Ralph Waldo Emerson
Select Poems and Prose

A regularly updated audio collection of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

A regularly updated audio collection of works by Walt Whitman. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Henry David Thoreau
Selected Poems

A regularly updated audio collection of works by Thoreau. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Anton Chekhov
Short Stories

A regularly updated audio collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Nikolai Gogol
The Overcoat

A complete unabridged reading of this novella is now available. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Kate Chopin
Select Short Stories

A regularly updated audio collection of short stories by Kate Chopin. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Short Sories and Poems
For the Classroom and Home

A regularly updated audio collection of short stories and poems for classroom use and homework assignment listening. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Leo Tolstoy
Select Short Stories

A regularly updated audio collection of short stories by Leo Tolstoy. All downloads are free in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Or listen to streaming audio now.

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Anyday now I’ll be officially free of GarageBand. It’s a dinosaur compared to the simple, thorough, complete way Sound Studio does its job. More on Sound Studio soon. Am currently working of a demo and am, well… very please about everything. (Plus, I believe I’m cutting my work flow time in half! Am suddenly quite productive!)

Update: Just delivered by UPS, it is already proving invaluable. An excellent audio editor, especially for voice overs.

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Just a number, but…

Am a little frustrated: after 6-8 hours of editing the 90 minute Gogol story “The Cloak,” GarageBand decided to unexpectedly quit and forget where the edited file was. Man, did I learn something this morning. (See what time this was written?) I plan to save a new version every 15 minutes, for everything I do on GarageBand. Super bummer! Am also thinking of switching to somrthing else that will allow me greater, detailed gain control over separate (small to very small) sections of a track. Right ow the little bubbles are NOT precise in comparison to Audacity or other apps, plus you can’t make markers. Duh.

Tags: LibriVox Asides, Podcasts, News // Add Comment »

As of today, with the addition of “The Spleen” by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchester (1661-1720), and Chekhov’s heart-breaking short story “Misery” being edited and soon to be released, along with Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” the total audio collection of poems, essays, newspaper articles and the like, has now reached 590 MP3 files. A free version of Gogol’s important “The Overcoat” (”The Cloak”) is in preparation for recording/mixing. More on “The Overcoat” in June.

Work is underway for a new podcast, tentitively named “Madmen and Dreamers.” It will be a collection of “classic” short stories, primarily it seems, by European authors, including Tolstory,  Maupassant, Chekhov, Dostoesvsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Zola, Flaubert, Dickens, Crane, and the like. All stories will have either “madman” or “dreamer” in their titles. Many, if not most, are in the classic style of a diary or memoir: “Diary of a Lunatic,” Diary of a Madman, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” “The Story of a Madman,” “A Madman’s Manuscript,” “Which Was the Madman?”, “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” “Memoirs of a Madman…” and others.

Tags: Podcasts, Poetry, Short Stories // 4 Comments »

Listen to the new iTunes podcast:
Kate Chopin Short Stories!

Listen to the new iTunes podcast:
Anton Chekhov Short Stories!
.
Links to all short stories are available under the individual writer in the right column of this blog.

It’s a pleasure to escape from poetry —for awhile at least.

Newly available here are ten short stories by Anton Chekhov and twelve by Kate Chopin. More of each are no doubt on their way…

Then soon after at least Chopin’s “The Storm” (drat the Cajun) and “Two Summers and Two Souls,” it will be on to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (”The Cloak”) and “The Flood” by Honore de Balzac… then, possibly, two others, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, certainly “LouLou” by Thomas Mann (a rare first US publication, of which I have a copy of the original Dial mag it was first published in) and perhaps “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett.

I really must work on completing my promised Wallace Stevens Complete Public Domain Poems Volume 2)

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Since venturing through London’s “To Build a Fire” with 10th graders over the past few years, I’ve been toying with recording it or something else by London. This year with only 12th grade classes, happily, and am not confined to reading the “in class” story I’d continually planned to record but never got around to. Yes, “To Build a Fire” is excellent, particularly as it can be returned to again and again, each time in a new, fresh way. Still, I wanted to do something lesser know, but more exotic.

I wanted to add Jack London to the list and so I choose the simple tale “The Story of Kleesh” —and simple it is. After the read, I see (hear) it was not a challenging choice. A “read once” story, it is not one of great complexity. One listen and you know all, and like so many of Poe’s stories, once you know the “twist,” there’s no reason for a revisit. But it was fun and an opportunity to conflate any differentiation between any number of the flat stock characters. Neither does one have to worry about character development. More like a bedtime read for slightly older children.

Now that I’ve done a thourough job of discouraging you from listening, I envite you to listen anyway… As might be suspected, this was read for LibriVox.

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One might say, this is one of my backyard. I took a walk down the street, to the boardwalk, to try out my new Canon G9 viewfinder 12.1 MP camera. One of its wonderful features is image capturing in RAW mode. (Alas, now after but 3 weeks, I am sending it in for repair, but still am quite happy with it. Wish I had time to review it.)

I almost bought the long coveted Aperture by Apple. Using a free 30 day trial, was fortunate to discover, before I spent the $150, that it cannot open G7 or G9 RAW files. A quick posting photography forum uncovered for me Adobe’s Lightroom. For me, Lightroom is much handier (it provides a very handy, intuitive work-flow) and at a 30% savings over the Aperture. It creates excellent, simple on-line photography galleries as well –which it instantly FTP’s to my site. I’ll be posting some representative results soon.

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Christmas is to most a cheerful time of year. Christmas stories are often tales of happiness and hope. Here are three stories of a very different kind, along with a few poems. Sorry for any offense to anyone.

The Christmas Gift that Came to Rupert by Bret Harte [19:14]
An Old-Time Christmas by Paul Laurence Dunbar [10:14]
The Christmas Present by Richmal Crompton [11:22]

little tree by E. E. Cummings [01:42]
A Visit from Saint Nicholas by Clement C. Moore [04:06]
Christmas Trees: A Christmas Circular Letter by Robert Frost [04:11]
Karma - “Christmas was in the air…” by Edwin Arlington Robinson [01:11]
Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson [04:19]
The Magi by William Butler Years [01:00]
A Rhyme for Christmas by John Challing [02:44]

Tags: LibriVox Asides, Podcasts, Poetry, Short Stories // 3 Comments »

Thanks to the New York Times, who recently make access to their historical files available for free, I have begun an exploration of local Long Branch, NJ news —as well as news related to a number of literary dignitaries, including Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne and others. Funny that it took getting them for “free” to move me to do this, as I am a subscriber to the Times and have had access to these same files via Times Select. The difference of course is that I could read them, but could not share the links with others.

Visit the link page (with recordings)

As part of my long-term recording projects for LibriVox.org, particularly planned on-going contributions to the Local Color Collection, I’ve begin to make audio recordings of a few of these newspaper articles. At present three are complete: two articles Long Branch news (1872 & 1904) and one referring to plans for the funeral of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882.)

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Welcome to the new look! Have found my classroom blog to be very successful and so have done some tweaking here and there, so the old “WuCoco” look is now a thing of the past. Farewell! The current look is based on the WordPress Theme “Darkwater,” by none other than Antbag. (I say “none other” because I have little clue as to who or what an “antbag” might be. But I am gratefull to him/her/them/it.) It’s neater and more compact for my purposes and yes, I have little to do to make it appear up-to-date or recent —can go whole months without an apparent update, and all’s well.

What I do continue to add, if anyone’s listening, are more recordings. The full is list is reaching 400 recordings; it’ll easily reach that point before the end of Oct. 07. I have at least 10 more poems in the can, principally ones by Amy Lowell. Meanwhile, am investigating a change in the usual poetic fare and may shortly, for a while at least, be working number of short stories, particularly by Anton Chekhov. Just finished his “The Bet,” which I’ve read for my English classes. Fortunately there are currently 200+ public domain translations of stories by Chekhov. That’ll keep me busy for a very only time. And give me opportunities to work on characterizations and creating a sustained reading stule for longer pieces.

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