George Orwell - Coming Up For Air

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From Wiki:

Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II and predicting that conflict. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, telling the reader his life story. 

The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem as distant as the biblical character Og, King of Bashan, whom he remembers from Sundays at church. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog of Albania, along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something' triggers the connection in Bowling's mind and his subsequent 'trip down memory lane'. Orwell's writing tends to show a real relish for pessimism and squalor; nevertheless, Bowling expresses a nostalgic melancholy of some tenderness. 

George Orwell - '1984'

WAR IS PEACE, 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH 

CELEBRATION

IS MANDATORY

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“1984” follows the life of Winston Smith as he struggles to conform. We get a first-hand look at the fear and distrust that rules his every thought and action. Reading “1984" will definitely help you to appreciate your own situation, no matter how bad it may seem. Big Brother is watching!

NARRATOR: Frank Muller is one of my very favorite audiobook narrators, and a perfect fit for “1984.” His grit and solemnity serve to augment the funerary feel of the audiobook.

Yeah whatever that dork said, now get back to your drab robotic lives spent watching Channel 4's Big Brother with four CCTV cameras installed in the corners of your living room while a giggling David Cameron watches you picking your nose.


In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and put this one down in the Archive as Factual...

As always, thanks for visiting, and spread the word!

Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood

"To Begin at the Beginning…."

The words of Dylan Thomas as read in the mellisonant tones of Richard Burton. One of my most treasured books, I offer you to borrow indefinitely, switch off the lights and take your imagination for a walk.

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Coming Soon!

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Under Milk Wood is a 1954 play for radio by Dylan Thomas, later adapted for the stage. A film version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972. 

Thomas’s poetic writing and an unforgettable cast of characters makes this a landmark play in the history of both radio and theatre.
An all-seeing narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of an imaginary small Welsh village, Llareggub.
They include Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly bossing her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, reliving his seafaring times; the two Mrs Dai Breads; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. Later, the town wakes and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business.

There is an original recording I've also uploaded ( Download Here ) if you're interested:

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The play had its first reading on stage on 14 May 1953, in New York, at The Poetry Center. Thomas himself read the parts of the First Voice and the Reverend Eli Jenkins. Almost as an afterthought, the performance was recorded on a single-microphone tape recording (the microphone was laid at front center on the stage floor) and later issued by the Caedmon company. It is the only known recorded performance of Under Milk Wood with Thomas as a part of the cast. A studio recording, planned for 1954, was precluded by Thomas's death during November 1953.

And I've also uploaded a BBC R4 continuity which played after the above recording back in the 1950s:

( Download Here )

Description:

I found a copy on an old tape my brother found at a charity shop some years ago. At the end of the production is about 10 minutes of priceless Radio 4 continuity, plugging three up-coming Just Before Midnight plays, giving details about the imminent wavelength changes and a complete playing of the 'New Radio 4 Opening Music', which became known as the UK Theme. This version of the Theme is about 2 minutes longer than the one that was axed in 2006.
Audio details: 96/44 mono mp3. Sound quality is rather poor - the recording was on an elderly C120 cassette, that gave up the ghost soon after this transfer.

I'm gonna try and find those three 'Just Before Midnight' plays too.

Radio Enthusiasts all up in this shiz.

Rock on.

William S. Burroughs -The "Priest" They Called Him (1992)

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The "Priest" They Called Him (1992) is an album collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain. Cobain provides dissonant guitar backing based on "Silent Night" and "To Anacreon in Heaven" to Burroughs' deadpan reading.

 The titular "Priest" is the protagonist, an otherwise nameless heroin addict trying to score on Christmas Eve. After selling a leather suitcase filled with a pair of severed legs (and subsequently visiting the ubiquitous crooked doctor), the Priest returns to a boarding house with a fix. While preparing, the Priest is interrupted by muffled moans from the next room. He knocks and finds a crippled Mexican boy in the throes of agonizing withdrawal. After giving the boy his drugs as an act of charity, the Priest returns to his room, reclines on his bed and dies, in what Burroughs calls "the immaculate fix." Another reading of this piece was also used in The Junky's Christmas, a short animated film in 1990.

More info on the aul' - Wiki

Good day! 

William S. Burroughs - Break Through in Grey Room

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Continuing our William S Borroughs April series (ho ho ho) , here's another classic:

Extraordinary cut-up voices recorded during the mid-60's in hotel rooms in New York, Paris, London...It's impossible not to recognise the writer's voice -- the sonority of this voice -- a sonority also present in the silence of every text he wrote. An explosion of styles -- a blasting of borders -- the silence after a gunshot -- the overtaking of the fetishized word -- from the exploded painting to the cut tape. This record starts with a piece of more than 13 minutes, recorded around 1965 with Ian Sommerville somewhere in New York and London -- K-9 was in combat with the alien mind-screens, including various monologues, radio short waves and music...Tapes, cut and cut and cut up to the limit of sense -- emerged new structures of communication... and senses. Words gain power when loosing the boundaries of semantics. Including too Joujouka music recorded by WS Borroughs in the hills of Morocco with Ornette Coleman, circa 1973."

Compliments of BBC4Free, now taking requests, just write in the comments box below! 

William S. Burroughs - Junky

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Artwork

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"Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first novel. It is a candid eye-witness account of times and places that are now long gone, an unvarnished field report from the American post-war underground."

"Unafraid to portray himself in 1953 as a confirmed member of two socially-despised under classes (a narcotics addict and a homosexual), Burroughs was writing as a trained anthropologist when he unapologetically described a way of life - in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City - that by the 1940's was already demonized by the artificial anti-drug hysteria of an opportunistic bureaucracy and a cynical, prostrate media."

Read BY THE AUTHOR.
Total length: 3 hours, 5 minutes

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

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Franza Kafka's surreal novel reenacted by BBC.
Gregor Samsa wakes one day to find himself transformed into a hideous insect.

Total length: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Read by Benedict Cumberbatch

Wordsworth - Two-Part Prelude

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Some people prefer the other version of The Prelude done by Ian McKellen, but I love this recording of it, dream-like sounds and a voice draws me into the world of the poet.

The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his widow Mary. The poem has been referred to as the first psychological epic. - Wikipedia

H.G. Wells - The New Accelerator

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A BBC 7 commission read by Robert Bathurst.


The acclaimed physiologist, Professor Gibberne, is on the verge of a making a discovery that will revolutionise human life by creating a stimulant to speed up both the body and mind...


One episode of approximately 30 minutes.


First broadcast 21/1/2006 on BBC7.


oh also...this is the-

Better drink heavily on this momentous occasion!

The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

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In this scripture of Tibetan Buddhism—traditionally read aloud to the dying to help them attain liberation—death and rebirth are seen as a process that provides an opportunity to recognize the true nature of mind. This audio program, read by the actor Richard Gere, allows you to experience this timeless text in the traditional way. It will be of interest to people concerned with death and dying, as well as to all those who seek spiritual insight into the myriad changes of everyday life.

Total length: 2 hours, 49 minutes

George Carlin - Class Clown

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Class Clown is the third comedy album released by American comedian George Carlin. It was recorded May 27, 1972 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California, and released in September.


At the time he was relatively well-known for tame satirical routines about the entertainment industry. His previous album FM & AM released the same year, showed that he was already drifting towards counter-culture icon, but Class Clown proved a landmark. Besides musings about his youth, the album featured strongly directed remarks against the Vietnam War and his attachment to taboo topics. The album contains "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television", which became the focus of government harassment in the year that followed, and, perhaps not coincidentally, Carlin's most famous calling card. Carlin would continue to explore the use of profanity for the rest of his career. Apart from this segment, Class Clown is Carlin's only profanity-free album since 1971.

Gotta love Carlin.

Bill Hicks - Arizona Bay

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Arizona Bay is an album by comedian Bill Hicks, posthumously released in 1997. It was released alongside Rant in E-Minor, marking three years since his death. The album's title refers to the hope that Los Angeles will one day fall into the ocean due to a major earthquake. Hicks contends that the world will be better off in L.A.'s absence:

Ahhh, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone...All the shitty shows are gone, all the idiots screaming in the fucking wind are dead, I love it...leaving nothing but a cool, beautiful serenity called Arizona Bay. That's right, when L.A. falls in the fucking ocean and is flushed away, all it will leave is Arizona Bay.

Several of Hicks's albums are unique in that they feature background music, meant to enhance the album's mood. Such additions were made well after the initial recordings and are the product of Hicks's own musicianship.

According to Kevin Booth, in the BBC documentary Dark Poet, it was during the early recording sessions for Arizona Bay, around Christmas 1992, that Hicks first started suffering from the pains in his side, which would later be diagnosed as pancreatic cancer. Upon learning that he had developed cancer, Hicks used his time to mix music into Rant in E-Minor and Arizona Bay, calling it his Dark Side of the Moon.


Bill Hicks - Guitar, Vocals
Kevin Booth - Bass, Keyboards, Percussion, Producer

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit (1974)

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Out-of-print audiobook adaptation which was authorized by professor Tolkien himself, this was originally put out in 1974 as a boxed set of LPs. In my view, this is pretty much the best adaptation of The Hobbit ever, rivaling even the terrific animated film adaptation. It owes its greatness to the wonderful music and simply amazing voice work of Nicol Williamson, who may be better known to some as Merlin from the film Excalibur. If there were a Criterion Collection for audiobooks, this would surely be be one of the first titles.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."