Gails Yarns, Hooks & Needles

Jon Armstrong has a blog, called “If You’re Just Joining Us.” He has addressed all sorts of things, from unschooling to fashion design. In his latest release, he includes two short selections from his upcoming novel, “Yarn,” published by Night Shade Books.

Jon’s novel, “Grey,” was published by Night Shade in 2007. It is also at Podiobooks, if you’d like a listen to his writing. The first paragraph of the description at Podiobooks is this:

“High fashion, corporate malfeasance, celebrity culture, and an obsessed media collide with exuberant violence and volatile intensity in Grey, the explosive debut novel by Jon Armstrong.”

I thought it rather defied description. Violence is not what I thought of first, possibly because Jon’s voice is like velvet as he reads.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time catching up on the CraftLit podcast. I’ve dipped into it several times without staying and finally got curious enough to begin at the beginning – and was swept along with the current. I’m hearing all the story lines as well as most of the books under discussion. No wonder people love it. It’s a book discussion without the test!

For years I have heard about CraftLit and not listened. This past week I did, and enjoyed it, so here is a recommendation for CraftLit.

Heather is an English teacher who knows her literature. To begin the podcast, she talks about a few things more or less personal, such as a project she is working on, or what she did on 9/11, or a nifty website or podcast she has found. Then she prepares the scene for the reading and tells us what to listen for in the upcoming chapters. Then she plays chapters for the rest of the hour.

The very first story is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, from Librivox, so I started there. I am enjoying the reading, and gaining new insights from Heather’s scholarly comments! This is fun!

I found it on iTunes with no problem. If the webpage had loaded I would include a link, but it didn’t so I can’t. I am up to Episode 12, and there are a total of 165. With great podcasts like these to listen to, I cannot be bothered to pick up a book and read.

Several weeks ago, Librivox sent me an email announcing a fundraiser and explaining how to donate. Their first ever fundraiser hoped to raise $20,000 to cover operating expenses for the next five years. Two weeks later, they sent another email announcing the close of the fundraiser, as the goal had been met. They were pleased and thankful. I’m pleased on their behalf. Librivox is worthy.

In case you aren’t familiar with Librivox, their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. All reading is done by volunteers, and all readers are welcome. You don’t even have to own the book you read, all text comes from Project Gutenburg, which is scanning all public domain books. Volunteers scan and edit the books, which is way more complicated than you might think.

Julie D. recently posted some favorite readers from Librivox, and I like how she presents the list at Forgotten Classics.

Translation: Friends, Romans, Countrymen.

This morning I listened to Wil Wheaton’s Radio Free Burrito, in which he recommends some other podcasts, and briefly mentions his spoken intro, “Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies, knock me your lobes,” mostly to say he never chooses music from the same hip era.

At the blog posting for this episode, where I looked for the recommended podcasts, I found a comment with links to improve Wil’s knowledge of Lord Buckley, the man who speaks that spoken intro.

I went to improve my knowledge.

If half what the website says in one article (specifically, A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat ) is true, then Lord Buckley more or less invented life as we know it! This is seriously amazing, and worth a look. Lord Buckley influenced so many cultural icons, and has been parodied so many times that he sounds familiar, even though I never heard of him, before today.

It seems to me I saw a reference Lord Buckley made to the hiposphere, which would be a direct ancestor of the words podosphere and blogosphere, and why we knew to spell and pronounce them exactly that way. I have hunted for a more precise reference but keep getting distracted, so now I’m giving it up and going to watch videos of the Lord.