DRM-free audiobooks at LibriVox

At LibriVox, volunteers record their own audiobooks out of texts in the public domain, and give them away for free. Isn’t that amazing?

Today I listened to Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly, written in 1887. Bly was a journalist who infiltrated a mental institution in New York to see what it was like. It was pretty bad. The nurses were sadists, and nobody bothered to find out if she really belonged there. The book caused an embarassment, (much like the ‘thud’ experiment a hundred years later.)

The recording is not up to commercial standards, but who cares? I don’t. I’m just glad to find another source of DRM-free audiobooks. It’s easier to use than eMusic, and it doesn’t straitjacket you like Audible.

I picked this book at random. That’s what I love about public domain book projects, like LibriVox and Project Gutenberg: The chance to find a strange old book that few people remember. When people pick an old book to read, it’s usually a Classic, because all book readers feel guilty about not having read enough Classics. But classics are often just old bestsellers. John Grisham, but with more flowery language. No – give me a book that didn’t define literature as we know it, but displays a memorable point of view.

What every book at LibriVox has in common is that somebody loved it enough to take the time to record it for you. What better recommendation is there?

Silent movie marathon – Part 4

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927, Germany) – Oh .. my .. God. People, machines, buildings. Yes!

The Lost World (1925, USA) – Stop motion dinosaurs and a man in a monkey suit. Not bad, but typical. However groundbreaking, special effects really do work better with sound, color and CGI. Watched: 15 minutes, then fast forwarded to the dinosaurs.

The Unknown (1927, USA) – Circus artist Joan Crawford is sick of men groping her, and develops a phobia about hands. She finds comfort with a man who pretends to have no arms, but is secretly a thief and a strangler. Deliciously macabre symbolism. Sometimes a cigar really is a penis.

Anthology of Surreal Cinema, Vol 1: Entr’acte (1924, France), La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928, France), Ballet Mecanique (1924, France), Anemic Cinema (1926, France) – Huh. Funny! Brain massage. Watched all of it, but the nice thing about surrealism is that you can take a bathroom break without missing anything.

La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928, France) – Not bad, but I like Roger Corman’s Poe movies better. Watched: 10 minutes.

The Battleship Potemkin (1925, Soviet Union) – Fine film. Made in that very very short period when Bolshevik doctrine held that the state shouldn’t massacre citizens for no good reason.

That’s all the silent movies for now. I have learned that I hate silent comedies, and that all silent movies should be set to Shostakovich.

Some damned little arrows on a piece of paper

Richard Feynman warns in QED that he cannot help the reader understand the theory of quantum electrodynamics. This is because he doesn’t understand it himself. All he can do is draw arrows on a paper and ask us to accept that this is how nature works.

How is this different from religion and pseudo-science? Religion and pseudo-science makes intuitive sense, but is uncomfirmed by experiments. It makes sense that like should affect like, and that we’re surrounded by spirits and gods, but there’s no evidence for it. Quantum electrodynamics is well supported by evidence, but makes no intuitive sense. And there is no reason why it should.

The point of reading about things you can’t understand is to feel the shape of it. What is the theory like? How do scientists think? How do they argue? Then when you read a theory you actually can understand you may recognize that it has the wrong shape. Knowing quantum electrodynamics is pointless. Knowing the shape of real science is not.

Also, science is fun, and even more so when it is Richard Feynman that explains it.

Have fun in Funny Town

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti is an anthology of existential dread. Horror should disturb you, but all I feel from reading these short stories is mild fascination. Even the best of them are fashionably nonsensical, ending before the reader realizes how stupid the premise is. There’s this boy who has a strange father and a strange mother and sister, and he goes out to a strange neighbour and does strange things, and then it’s over. What?

Other stories combine Lovecraft with Kafka, proving that this is a bad idea. A factory gets as a temporary supervisor a shapeless, evil presence who hides in his unlit office. Suddenly the workers become more and more efficient, so efficient that they hardly ever leave the factory at all, and you can’t quit, because dark evil forces controls everything, and you can’t retire, you can only work and work and work until death frees you from this horrible burden that is life. Okay, okay, I get it. Jeez.

Ligotti is praised as an unjustly ignored master of horror, and he writes well, but I gave up half-way.

Btw, here’s how to do Lovecraft fan fiction: A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman.

The end of the world, as we know it

The world just ended again. Twice. First with the new mini-series Dead Set, where the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are participants in Big Brother, unaware throughout the first episode that zombies are eating their audience. Nice spin.

Second with Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic RPG. I’m an impatient gamer. If a game doesn’t constantly reward me with points, happy sounds and shiny colors, I lose interest, and go back to something more exciting, like reading a book. But for now I’m having fun exploring the nuclear wasteland of the D.C. area. Based on the game engine from Oblivion, Fallout 3‘s lush and detailed graphics cover the full range of colors from brown to gray. Broken buildings and roads litter the landscape. Mutants and hopeless people roam about, waiting for you to save, exploit and/or eat them.

I always play the hero in these type of games, even when they give you a choice. “Why, of course I’ll save your village from the mutant army without asking anything in return, even though I’m sick, starving, and short on ammo. Don’t mention it!” I don’t want to explore my inner sociopath. I just don’t. Well, maybe I should try it just once. Just for a little while. To see what it’s like. Surely that won’t make me a .. BAD PERSON?!!

Silent movie marathon – part 3


The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Germany) – Arabian Nights-based fairy tale. Animated with silhouettes, which looks amazing. Look! Watched it all.

The Bat (1926, USA) – Jewel thief dressed as a bat (if a bat looked like a mouse) baffles the police. Reminds me of a kid telling a story with action figures. Watched: 10 minutes.

Ménilmontant (1926, France) – Drama from the bleak and menacing school of film-making. Life in Paris really, really sucks. Watched it all, not because I liked it, but because it’s compelling and doesn’t feel old.

The Blue Bird (1918, USA) – Probably a morality tale. There’s a bird of happiness which only some people can see, and then there’s a rich family and a poor family and one that is normal. They all live on the same street, just waiting to bump into each other for valuable life lesson purposes. Watched: 11 minutes. (Having checked IMDB, I see there’s also a fairy involved.)

Oktyabr (1928, Soviet Union) – Mm .. Soviet propaganda, where hysterical mobs of rich ladies beat up workers in the streets. Fairly truthful account, in the sense that, yes, the October revolution took place in October. (Well, it was actually November). The version I saw was with sound effects, which is silly, but it was set to music by Shostakovich, whose ‘1917’ symphony is my favourite of the few positive outcomes of communism. Watched it all, but it lacks focus.

Bringing the light of consciousness

The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld could be one of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. One of the better ones. In Banks’s socialist utopia, computer minds and humans live in happy symbiosis. AI runs society, people play. Here, AI is more ambigous: The Rix cult believes that humans must create their own gods, by bringing consciousness to entire planets. They seed computer networks with AI, then worship them as gods. Humans are to these compound minds as bacteria are to a human: Necessary for the whole to function, but valueless as individuals. Against the Rix stands an ossified empire ruled by a class of living dead. They don’t value individuals much either. The Risen Empire is concept-heavy space opera, but it still has a soul – a nerdy soul. There’s a touching love story based on relativistic time dilation (yes!) One side character is a self-built house that has rebelled against its own architects. Much of the fighting takes place among microscopic military crafts controlled by remote. You get the idea. Not great, but strange and likeable, and tightly focused. I’ll continue with the second book in the series, and I’ve heard people rave about the Young Adult novels Westerfeld turned to writing when he discovered that it pays better and that teenagers send more fan mail.

Silent movie marathon – part 2 (“comedy” edition)

Shoulder Arms (1918) – In the words of Captain Edmund Blackadder, Charlie Chaplin’s films are “about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there’s a gas bill tied to it”. Now I see what he meant, and – dear God – there’s another one coming up. Watched: 18 minutes.

The Pilgrim (1923) – In the words of Private Baldrick, a few seconds later, Charlie Chaplin is “as funny as a vegetable that’s grown into a rude and amusing shape”. Mm .. Blackadder. Now where was I? Oh yes. Watched: 5 minutes.

Safety Last (1923) – On the bright side: Harold Lloyd is funnier than Chaplin, and I did like this movie the first time I saw it. Watched: 40 minutes.

Days of Youth (1929, Japan) – I .. think this is supposed to be funny. I arrive at this conclusion by a process of elimination: It clearly isn’t anything else, so it must be comedy. Watched: 9 minutes.

The Freshman (1925) – Lloyd again. I wish I was watching Horse Feathers. Watched: 8 minutes.

For Heaven’s Sake (1926) – Ha ha, Harold Lloyd’s black driver is stupid! I really should be revisiting the Marx Brothers soon. Watched: 8 minutes.

Dr Pyckle and Mr Pride (1925) – Laurel without Hardy. At last a funny (but short) comedy. Mr Hyde of Stevenson’s novel is an evil and violent man. Mr Pride steals ice cream from children and plays jokes on old ladies. Watched: All of it. All 20 minutes of it.