Blogtrotter

Joyce: "Ulysses" MP3 Readings at LibriVox: Free!

While I paid (using a gift certificate to defray costs) for Donal Donnelly's marathon reading of the novel, 33 hours in a sort of Edwardian recitative swagger, and while I would like one day to compare it to the Naxos & RTE versions, for now, my impecunious (thanks to the remodelling?) hunt revealed this effort by devoted amateurs who read aloud and upload public-domain files of stories. "Dubliners" is in the planning stages, while "Portrait" and "Ulysses" can be accessed here. There's even an RSS feed for iTunes along with the sound files. Hugh McGuire's note warns of pub noise and creative additions that make this an exception to the quieter, more pristine, deliveries of other LibriVoxians.

This is part of the Lawrence Lessig-inspired Creative Commons movement. Much as I admire actors who read eloquently Joyce's language that demands a musical power on the tongue that can resound in the ear as well as revive the eye, we also need to free art from idols of the marketplace who would charge admission for every aesthetic creation ever displayed in the agora. What would Francis Bacon (the original one, not the painter of torment) do? Remember: demand alternatives to, contra Stephen Joyce & Disney & Sony & the RIAA, the idiocy of an era when we Americans suffer the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse (aka Digital Millennium Copyright Act) corporate mania to protect for another thousand years their capitalist Reich.

(Image credit: is this Jim Dale the reader of Harry Potter? Here, as did Jim Norton for an abridged (of course!) Wake on CD from Naxos, Mr Dale tries out Joyce aloud. I trust S. Harris will permit this use of the cartoon for educational, non-profit purposes on my blog which earns me no profit, in the same open-minded spirit. I don't think bloggers should become shills-- although Leopold Bloom was an advertising canvasser!-- as this only worsens the relentless commercialization of the medium of the Net for us all. That's why I married a woman more practical and worldly than Mr. Peabody-lecturing distracted dreamer me, of course. )
http://librivox.org/ulysses-by-james-joyce/