Month: February 2012

CBS Radio Mystery Theater: Wuthering Heights adapted from the novel by Emily Brontë

SFFaudio Online Audio

We’ve got the audiobook version, and here’s cool radio drama adaptation from the 1970s. I’ll be listening to this tonight as I drift off into dreamland.

CBS Radio Mystery TheaterCBS Radio Mystery Theater – #0643 – Wuthering Heights
Based on the novel by Emily Brontë; Adapted by Elizabeth Pennell; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: April 29, 1977
Provider: CBSRMT.com
Heathcliff, an adpoted son, returns home to the family that mistreated him as a youth.

Cast:
Lloyd Battista
Paul Hecht
Russell Horton
Roberta Maxwell
Bryna Raeburn

Bonus: The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights (courtesy of Month Python):

Posted by Jesse Willis

Cathy And Heathcliff by Emily Brontë – from The Crackerjack Book For Girls

SFFaudio Online Audio

Cathy And Heathcliffe by Emily Brontë - illustration by William Stobbs

I’ve been looking for an excuse to begin reading Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights!

Now I’ve got one.

This excerpt from the novel works well on it’s own, and makes up the bulk of chapters IV, V, and VI.

I found it in a great uncopyrighted (and undated) kid’s book from the mid 20th century called The Crackerjack Book For Girls!

The Crackerjack Book For Girls

I love these old collections, they combine terrific illustrations with a level of intelligence that’s hard to find in modern kid’s books.

What I’ve actually done here is taken the story’s text and images |PDF| and matched them up with the terrific solo narrated audiobook as performed by the talented Ruth Golding for LibriVox. Or to put it another way I abridged the public domain audiobook of Wuthering Heights to match the text as it appears in The Crackerjack Book For Girls. Here’s the |MP3|.

I should also point out that the complete audiobook of the novel is HERE).

Before you listen, read, or watch the video check out the introduction to Cathy And Heathcliff as it appeared in The Crackerjack Book For Girls:

Emily Brontë was one of three sisters – all if them writers – who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their father was a clergyman and their home was Haworth Parsonage, a bleak, rather forbidding house with the gravestones if the churchyard on one side and the wild, desolate Yorkshire moors on the other.

Their lives were spent in this lonely little village if the West Riding, and the Yorkshire character and landscape colour all their writings. Emily, particularly, loved the windswept, moorland country which surrounded their home, and Wuthering Heights, her only novel, owes its sombre, fascinating atmosphere to the background if her life.

Of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, only the work of Charlotte gained recognition in the author’s lifetime; but now, a century later, we recognise the true genius if Emily. The beauty of her poetry, and the power and dramatic quality if her novel far excel anything written by her sisters (even Charlotte’s masterpiece, Jane Eyre).

Wuthering Heights relates the histories of two neighbouring Yorkshire families, the Lintons and the Earnshaws, through three generations; and the changes if fortune brought upon both of them by the chance action if Mr. Earnshaw, which is described in the excerpt from the book which follows. The strange little foundling boy grows up to be the principal actor in the drama. This is Heathcliff, a character drawn with a power and assurance which at once mark Emily Brontë as a great English writer.
(The story is told in the first person, and is taken up in turn by minor characters in the book. Here Nellie Dean, an old family servant, is telling the story.)

And here’s the afterword:

This incident marked the close of a chapter in Heathcliff’s life. The Cathy who came back to Wuthering Heights had changed beyond his recognition; her stay with the Lintons had turned her into an elegant young lady with fine clothes and manners. In bitter disappointment and despair, Heathcliff fled. Years later he returned, a grown man. Hatred and a desire for revenge had taken complete possession of him, and his one reason for living had become vengeance upon Hindley.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Commentary: The Sci Phi Show and Christian Meets World and Twitter are apparently in a conspiracy to waste my time

SFFaudio Commentary

Back in 2006 Jason Rennie was my podcasting archfoe. He had a podcast called The Sci Phi Show. Back then I used to post about it a lot. It podfaded sometime in 2008.

Jason was a podcaster with whom I had many, many arguments. The problem was I just couldn’t help myself.

Part of it was that he was always talking about topics I loved to think about. And normally that would be cool. But with Jason it always felt more like this…

Now I don’t think Jason was actually out to get me – he lives in Australia so he’d have a long way to swim – it’s more like he was a mirror universe version of myself. I just had to fight him!

And part of it was that he was rather like me – he liked to look for the philosophy in Science Fiction – that’s my thing!

He was doing it wrong.

Jason was a big, big fan of belief.

I too like the idea of certainty (which is a kind of ersatz twin of belief). But having grown fairly comfortable with the fact that certainty is itself a very elusive end to chase I’ve learned not to often persue it.

Incidentally, check out this awesomely funny sentence from the Wikipedia entry on certainty:

It is widely held that certainty about the real world is a failed historical enterprise (that is, beyond deductive truths, tautology, etc.).[1]

So like I was saying, Jason Rennie was the antipodean Jesse Willis.

He was a self-confessed Christian, and he metaphorically wore a crucifix round his neck in every single podcast he produced.

This is rather unlike me. As I am a nothing, holding no religious belief and answering the question of my religious convictions much like THIS when asked.

But somehow, listening to Jason’s show, I always found myself drawn in.

I think it was something about the assumptions he made in every podcast. And how they just lay there, unchallenged.

It’s not like I have a very big atheistic axe to grind, not having being raised with any religious belief that I’ve now overcome or dispensed with …. I mean …. how could I have any real axe to grind? I was never even given a metaphorical helve!

Jason used to insist that I had a worldview and that I was just refusing to articulate it. I think he was wrong, and is wrong. But I’ve thought about that a lot since then. The closest I think I come to having a worldview is with a conversation game I like to play.

At a party, or around a dinner table, I like to ask everyone to figure out what a given person’s favourite word (or phrase) is. And then I ask what that word or phrase might mean about him or her.

So for example, at one such party we figured out that my mom’s favourite phrase is “at least” – and we figured that perhaps that meant that she was always looking on the bright side of things.

Fun right?

My favourite word, apparently, is the word “apparently.”

Personally I like to think my extensive use of “apparently” is because I care greatly about precision and that that the word works as a kind of bulwark to my skepticism about my own statements. Apparently others hold other opinions on this matter.

My friend Luke Burrage’s favourite phrase on SFBRP seems to be “it’s a bit strange.”

I think it’s a bit strange that that’s his favourite phrase because I’m not sure what it means.

Now, having listened to Jason’s podcast, I think his favourite phrase was “intellectually lazy.” I don’t know exactly what that means about him either. It’s more of an observation at this point. I’d need to discuss the matter more with people who’ve heard him use it in context. Figure out if it really is a phrase that stands out and if so what meaning it might have.

This all would have been of little interest except, apparently, Jason had recently un-podfaded his podcast!

Christian Meets WorldThe Sci Phi Show

And it seems he is actually producing two podcasts now!

One is familiar in name and substance. It’s called The Sci Phi Show, a ressurectied version of the old show with new recordings on familiar topics. And the other is wholly new, but similarly themed show called Christian Meets World.

I’ve listened to a few episodes of both.

And, apparently I’m still a sucker for Jason’s magnificently targeted antagonism, all these years later.

I wouldn’t have said anything, but for Twitter.

It’s been a few days now I’ve been unable to get this horrible tweet out of my head:Jason Rennie's Tweet - Thinking of doing the next Christian Meets World on the idea that it should be ok to kill atheists and harvest their organs to save lives

What can I say to that?

It’s like a tractor beam … must resist … can’t resist!

‘Say nothing’, my friends tell me, ‘it’s just linkbait’ they say.

And I want to listen to them …. but Jason is …. just …. so …. wrong!!!

I think I’m going to quit looking at Twitter.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Also:
Jason can’t have his old archfoe status back, that slot is currently occupied by a fiend of a different ilk.

A terrible menace that apparently doesn’t even know of his own status as such.

I speak of course, of that arch-villain, that Professor Moriarty of podcasting, that obstructionist joker known as Patrick Hester.

The Anti-Gravity Room – Season 2 – Episode 11 -The Global Village

SFFaudio News

The Anti-Gravity RoomHere’s a complete episode of YTV’s The Anti-Gravity Room from the second season (episode 11 of season 2), titled The Global Village.

This episode includes a discussion of what anime is, a substantial look at the then new “anime sensation” called Ghost in the Shell as well as interviews with Carl Macek, a pair of South African cartoonists, and a young Garth Ennis in Belfast!

Ennis’s comments about the internet, near the end of part 2, probably still reflect his attitude today.

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

Posted by Jesse Willis