Late last night, I was hunting around for something new to listen to in the car. In the absence of anybody of worthwhile substance having released any music I might want to listen to (what is going on out there?), I scoured the racks for an audiobook and came up with something I never thought I'd be into.
Everybody has heard of Ernest Hemingway - well, anybody with a scrap of a brain anyway. Having never read him before, I always had him filed under the heading of "classical American writer - probably extremely dull and for old people who like to pretend they're elitist."
I may have become "old" but I hardly think I'm elitist with my authors. Death In The Afternoon is simply captivating - its basic premise is 'observations on a bullfight', but the way he pulls his thoughts together, the way they flow onto the page, make it into something genuinely unique. So far, I've only whipped through the first chapter and I'm half tempted to go out and buy the book, but being as it's a Sunday morning, I'll just slip it on, listen to the rest of it and buy the book later (so long as I can find this cover, some of the others suffer badly at the hands of bad American book designers).
This falls cleanly into the hands of something I've been chewing over a lot lately. As I (think I) said some time back, I was going to record some of my spoken word material and throw it out there as free podcasts. The kit is all set up and I've had a few trial runs at it - it sounds pretty good to be honest (even if I do say so myself) but having listened to a lot of similar concepts, it appears to me that only the Americans can do this properly. From Henry Rollins' Nights Behind The Treeline to old Bukowski and Kerouac material that I've hunted down, spoken word only sounds authentic when Americans do it. I rather suspect that sometimes, even if the content was not so good, it could sneak through the defences on those grounds alone.
Now, not that I'm comparing myself to Gaiman, but I have some of his spoken word material here and it sounds like an English bloke reading a story. Which is exactly what it is - and that's fine, but it wasn't really what I wanted to create. I've checked against some other non-Americans as well, and they all sound - well, just like people reading out loud. I can't put my finger on why I find the American way of creating spoken word so authentic - or maybe cool is a better word. Maybe I should stop analysing it, get it done, put it out there and let everybody else decide.
Then, if it generates less than stellar results, I'll get one of my American pals to do it for me. Then at least it will sound good in myhead.
