Entry tags:
Writer's Block: Reading Aloud
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I've been lucky. I have heard Terry Pratchett doing a reading from one of his Discworld novels; Katherine Kurtz reading from one of her Deryni series of novels; and Marc Okrand reading Klingon out loud.
I'd love to hear Howard Philips Lovecraft reading out one of his poems - Nyarlathotep being my personal favourite:-
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away."
-H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep
Who else? I think Cervantes, reading from Don Quixote, and Dante Alighieri, reading from The Divine Comedy. Perhaps one of the authors of the Mabinogion reciting his story in the original Old or Middle Welsh, whichever language it was first composed in, and Thomas Malory narrating the Battle of Camlann and its aftermath at the end of La Morte D'Arthur.
Dickens, reading the spontaneous human combustion scene from Bleak House, and partnering with Patrick Stewart to read A Christmas Carol; Blake reciting London; Yeats reciting The Second Coming; Vladimir Nabokov reading from Lolita (just because the very idea of that happening will piss off someone here); Chaucer reading one of his Canterbury Tales, and half of Oxford listening in with recording apparatus so they can hear how his language was really spoken back then - were their accents really that thick? :D.
Most ambitiously, I would love to hear the voice of the first shaman to sing the stories of Old Man Coyote into being; Aesop reciting some of his Fables; Doctor Seuss reading "The Cat In The Hat"; Marcus Aurelius and Seneca holding forth on their discourses, the Meditations and La Vida Beata respectively; and finally, I'd love to hear Snorri Sturlusson reciting the Voluspa or the Havamal (or both), and Beowulf, the Song of Amergin and the Epic of Gilgamesh being recited by their respective authors.
You did say "living or dead," didn't you? Well, in my case, the list of authors deceased well outnumbers that of authors living.
I've been lucky. I have heard Terry Pratchett doing a reading from one of his Discworld novels; Katherine Kurtz reading from one of her Deryni series of novels; and Marc Okrand reading Klingon out loud.
I'd love to hear Howard Philips Lovecraft reading out one of his poems - Nyarlathotep being my personal favourite:-
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away."
-H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep
Who else? I think Cervantes, reading from Don Quixote, and Dante Alighieri, reading from The Divine Comedy. Perhaps one of the authors of the Mabinogion reciting his story in the original Old or Middle Welsh, whichever language it was first composed in, and Thomas Malory narrating the Battle of Camlann and its aftermath at the end of La Morte D'Arthur.
Dickens, reading the spontaneous human combustion scene from Bleak House, and partnering with Patrick Stewart to read A Christmas Carol; Blake reciting London; Yeats reciting The Second Coming; Vladimir Nabokov reading from Lolita (just because the very idea of that happening will piss off someone here); Chaucer reading one of his Canterbury Tales, and half of Oxford listening in with recording apparatus so they can hear how his language was really spoken back then - were their accents really that thick? :D.
Most ambitiously, I would love to hear the voice of the first shaman to sing the stories of Old Man Coyote into being; Aesop reciting some of his Fables; Doctor Seuss reading "The Cat In The Hat"; Marcus Aurelius and Seneca holding forth on their discourses, the Meditations and La Vida Beata respectively; and finally, I'd love to hear Snorri Sturlusson reciting the Voluspa or the Havamal (or both), and Beowulf, the Song of Amergin and the Epic of Gilgamesh being recited by their respective authors.
You did say "living or dead," didn't you? Well, in my case, the list of authors deceased well outnumbers that of authors living.
