It wasn’t really three men in a boat, but it was three men on a journey, intermittent though it may have been. On April 7th of last year three men -- not J., George, and Harris, and certainly not accompanied by the dog Montmorency (although there was a loud-barking, annoying big bastard of a dog next door) -- set out to travel audio space and record my novel Traveling in Space as an audiobook. We -- Peter Lonsdale, Jeff Cannata and myself -- ended the recording journey on August 21, a little over a year and four months later. This is an awfully long time to be recording an audiobook, but circumstances were such that it took this amount of time. And I’m glad it did.
[I’ve outlined the beginnings of this project, and a couple of stops along the way in my blog posts, Traveling in Audio Space # 1, Traveling in Audio Space # 2, Traveling in Audio Space # 3, and Traveling in Audio Space # 4, and you may want to jump back to them in you are interested.]
Audiobooks have been growing in popularity of late, and not just because of long distance commuters who may well have been the bulk of audiobook adherents in the past. It seems the proliferation of MP3 players, not only as stand-alones, but built into smartphones and tablets, have added to the audience for the out loud declaration of an author’s work. And this I am also glad about.
I have loved “Spoken Word” recordings -- to borrow the category from the Grammys -- ever since high school when Drama class saved, or possibly made, my life, and I would check out multi-disk LPs of Broadway plays from the local library. In listening to Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman,
or a very young Martin Sheen in The Subject was Roses,
I fell in love with the human voice -- especially when divorced from the visual. I did not grow up in the Golden Era of radio when it reigned as Home Entertainment, when dramatic plays of many genres, and comic greats coming in from the closure of Vaudeville, kept America company during the Great Depression and World War Two.
I grew up in the first decade of commercial television, my eyes focused on flickering black & white images of actors on horses packing six-guns,
and Dinah Shore.
My father loved Dinah Shore.
So discovering these LPs
was a great revelation to me -- what fine “music” the instrument of the human voice could provide.
When I graduated from high school, after three years of involvement in drama classes, the drama club, and the plays that came out of them, having spent most of those years wanting to become an actor,
I left adolescence, ironically, not wanting to become an actor. For shortly before donning the cap & gown it had occurred to me that what my involvement in drama had developed in me was not my talent for acting -- which was fairly minuscule -- but a love of the written words that actors perform.
“Author” replaced “Actor” as the first letter in my alphabet.
But the idea of performing an author’s words remained important to me. And I do mean performing, not just reading aloud. Reading aloud gives only sound to words. Performing gives life to words. Not a revolutionary thought. After all, the stringing together of words in order to make magic was first done in order to present them orally, long before words were ever written down.
A bit of a burden as they had to be memorized. But eventually the tool of writing -- first created to notate the trade in beer and stuff,
 |
Sumerian tablet from 2050 BCE - a signed receipt saying: “Ur-Amma acknowledges receiving from his brewer, Alulu, 5 sila of the ‘best’ beer.”
|
but soon adapted for more creative efforts, dispensed with the burden of memory. Except, of course, for actors acting on stage.
And as writing -- and the complimentary ability of reading -- was pretty much kept among elites in the commercial, political, and religious professions, most of the rest of society, if they were exposed to the creative endeavors of writing at all, probably were exposed through the human voice in readings from unrolled scrolls.
It was not until after the perfection of the movable type printing press in the Fifteenth Century, and the rise of the prose novel in the Eighteenth Century, that individual, silent-in-your-head reading took hold among a mass of readers.
Still, readers would often read out loud to their friends and family,
and some authors would perform their own words to crowds, most famously Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.
For millennia words were creatures of sound.
But written words, those rationally ordered little black bugs of type streaming across a white page, and now a white screen, eventually became, in the main, separated from sound, from the oral tradition. I have always found that to be a bit sad. Especially when certain people developed the ability to speed read, foregoing even the inner sound of the author’s words in their heads. (See my Huffington Post blog on this). But not to be deterred by that, I decided that whenever I would write prose (which has turned out to be more often than writing for the stage or the screen) I would write my words for the human voice, whether heard silently in one’s head or coming into one’s brain through vocal vibrations.
So I have always loved the idea of audiobooks. And to be able to produce this one (with Peter Lonsdale, also our recording master),
directing as fine an actor as Jeff Cannata
in the performance of my words, has been a joy. And the fact that it has taken this long, has just extended that joy. It inadvertently turned out to be a way to keep that joy to myself for a while. But, as we do these things to share, it’s time, now that the main recording is done, to do the editing, do necessary retakes, package it all together, and send it out to travel in audio space on its own and see if any of the joy I have felt is transferred to a listening audience. I hope so.
By the way -- can you tell me the literary allusion I used in the first paragraph of this blog? Now there’s a book that begs to be read/performed out loud.
==================================================
Kindle e-Book $2.99
