Sometime late last summer, I decided it would be a good idea to record myself reading bite-size chunks of Moby Dick. My illustrated version had recently been published and I was at work on a couple other public domain titles, but I felt like I wanted a final bout with the white whale.
I pitched the idea to Adam at Hello America Stereo Cassette and he gave me his blessing. He warned me it would be awhile till he could give it attention so time might pass till it saw the light of day but that was fine by me. I had plenty else going on and wasn’t in any great hurry. I’ve learned over time to be better about not pushing so hard on deadlines and such. It just pisses people off and makes them not want to work with you. I’ve become accustomed to doing my work and sending it off into the ether, forgetting it even happened until it resurfaces, according to my collaborators’ timeline. Occasionally, it’s even a nice surprise when it returns.
Aside from not stumbling over the words too badly, the big challenge of assembling this recording was cutting down an epic novel down to sixty minutes. I quickly found out that even a chapter was really too long if I wanted to give the listener an overall sense of Melville’s book so what I did was cut out passages that spoke to me most and pasted them into a word doc.
It’s drastically abridged, of course, but I think the fragments I chose give a feel of the heart of the thing. Handling Melville’s paragraphs this way was not unlike the layout process on my illustrated version. It was a way to really get under the hood and see how the thing was put together. It was a rare privilege.
Early warning for this but the preorder’s been up and the publisher likes it when people buy ahead. Gives ’em confidence in the talent, that they haven’t backed the wrong horse…
I sat through a play earlier in the week.