Todd

Stefan Rudnicki’s Voice makes me Puke

Revisado: 08-01-22

Great stories.

However, Rudnicki’s baritone is not merely an odd choice for stories about young adults, his dramatic range is profoundly limited. So particularly female characters are just not very good. It’s frequently absurdly distracting. I’m glad they got another guy for the mars books.

Rudnicki’s voice makes me so sick I couldn’t even finish listening to Gold Coast and I’ll just read Pacific Edge myself.

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Shitty shitty Radio Theatre Production

Revisado: 11-24-21

The main narrator is competent. Performances are ridiculous. Absurd mish mash of “foreign” and “domestic” accents. But where you’d think for instance, the producers would provide some consistency of accents for specific cultural groups, they do not. The fremen accents range from Arabic sounding to south Asian, to Slavic. The Atreides cast has no consistency of accent snd the actors performing as atreides loyalists sound like teenagers when they’re supposed to be seasoned warriors. The Baron Harkonnen seems to be voiced by several different actors.

Utterly embarrassing.

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Overly Emotive Reading

Revisado: 04-27-21

Ellison's magnum opus could be likened to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey stargate sequence. It invokes awe, sublime disorientation, and a kind of horror of an abundance (or vacuum) of self-awareness.

Detractors and enthusiasts alike took profoundly variable meanings from the Kubrick. And I wonder: should Joe Morton's performance support or interrogate Ellison's satire? Should my interpretation be as good as yours? Or did Ellison have a distinct point to make? I think Morton's overly dramatized performance opens the text to misguided interpretation. Specifically the caricature of types, whether African American, white, male or female, who populate Ellison's society begs questions about both Morton's and Ellison's reliability. Intended or not, the "grotesque" performance enacts a rhetorical overlay that I fought with through the entire reading.

Though the book is a species of burlesque (a "picaresque"), theatricalizing the text, itself, troubles our interpretation of the naive protagonist, and of Ellison's intentions. (This is a constant challenge for the audiobook format.) So the reading must take care not to distort the esthetic sensibility of the original. Such is the ethos one would hope for, but audiobook producers apparently seem to think that understatement will bore the listener. So they frequently over-reach, engaging in often dubious attention-getting ploys. Sometimes the readers just don't really have that much insight into what they're reading, and I wish we could hear Morton's thoughts on the challenge he was undertaking in his attempt to render Ellison's already exaggerated dramatis personae.

In any event, like the conclusion of 2001, in which astronaut David Bowman sees a succession of projections (or is he the projection?) of himself, from the underground the Invisible Man searches for a reflective epilogue affirming the struggle for "visibility" (social validation) which ultimately serves as a confession that no one can really be seen. So perhaps Ellison is interrogating a more universal human existential conflict beyond the brutal white supremacism which serves as the ostensible antagonist in his tale. This is as close as we get to a direct confrontation of his own submission which stands in contrast to the agency that he celebrates in the arsonist-heroes of his closing chapter.

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Another Mannered Reading of a Great Book

Revisado: 10-30-20

Kuhn's impact is widely recognized. There's no complaining there.

Holland? Think of the phony urgent VoiceOver to a sex education film you saw when you were twelve.
He simply fails as an actor attempting to perform "intelligence."

Like so many Audible readings of intellectually substantive materials - this arbitrarily mannered performance lacks the vaguest sort of contextual awareness. Dramatic intonations, pauses, emphases, subordinate clauses are unhinged from any comprehension of the simplest meanings of the text, and are - rather- motivated by an apparently clueless notion of providing "interesting" modulations that aim at conveying "knowledge." But it's just mindless emotive contrivance.

See: "vain toupeed high school english teacher" who was actually hired to coach golf.
Suffering through.

Hokey smokes Bullwinkle. Load the spitballs.

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The Most Important Book You Haven’t Read

Revisado: 09-30-20

The reader damages the reading with needless emoting of rhetorical drama. damaging the message. If she’d taken the time to see what Klein looks and sounds like when lecturing it might’ve helped.

Otherwise Klein presents an important critical counterpoint to Tom Friedman and other neo-liberal globalist thought leaders.

Klein provides what is the most succinct rendering of the economic and geopolitical forces assailing not only democracy but humanity more broadly.

There is no clearer indictment of the figures and institutions that have brought America to the fascist Trump moment.

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Fantastic book. Too bad Barrett Whitener Sucks. ...

Revisado: 05-25-20

Too bad Barrett Whitener and the producers saw fit to have this terrifically intelligent book performed like a robot. It’s hard to imagine a worse, less human performance.

Totally bizarre.

More unfathomably horrible performances from Audible.

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Gardiner is an uncomprehending bimbo.

Revisado: 04-03-20

You’d never wish to hear a Stepford wife read philosophy out loud, but that’s what you have in this utterly robotic performance.

The pace never alters. Her vocal modulations are all performed from a programmed menu rather than from any apparent sensitivity to the information.

It’s like getting a totally robotic blow job.

Totally disgusting.

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Wanted to like it

Revisado: 09-24-19

Terrific narration fails to save a story that has no apparent driving conflict.

Though it promises, with some portent, to discuss the tragic relationship between protagonist and the global catastrophe, the story fails to fulfill its ambitions.

How do you create a world with meaningful characters after the apocalypse? If successful it would be a great book. Stephen King's The Stand comes to mind - the characters are given pasts to live up to in the present. Jemisin's characters operating in a destroyed alien world are just voices mouthing portentous lines.

The book goes from convoluted to incoherent to just boring.

Listened for hours and failed to be brought in.

Amazed that Ezra Klein likes her stuff.

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Why is the Voice of "Civilization" Always British?

Revisado: 08-05-19

Great Book. Bad Production Choices.

The producers choose to go with the cliched British narrator - the media's constant and invariable "voice of civilization" straight out of central casting.

Never mind the book is explicitly ABOUT how the West has deliberately ignored or derogated the contributions of non-western intellectual traditions to world knowledge.

It's not even stupid. It's perverse.

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Women Do Not Sound Like Paul Lynd

Revisado: 08-03-19

So Why oh Why does David Pittu caricature the feminine voice as an affected queen from the 60's?

What a fucktard.

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