Montlake Blog /comments

I have written of my first encounter with the writing of Lord Dunsany, an experience that is now forty years ago. When I took up reading his work again (after a couple decades), I realized that one problem with a modern appreciation of his writing is that it requires a somewhat "slower" reading than I think we're currently used to. Much of his work is simply prose poetry. As Neil Gaiman has written about Dunsany's work: "So trust the book. Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly." When I began this blog, I played with a couple ways to slow down our reading, and provided links to the experiments:

Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn
Charon
Flying to Mars
How the Office of Postman Fell Vacant in Otford-Under-the-Wold

At some point at least ten years ago, I had another idea. If his work was available in audio form, the slowing of its perception could be dictated by the reader. I remember contacting an audio production engineer who was a friend of a friend. "Well, just record on to your computer," he suggested when he'd heard the very modest goals I had. Good idea, I thought, and cheap! So I obtained some sort of microphone and gave it a shot.

In those days, you plugged a microphone into your computer sound card. It must be do-able, but I spent more than a couple years playing with this technique, and I remember that the only sound I ever recorded was a horribly distorted rumble after turning the various volume controls WAY UP. At least it was something.

I acquired various pieces of audio recording equipment, as the years went by. One, purchased when I had several extra bucks, was a Tascam digital recording studio. I studied the manual diligently, but it was easy to see that only by doing would one have any idea how it worked. I must have managed to get some sort of sound on it, because when one of my early wives agreed to record her mother and aunt discussing their very interesting early lives, I spent the weekend writing out a couple pages on how to use the device, and then sent it on to her. Miraculously, she managed to make the recording, probably without looking at my instructions, and then I had to figure out how to get the result off the device. Apparently, I succeeded, because I have the wonderful recordings on my computer. But when I soon thereafter had the opportunity to record my sister's recollections of her life (which would soon end), I opted for an even newer device that I had obtained, and succeeded to record directly into a laptop (how many years had that taken?).

I had a lot of experience over the past couple years digitizing various audio media, so when I recently read some blog item about how more efficient USB microphones are in use with computers as compared to using a microphone that plugs into a sound card, I quickly bought an Audio-Technica that does that very thing, and made plans for Dunsany.

A couple weeks ago, I recorded his novel Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, and this weekend have finally finished editing the recording (the toughest thing is being both the talent and also the engineer!). I'm making these available (as MP3 files) for any folks who listen to audio books. [By the way, if you listen to part of, say, Chronicle 1 and would like to listen to the whole thing on, say, a CD, let me know, and if you know me then I'll fix something up for you.]

At that same web site, I include a brief introduction to the novel and I also include some reading notes. That is a good story in itself.

In 1998, I used the fairly new Internet to discover a copy of Dunsany's Rodriguez novel (I wanted an original, to digitize via scanner). Looking around on what we used to called "lists" (group discussions), I found a couple references out there in the world to Dunsany. One was from a woman who had asked someone a question about Dunsany but for which there was no answer. In those days, you could put your email address in your question, because spam hadn't started yet, and I used the address to ask the woman whether she'd gotten an answer. That led to my discovery that she was (is?) a professor at a university in Uruguay. When I had told her of my plan to digitize the novel, I asked whether she would like to join me in reading it, exchanging notes on our readings with each chapter. Sounded good to her, and so began my first (and only, so far) Internet study project with another person.

Far more qualified than I (she taught Spanish literature, and was a Borges scholar, Dunsany having been an early influence on Borges), I had the advantage of native competency in English. It was really fun, and when we had finished, I gathered up all our notes into a single document, and sent them to her. As part of the "support site" for the Rodriguez recording I've just made, I'm including those reading notes, not for any particular academic reasons, but as a momento of that remarkable event more than ten years ago [1998]. There is a link to this site among the links at the site on which I've placed the recordings.