LibriVox: Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Crawling Chaos, and discussed in SFFaudio Podcast #138, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey was first published in 1821.

Martin Geeson, the narrator, has written this intriguing mini essay about it for his LibriVox reading.

“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”

Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memories, temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of immense sophistication and certainly one of the most impressive and influential of all autobiographies. The work is of great appeal to the contemporary reader, displaying a nervous (postmodern?) self-awareness, a spiralling obsession with the enigmas of its own composition and significance. De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat feverishly, in an effort to fix his own identity.

The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors; these passages do not make up a large part of the whole. The circumstances of its hasty composition sets up the work as a lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more intellectually respectable organ – the London Magazine – than are today’s tawdry exercises in tabloid self-exposure. What makes the book technically remarkable is its use of a majestic neoclassical style applied to a very romantic species of confessional writing – self-reflexive but always reaching out to the Reader.

I’ve combined his narration with two different sets of illustrations and placed the resulting video on YouTube:

LIBRIVOX - Confessions Of An English Opium Eater by Thomas de QuinceyConfessions of an English Opium-Eater
By Thomas de Quincey; Read by Martin Geeson
1 |M4B|, 16 Zipped MP3s or Podcast – Approx. 5 Hours 22 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 16, 2009
First published in September and October 1821 issues of London Magazine.

|ETEXT|

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-by-thomas-de-quincey.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks also to TriciaG, Ruth Golding, and Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Posted by Jesse Willis

TVO: Search Engine: Digital Locks have Nothing to do with Copyright

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Search Engine with Jesse BrownThe latest episode of TVO’s Search Engine, #127, updates us on the latest on Bill C-11. Host Jesse Brown interviews Russell McOrmand, of C11.ca (aka digital-copyright.ca), the hero who is blogging C-11’s progress through legislative committee.

|MP3|

Podcast feed: http://feeds.tvo.org/tvo/searchengine

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Under The Influence: Movie Marketing

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

CBC - Under The InfluenceCBC Radio One doesn’t normally have advertizing. But since 2005 one of it’s most popular programs has had advertizing as its core subject. Variously called O’Reilly on Advertizing and The Age Of Persuasion it is now called Under The Influence.

The show is a half hour documentary series about the history of advertizing. The host, Terry O’Reilly, is a marketing man and has a business that specializes in radio advertizing. This, along with the often interesting sub-subjects it tackles, makes the show incredibly slick, and fun to listen to.

In fact I’d argue that it is perhaps most accessibly listenable program ever aired on CBC Radio or ever podcast on the internet.

Check out their recent episode titled Movie Marketing, which looks at, among other things, the effect that spoilers in movie trailers have on box office receipts. |MP3|

But you better hurry because if you don’t download it now, before you have to buy it on iTunes later!

Podcast feed:

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/undertheinfluence.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Posted by Jesse Willis

Great Northern Audio Theatre: an essay on the intersection of audiobooks and audio drama

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Great Northern Audio TheatreBrian Price, of the radio drama collective Great Northern Audio Theatre, has posted an interesting essay on the state of dramatized audiobooks over on the new Great Northern blog. Here’s a snippet:

So far, audiobook publishers have been going to their usual sources to produce audio theater: Commercial voice-over studios, Industrial/educational studios or the publishers themselves. Frankly, the results are really mixed. These people aren’t audio theater people. They haven’t been listening and producing audio theater for years.

My prediction is that at some point pretty soon the audiobook publishers are going to get feedback from their listeners that there’s a whole ‘nother world of audio theater out there. It’s on community radio. It’s podcast. It’s handed back and forth on the Internet. It’s sounding better and better all the time.

Posted by Jesse Willis