oedipus' online complexes

first, congrats on reading your third book in norwegian!

second, some things i have to speed up, or my mind wanders off on flights of fancy sparked by the long pauses... besides, it still rankles the reader in me that i'm at the mercy of someone else's pace and interpretation of what is better left to the solitary reader's mind whilst reading the book his or her self... but then, 2 of the things i miss most about not being able to see is the physical act of reading and the physical act of writing -- i'm much more lucid away from the keyboard -- honest! just don't make me talk without using my hands....

but i've limited the rate to which i've started to speed things up, for more than one ex-house mate and house guest has commented that i always seem to get the same narrator, no matter what i was listening to, and a member of alvin and the chipmunks, at that!

interestingly, it is the sound of the human voice that i tend to speed up these days, as listening to syntesized speech demands a certain amount of filtering (mentally changing read to its proper pronunciation due to a tense change, expanding abbreviations or merely guessing at them, stopping to listen to a particularly incomprehensible word letter-by-letter) -- i do enough of that every day interacting with my computer, whom everyone seems to think speaks to fast for human comprehension, (although, personally, i've heard much faster); i don't much like reading synthesized speech lately, when reading for sheer pleasure -- except for when i cannot find a title in an unabridged audio format...

i refuse to listen to abridgments, and often do my historical reading courtesy of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D) -- what one loses in consistency and quality of the reading (hey, they're volunteers, and they are reading random chunks of books in the interest of getting works transmuted into audio as quickly as possible), so it is not uncommon to have more than 75 different people of very different backgrounds and voice characteristics read a single work -- the payoff? RFB&D books come complete with all annotations, footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, appendecies, etc.

actually, there is a small group of historians whose style i admire greatly, whose works i will read first for the sheer pleasure of it (books such as simon schma's "citizens" or his "embarrassment of riches", anything by Carlo Ginsburg (he doesn't publish enough!!!), but occasionally one encounters a book that -- despite its multiple mispronunciations of the same word which appeared at least once on every page (in this case, it was "hessian") -- is still as compelling and addictive a read as i remember reading Carlo Ginsburg's first 2 works published in english translation ("the moon and the cheese" and the incredible, incomparable "night battles") -- which is why i have to get you a copy of David Hacket Fischer's "paul reveere's ride" -- even when read by innumerable different authors, with sometimes quite jarring transitions from one type of voice to another, i read -- ok, listened -- to this book as i would have a book that captured me from the first page, and which i wouldn't put down until dawn was breaking and the final page had been turned... of all of the so called founding fathers of america, he and thomas paine are probably the most interesting figures of the american war of independence to those who really have no interest in american, let alone early american, history... besides, paine is not only a great writer, but lead one of the most colorful lives of the eighteenth century -- and, on a personal, emotional, note, he appeals to me for the same reason why i love gerald of wales' -- not just because they were realists and damn good writers, but because neither of them could keep his big mouth shut, which is something that i can -- er -- identify with...

so my rule is to now listen at an acceptable, but not hyperactive speed, and absolutely no abridgements -- i never read 'em as a reader, and i'll be damned if i'm going to start reading them passively now...