So another idea to pass the time on the trip was to have some "books on tape."
We tried this on our trip in Death Valley. We brought at least four novels. Way way way too many. We ended up listening to thirty percent of one, "Polar Star."
We found it tough work to listen to. It takes more concentration than you like and it gets a bit loopy after a while.
Well, we've all been passing around copies of the Len Beadell books. I found that Len's ancestors have a website. One of the things the do is sell Len Beadell tapes and cds. These are recordings of his talks, among other things.
At first thought, it sounds like a clever idea to listen to these. But then I listened to some of the snippets on this page.
Ugh. I probably hear Australians more often than most of our crew, and I found Len's strange high-pitch warble fairly difficult to hear comfortably.
I'm sitting in my otherwise silent study playing the snippets on a nice sound system.
Now if I cannot understand him very easily in those conditions, imagine us sitting in a Land Cruiser, blasting down some dirt highway at 60mph with a truckload of equipment bouncing around the back.
How often do you think we'd have to rewind our tapes to hear all this? Probably not as many as you think; we'd eventually just abandon the whole thing.
We still should try to throw together some cassettes of shit to listen to during the trip -- books on tape and music. Maybe even my favorite, and something that I don't get to enjoy now that I am back in Singapore, TALK RADIO.
Posted by Nils Blutig at July 20, 2003 11:15 PM | TrackBack