Kestrell

I'm currently on an Angela Carter binge, because the entire time I was death-marching through Eugenides’s _The Marriage Plot_ (which struck me as a "St. Elmo's Fire" for literature snobs), I kept thinking, "Well, he's no Angela Carter." Carter is still one of the few writers who managed to write novels which featured subversive female protagonists while also being dark, funny, literate, and original.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/25/card-from-angela-carter-review?CMP=twt_gu

check out some of the narrators on The Oscar Wilde Coolection
http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_5?asin=B005HEYU82&qid=1319748529&sr=1-5

I already only recently found out that, in the audio version of his autobiography, Keith Richards shares the narration with Johnny Depp. That definitely seems worth hearing, and I guess a lot of people agreed, because it won an Audie, the award for best audiobook of the year.

Kes: DDM's short story, "Don't look Now," which was made into a film starring Donald Sutherland, is definitley one of the creepiest little stories I've ever read, and it makes wonderful use of the setting of a very gothic Venice--I commend it to any horror fan who might not have read it yet.

bits and pieces from The Guardian article at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/21/daphne-du-maurier-stories-discovered

A bookseller's dedicated attempts to root out the early work of
Daphne du Maurier
have resulted in the recovery of five lost tales by the enduringly popular author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Most startling among them is "The Doll",
published in 1928 when Du Maurier was barely into her 20s – a macabre short story about a man who discovers that the girl he's smitten with is besotted
with a mechanical sex doll.

....Willmore said that she had been looking for "The Doll", which is mentioned in Du Maurier's autobiography, Myself When Young, for many years. "I'd searched
for it a million times before," she said, "but quite by chance it turned up in a 1937 collection of stories rejected by magazines and publishers called
The Editor Regrets. I was dumbfounded."

....The other stories that Willmore unearthed include two which vanished after appearing in short story collections in the US, "East Wind" and "The Limpit".
Another two - "And His Letters Grew Colder" and "The Happy Valley" – appeared in magazines published in 1932. The latter, which Willmore said is her favourite
of the rediscovered stories, contains elements of a plot which later grew into Rebecca. "These stories are often overlooked," said Willmore, "but they
show how she learned her craft, and tried out different mechanisms for telling the stories".

Du Maurier's novels are notable for their sour view of humanity and the often macabre suspense plots, which led Alfred Hitchcock to film three adaptations
of them. "The
short stories
are even darker," Willmore confirmed. "They're not nice, quite macabre and sinister."

Willmore took the stories to Kits Browning, Du Maurier's son, who himself had never seen the stories. They are now set to be published by Virago, alongside
another eight early stories originally published in the 50s. The collection, The Doll, is due to be published on 5 May this year.

1. Papa Sangre
http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/2010/06/papa_sangre.php
a soon-to-be-released audio game for the iPhone which uses a sonic landscape. This is the kind of thing which I have been imagining for years whenever someone asks me about what I want from an audio game.

2. An article about a new book, _Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear_ by Neil Lerner

Horrors! Davidson Professor’s Book Explores Music in Scary Movies
by John Syme
http://www.collegenews.org/x10349.xml

3. Lastly, not specifically an audio event, but from Pretty/Scary
http://pretty-scary.net/
the Website that focuses on horror created by women, comes this announcement
Yfke Van Berckelaer's 'Zombie Love' and Maude Michaud's 'Reflection' double-feature for charity!
On Wednesday, July 7th, All Things Horror

http://www.allthingshorroronline.com/
hosts a charity screening of Yfke Van Berckelaer’s short zombie musical Zombie Love and Maude Michaud's Frankenstein-inspired Reflection in Somerville, Massachuessetts, USA on July 7th, 2010. This double feature will showcase the American premiere of Frankenstein, Unlimited, a collection of six shorts each with their own take on Frankenstein mythology, and benefit the Boston Girls Rock Camp.
Frankenstein Unlimited consists of six short films from up-and-coming filmmakers in Montréal. Each film maker uses themes contained within Mary Shelley's original novel as a template for their movies...
The program is a fundraiser for the Boston Girls Rock Camp which runs August 2nd through the 7th. The camp teaches girls ages eight through 16 how to play instruments, write their own music and perform for a club audience within a week. They offer workshops provide leadership and life skills carry them through the years that follow. A representative from the camp will be on hand to discuss how anyone can donate not only money but they are timer services to make this camp continued success.
Somerville Theatre
55 Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
United States
617.625.5700
The night starts at 8pm and tickets are available at the door for $5.

Jim Fructerman, founder of Bookshare.org, posted
a brief commentary on the book _Total Engagement_
http://benetech.blogspot.com/2010/02/total-engagement.html ,
contextualizing the psychology of MMOs within the corporate sphere.

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The thesis is simple. Millions of people pay each month to participate in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). I've tried them, and I have friends (and kids) that have been totally sucked into them. They punch a bunch of psychological tickets for humans: the game designers know what they're doing. The book discusses how this is done:

* an epic story line(we're saving the galaxy from the Crumlons)clear paths to advancement, with transparency about your skills and performance
* intensely meritocratic societies called guilds that work together in groups to accomplish major tasks
* strong social interactions with other people
* the ability to try, fail and try again rapidly, learning quickly
* the option to try on leadership roles

For many people, these games are where they come alive and truly experience their potential to solve problems, meet challenges and lead a team.

And then they go into the modern workplace, which is frequently as stultifying as these virtual worlds are thrilling. Fail!

Read and Reeves are convinced that at least some smart workplaces of the future are going to adapt some of the ways of the games to more fully engage their employees and become more effective as economic organizations. They don't have a magic formula for how to do this, but do invest a great deal of time ana! lyzing what makes people inside these games tick and how those! concept s transfer to the workplace.
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Kes: Although I disagree about _Zeroville_ being strictly nostalgic: I actually found it it to have a dark side which seemed to suggest that both the mystery and corruption in films was merely an extension of the psyches of the people who made those films. Also, must add _Sunnysie_ to my books wishlist.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/aug/07/budd-schulberg-literary-legacy

From The Writer's Almanac comes this description of an author whose work I have managed to totally miss, a sad fact which must be addressed in the near future.

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Today is the 44th birthday of memoirist and journalist Jim Knipfel, born in Grand Forks, North Dakota (1965) but raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He's best known for his humorous and sarcastic "Slackjaw" column, which has run weekly in different publications for more than 20 years. He's written a thousand weekly columns, a trilogy of memoirs, and a couple of novels.

Knipfel is legally blind due to a rare genetic eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa. It first appeared when he was about 11 or 12, when he could no longer see in dim restaurants or see at night. When he was in his early 20s, an ophthalmologist finally diagnosed his disease and told him that he'd be blind in a few years. About five years ago, he told an interviewer that the way he viewed the world was "kind of like peering through two toilet paper tubes all the time."

He'd been writing his Slackjaw column for about 10 years when a Penguin Putnam editor approached him with a book deal to write a memoir. The memoir, entitled Slackjaw like the column, came out in 1999.

When the book came out, the publishers sent him on a 10-city promotional tour. Knipfel later said, "Putting a blind man on a plane to 10 cities he's never been to before struck me as cruel and funny." At promotional book events, he had to read from photocopies of his book that had been hugely enlarged, and had to use a magnifying glass and have a strong lamp shining right there on his paper to read, and even then, his eyes would give out after a page or two, and he'd make the rest up.

Knipfel is fond of his parents and has said that he had a great childhood, but he also suffered from very severe bouts of depression in his teens and young adulthood, and tried committing suicide a dozen times. When he was 22, in his final suicide attempt, he tried first to hang himself and then swallowed two fistfuls of pills and a fifth of Scotch. He stumbled out of his Minneapolis apartment, he recalls, into the hallway and "made such a commotion that the cops came and they ended up beating me up. As suicide scenes go, I thought it was pretty funny."

He was put in a psychiatric hospital in Minneapolis for the next six months, and he wrote about his stay in the Minneapolis psychiatric hospital in his second memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio (2000). He finished the first draft of the book in 10 days.

Knipfel says that when it comes to writing books, he prefers to write "in marathon fashion." He says, "Before I begin, before word one is typed, I need to have the complete story in my head. That's the important thing. Then I'll take what vacation time I can get from the paper, parcel out what needs to be done given what time I have available, lock the apartment door, sit down and type eight to 10 hours a day (with regular cigarette breaks). I start with the first chapter and drive straight through to the end. I guess this comes from a deep love for the pulps."

His third memoir, Ruining It for Everybody (2004),begins: "Whenever I hear the word 'spiritual' I reach for my revolver.'"
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