful lot of work.] (more…)

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James Joyce–Ulysses Episodes 13-15 (1922) [audiobook 2013–Donal Donnelly and Miriam Healy-Louie]

Posted in Big Books, Donal Donnelly, Drinking, Dublin, Ireland, Huh?, Humiliation, Infinite Zombies, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Language, Prostitution, Sex, Unreliable narrator, Violence, Yuck! on September 13, 2010| 2 Comments »

[LISTENED TO: Week of September 6] Ulysses

This week I almost finished Episode 15.  I’ve just finished where Bella turns into Bello and things get really weird.  And I have to say that this Episode, for all of its craziness, is masterfully handled by Donal Donnelly.  I’ve already raved about his vocal stylings in the earlier chapters, dealing with so many different men.  But in this chapter he proves to be very dextrous at male and female voices, with a very delicate voice for some and an incredibly masculine woman’s voice for Bello (very well done indeed).  He has also proven himself to be a treat with sound effects (of which there are many here).  I won’t say for certain that it makes this insane Episode a lot clearer, but it certainly makes it easier to follow.

Back to Episode 13. The Gertie section is written in a style that is supposed to be romantic, very quick and flowy.  And Donal really nails it.   After the business of Episode 12, the lightness of 13 is wonderful, and it really brings to life the scene, especially when the rockets go off.

One thing I picked up this time is that Bloom assumes that he knows exactly when Blazes and Molly consummated their affair.  Even re-reading it now, it wasn’t quite as clear as the way he read it aloud:

Funny my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use to clean could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?
O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.
Ah!

So, yes I suppose it’s obvious, but sometimes reading along you just don’t pick things up.  And it took the way he read it for me to realize just what those short sentences meant. (more…)

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