Last night, whilst reading under a bright table lamp and in between midnight smoke breaks and short bursts of conversation on MSN, Jamila introduced me to the wonderful world of podcasting. Prior to last night, I was only mildly interested - that is to say, interested only enough to know something about it without doing anything about it - but in the span of a few decisive minutes, a transformation took place and I became a podcast lover. Podcasts are an amazing new trajectory in literature. Jammi said, interestingly, that the wonder of podcasting lies in the idea of storytelling reverting back to its original form. I cannot agree with her more; before print and mass production, there were voices and memory. Stories, then, were fluid and fluxing, (and even some poetry begs to be read aloud to be best appreciated; unfortunately, this is lost on most people; the aural aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry is one such example; I recommend reading "As Kingfishers Catch Fire") and emotions expressed not silently in our heads as we read now with our mind-voice but tangibly and audibly, passing down from mouth to mouth, voice to voice, until finally being immortalized in print.
And if you go chasing rabbitsAnd you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
- Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
Alice In Wonderland is indisputably one of my all-time favourite stories. What an acid trip it is! A delight to read and an even greater delight to listen to. Natasha Lee Lewis does a wonderful job of reading the story - one chapter a month, and by the time she's done, "everyone will be a year older".
Podcast here.
And if you want to read along (because that's how you like to roll), there's an online text at The Online Literature Library.
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