Roger Phillips brought the penguin (his name’s Patrick and he comes with his Aquatic Attaché);

The University of Liverpool Chamber Choir brought the beautiful music;

Jane Davis, host for the evening, brought her enthusiasm to the whole proceedings;

Frank Cottrell Boyce brought his wonderful nativity story from Millions (who was slightly nervous that he had to follow Alexei Sayle and ‘be funny’: “it’s like going on after Led Zepplin and being told to be loud”, but of course, he didn’t fail to make us all laugh);

Mark Carney brought his theremin (it’s okay, we’d never heard of the instrument either – I can tell you now though that it’s amazing!);

Phil Davis brought us to tears in his moving reading from The Christmas Carol;

Georgina Aasgaard (Cellist) brought the rhythm (with the help of the audience, a xylophone and a cello);

The audience brought good cheer, festive spirit and an impressive singing voice!

It was certainly a good time had by all, and those are just a few highlights! In fact, this may have been the best Penny Readings yet – and I haven’t even mentioned the ‘creative’ raffle wheel – the pressure’s on for next year…

Singing 'Auld Lang Syne'

I still occasionally listen to In Our Time in the car and had the best radio pleasure of the year this week when Melvyn hosted a show about Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem, The Prelude. It wasn’t the erudite discussion, though that was mildly interesting, nor Melvyn Bragg’s faux-naïve questioning. (Was William a big head? I loosely paraphrase). No, it was biographer Stephen Gill’s warm and measured reading of an extract from Book Two of the poem that really got me. Stephen Gill’s accent is a lovely deep black-country+Oxford don combo, and you can feel a lifetime of loving Wordsworth in the reflectively steady walking rhythm his voice gives these great lines. It’s not often you can feel love and thought coming out of your car radio but don’t take my word for it–listen to him here. Or try it yourself–read aloud but very slow and steady:

But ere the fall
Of night, when in our pinnace we return’d
Over the dusky Lake, and to the beach
Of some small Island steer’d our course with one,
The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there,
And row’d off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.

Here’s the link to the In Our Time page. You can subscribe to the programme’s podcast here.

Here’s the link to Stephen Gill’s reading.

By Jane Davis

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The instructions are for Windows users only (shame on you DCAL) but if you’re using another operating system copy and paste the following url into your media player of choice:

http://www.dublincityannaliviafm.com/DCALFMStream.asx

Linux users will need to have the Windows Media codecs installed. Mac users should install the Flip4Mac plugin for Quicktime then use Quicktime to play the stream (File–>Open URL).

One of the great things about the Internet is the wealth of material that would never see the light of day without it. One such wonderful thing is this recollection by Walter de la Mare of an interview with Thomas Hardy. Walter de la Mare is an old man at the time of the recording and there is something quite wonderful about listening to this very Edwardian voice, speaking to you across 50 years. He describes going to Max Gate to meet Thomas Hardy and being surprised to find not a dour old pessimist but an affable old gentleman. Walter de la Mare has never been fashionable in the academic world but his poems continue to delight the old and young. ‘The Listeners’ – ‘ “Is there anybody there?” said the traveller’, is the most requested poem of Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Walter de la Mare, Selected Poems is an excellent new collection of his best work edited by the poet Matthew Sweeney and published by Faber and Faber, 2006.

de la Mare as fiction writer is not so well known these days. Fortunately Hesperus Press have recently collected and published three of his short stories (‘Missing’, ‘The Almond Tree’ and ‘Crewe’) with the added bonus of a foreword by Russell Hoban. If you enjoy Missing (Modern Voices), see if you can find a copy of his brilliant dark short story ‘Seaton’s Aunt’

Here’s the link to the download page (mp3 courtesy of RadioOpenSource).

Posted by Chris

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, had this to say in an interview on the Creative Commons website:

The immediate reason was practical — I was going on a long drive and I was looking for free public domain audiobooks on the Net; there weren’t very many, and I thought there should be.

But other than that practical need I wanted to address, LibriVox came out of a few conceptual strands. The first was the idealism of the free software movement, and it’s pragmatic success. Here was a parallel system (to the proprietary software system) built almost entirely out of volunteer effort, and hugely successful to boot. I was very interested in how free software ideals and methodologies could be applied to non-software projects: could the same sorts of ideas be used in the real world?

Here’s the link to Librivox.

Posted by Chris, Powered by Qumana