Archive for July 13th, 2005
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There’s an audiobook project on the internet that I’ve used a number of times and highly recommend. To date it has been mostly files costing a minimal amount of money but it was announced today they have launched “The Spoken Alexandria Project” of free files. The email that went out is below.
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Tuesday, July 5, 2005:The Spoken Alexandria Project launches today at http://www.spokenalex.org with free MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis audiobooks, all without DRM constraints and all licensed with Creative Commons Licenses, so users, libraries, and projects may share them without permission. For interested parties, uncompressed audio files and an MP3 podcast are also available.
For over a year now Telltale Weekly’s tagline has been “Funding a Free Audiobook Library,” encouraging the occassional question about where this free library is. Earlier the tagline was “The Spoken Alexandria Project,” which visitors found even more confusing. Today the promise of these two tagline merge into Spoken Alexandria.
From the beginning, Telltale Weekly was designed to be the fundraising wing of a larger audiobook project: an online library of spoken word recordings which anyone else–including parallel (“competing?”) libraries and projects–could share freely, just as sites like Project Gutenberg distributes its texts. The majority of Telltale Weekly recordings sold (all the “Funding a Free Audiobook Library” pieces) would, after five years, be made available for free at this library, thus continuously stocking (and, more importantly) funding its growth.
Today, sixteen months and 100 spoken word releases after Telltale Weekly first hit the internet, The Spoken Alexandria Project launches. Perhaps a suitable tagline would be “The Free Audiobook Library which Telltale Weekly is funding,” but we’ll go with “Creative Commons Audiobooks” for now.
To celebrate, there will be nothing but new, free releases (no waiting five years!) at Telltale/Spoken Alexandria throughout July, starting with “Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water,” a short story by award winning SF author Kelly Link, who just released her story collection with a Creative Commons License on Friday, July 1. It’s a personal favorite story of mine (and my absolute favorite of Link’s), and I’m pleased with the way the reading turned out.
Let’s see if Telltale can be just as self-supportive with free releases as it is with audiobooks starting at 25 cents. If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing in the future, spread the word (Telltale DEPENDS on word of mouth to grow) or buy something from the back catalog (or at Amazon.com using the link from Telltale’s front page under “Bookmarks that Benefit”). More options for supporting the projects at http://www.telltaleweekly.org/supportthisproject.php
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Alex.
I highly recommend Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”.
”Comment
Hasih Hussain was 18. It’s said he had a “troubled adolesence” before becoming devoutly religious at the age of 16.
A friend of Hasih’s was Shehzad Tanweer was 22, had studied for a sports science degree at univeristy, was said by friends to be non-political and from a very strong family. “Shezad is a very kind person who would get along with anyone and anybody. He’s the kind of guy who would condemn extremism,” said a person who knew him.
And it seems, perhaps, these were two of the individuals who participated in the bombing last week in London.
Suicide bombers.
Who left behind families who, like so many others, were worried after the news of the bombing, and when unable to reach their loved ones reported them as missing.
Another individual was Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, married and had an eight month old child.
They were “cleanskins”, not regarded as potential terrorists.
And how, may I ask you, President Bush, do you fight a war against “terrorists” of this type? Do you take the whole world hostage?
I think it’s likely many have the kind of picture of suicide bombers cut from a comic book or one of those god-awful Hollywood movies that is all stylized violence lurking through murky surrreal, soul-gutted settings.
Evil, Bush says. “Evil.”
At the ancient age of 48, I have a difficult time looking at individuals who are 18 and 22 years-of-age and seeing anything other than kids on their way to being adults. 18 to 24 is a great and terrible space of time. Most crimes are committed by that age group. And it’s 18 to 24 year olds who are said to be most heavily influenced by media, all the flashing lights and air-brushed slick perfect promise of advertising that is so very new to them they haven’t a clue the whole world had been there done that repeatedly, hungry for experience and taking as treasure maps everything the advertising world has to throw at them. Kids who have the idea they’re adult and who individuals twice their age should know better than to gather in to twist pipe-cleaner supple through the gaping holes in the ideologies they want to sell them, and the kids caught in that weird play-doh area where they are wanting to be anything but that yucked-out vaseline feeling that they’re slippery playing at being adult, eager for recognition and praise in a world that sells youth as all but is more like the famine woman in Hansel and Gretel tricked out to attract and eat up the young blood, siphon its energy and there you have it when the blood is gone it’s the next generation of gray vampires.
Youth, kids, they’re fucking invulnerable with all that energy and life waiting for them, just down the street, in this car, around the corner.
There’s a lot of life in making something go BOOM. No?
Yes. A hell of a lot of life in going BOOM. If you want to make a statement or if someone takes your malleable self-hating soul and convinces you they have a statement you should make, then BOOM is the ultimate signature on the dotted line of “I am!”
We talk about the desperation of battle-trashed nations and what grows in their soil. But when I think of kids living in West Yorkshire going BOOM I think instead, man, even if no one else saw it there’s not just a lot of rage there, that’s a lot of self-hatred. That’s taking your self-hatred and making it really work for you, making sure you don’t waste your life that you suspect isn’t worth anything more than a few cents worth of blood and guts. Or that’s someone else tapping into your self-hatred and vulnerable 18-24 year old media sponge brain and making it work for them.
Evil? I have a hard time thinking of them as evil.
Sick? Yes.
There are those who don’t think it through or don’t want to think it through who then have the picture in their minds of the terrorist equivalent of the porno-drug man with the flesh films and needles waiting in the shadowy doorway for a vulnerable pipe-cleaner to come walking down the sidewalk. When instead I think of the failure of consumer culture that pours gasoline on self-hate and makes religion of hunger and rootlessness, nothing to believe in but buy and be sold. Now sit back and look around and see if you can identify one of those hungry young souls who suspects the world’s going trash feast will never fill them up, and throw at one of these self-hating young people who feels such a failure in today’s world something they feel they can believe in, for whatever reason, fiercely enough for them to make their self-hating selves go BOOM for it.
If it’s done just right. You’re going to get a boom.
In a way I’m surprised there aren’t more concerted communal booms. Instead, they usually turn up in hospitals from car wrecks and and determined drug overdoses.
The world is a mess of Jonestowns. Different flavors of Kool-aid giving people their marching orders.
And it’s true that not everyone is willing to go boom. Most want someone else to go boom for them.
Like a Kool-aid pourer who wants others to go boom for him who happens to be sitting in the White House.
