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alibi_shopInsomnia Collection, vol. 5, by various authors
full contents (19h 46m)
with: "The Privy Purse Expences of King Henry the Eighth, from November MDXXIX, to December MDXXXII", by Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1827) - text / audio (1h 3m)
LibriVox periodically puts out these "Insomnia Collection" anthologies, where volunteers are asked to submit any public-domain text of their choosing as long as it's (1) read in a soothing tone and (2) boring. As the title implies, they're meant to help you fall asleep. For my section, I randomly found a lengthy analysis of Henry VIII's account books by a British antiquarian of the Georgian era, and read the first hour or so of it. I can't tell you much about the other pieces in Insomnia Collection vol. 5, because I couldn't get through them, because they are boring, so I guess everyone did their jobs.
However, I'm kind of proud of this piece and if anyone actually stays awake long enough to listen to it in detail, I think it has some enjoyable qualities. First, I learned enough about sound editing in Audacity by this point that I was able to get a nice even volume throughout and, importantly, blank out nearly all of the breath sounds in between phrases, which is an easy way to produce a somewhat eerie subliminal "this person is never breathing" effect not unlike HAL 9000.
Second, the text itself isn't just a uniform recitation of things: it has some formal qualities, mostly unintentional, that almost (if you're feeling generous) make this into a kind of performance art. Like many 19th-century writers Nicolas is fond of constructing extremely long sentences full of comma-delimited or parenthetical asides, which look to the eye like just an endless string of text, but when carefully read out loud they can be surprisingly expressive as you sort of hear the narrator guiding you through the sentence. And when Nicolas periodically falls into a repetitive riff, like listing a whole lot of dates each of which must include the name of the monarch and the year of his reign ("from the 1st of October, 21st Henry VII. 1505, to the 20th November, 1st Henry VIII. 1509"), or listing an arbitrary number of categories of things before finally giving up and saying "et cetera", you can kind of imagine the narrator going into a ritual trance with some special associated dance moves, before finally getting back to a regular mode of communication.
And, in his Preface and Introductory Remarks, Nicolas himself shows up as a character in ways that—if I hadn't tried so hard to stick to a uniform soothing tone—would threaten to make this piece too obviously funny to fit the requirements. The author is clearly aware that many people will think King Henry's expense reports are boring, so, again and again, he tries to rectify that by telling us that they're not boring ("as every payment ... is minutely noticed, it must be evident that they afford interesting information"; "it is not necessary to allude more fully to them, than to observe, that the Accounts about that time are extremely interesting"; "as whatever relates to the private conduct of eminent persons, is by far the most pleasing, and perhaps most useful part of antiquarian inquiries, the information here presented on that of Henry, is both valuable and interesting"). But even if the reader takes his word for it on that point, Nicolas still isn't happy: he apparently had some trouble finding a publisher for this book, even though, in his opinion, the Society of Antiquaries should have jumped at the chance. This leads to a hilariously pissy bit where he says surely the Society could've have found money for such a project instead of "publishing useless articles" full of "useless engravings."
Also, kings are very weird. Besides the usual rich-person pursuits, the story of all the places and occasions where Henry emitted money paints a vivid picture of a slightly different time where it's taken for granted that the king might magically heal random people by touching them, and then a little later the same dude is getting drunk and throwing down cash for someone to entertain him by "riding two horses at once" or eating an entire deer. That is, Henry did not eat the deer, he paid someone to demonstrate eating one as a stunt. Nicolas does pause at one point to acknowledge that Henry VIII was an incredibly terrible person, but let's not dwell on that.
full contents (19h 46m)
with: "The Privy Purse Expences of King Henry the Eighth, from November MDXXIX, to December MDXXXII", by Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1827) - text / audio (1h 3m)
LibriVox periodically puts out these "Insomnia Collection" anthologies, where volunteers are asked to submit any public-domain text of their choosing as long as it's (1) read in a soothing tone and (2) boring. As the title implies, they're meant to help you fall asleep. For my section, I randomly found a lengthy analysis of Henry VIII's account books by a British antiquarian of the Georgian era, and read the first hour or so of it. I can't tell you much about the other pieces in Insomnia Collection vol. 5, because I couldn't get through them, because they are boring, so I guess everyone did their jobs.
However, I'm kind of proud of this piece and if anyone actually stays awake long enough to listen to it in detail, I think it has some enjoyable qualities. First, I learned enough about sound editing in Audacity by this point that I was able to get a nice even volume throughout and, importantly, blank out nearly all of the breath sounds in between phrases, which is an easy way to produce a somewhat eerie subliminal "this person is never breathing" effect not unlike HAL 9000.
Second, the text itself isn't just a uniform recitation of things: it has some formal qualities, mostly unintentional, that almost (if you're feeling generous) make this into a kind of performance art. Like many 19th-century writers Nicolas is fond of constructing extremely long sentences full of comma-delimited or parenthetical asides, which look to the eye like just an endless string of text, but when carefully read out loud they can be surprisingly expressive as you sort of hear the narrator guiding you through the sentence. And when Nicolas periodically falls into a repetitive riff, like listing a whole lot of dates each of which must include the name of the monarch and the year of his reign ("from the 1st of October, 21st Henry VII. 1505, to the 20th November, 1st Henry VIII. 1509"), or listing an arbitrary number of categories of things before finally giving up and saying "et cetera", you can kind of imagine the narrator going into a ritual trance with some special associated dance moves, before finally getting back to a regular mode of communication.
And, in his Preface and Introductory Remarks, Nicolas himself shows up as a character in ways that—if I hadn't tried so hard to stick to a uniform soothing tone—would threaten to make this piece too obviously funny to fit the requirements. The author is clearly aware that many people will think King Henry's expense reports are boring, so, again and again, he tries to rectify that by telling us that they're not boring ("as every payment ... is minutely noticed, it must be evident that they afford interesting information"; "it is not necessary to allude more fully to them, than to observe, that the Accounts about that time are extremely interesting"; "as whatever relates to the private conduct of eminent persons, is by far the most pleasing, and perhaps most useful part of antiquarian inquiries, the information here presented on that of Henry, is both valuable and interesting"). But even if the reader takes his word for it on that point, Nicolas still isn't happy: he apparently had some trouble finding a publisher for this book, even though, in his opinion, the Society of Antiquaries should have jumped at the chance. This leads to a hilariously pissy bit where he says surely the Society could've have found money for such a project instead of "publishing useless articles" full of "useless engravings."
Also, kings are very weird. Besides the usual rich-person pursuits, the story of all the places and occasions where Henry emitted money paints a vivid picture of a slightly different time where it's taken for granted that the king might magically heal random people by touching them, and then a little later the same dude is getting drunk and throwing down cash for someone to entertain him by "riding two horses at once" or eating an entire deer. That is, Henry did not eat the deer, he paid someone to demonstrate eating one as a stunt. Nicolas does pause at one point to acknowledge that Henry VIII was an incredibly terrible person, but let's not dwell on that.
