So if you are one who has the good fortune of knowing me, then you know that much of my waking life revolves around my iPod. When I rise in the morning, I brush my teeth, cleanse my body, and organize my audio collection. At 15,000 files and 75 GB (minus podcasts), I take the organization of my collection with great seriousness. Recently, I had been feeling that I was not eating a substantial amount of mental sustenance in the form of great works of literature.
Unfortunately, I commute 1 hour (minimum) each way to work every day. This leaves me with little opportunity to do any morning reading (or writing for that matter) though I have been able to sufficiently replace the time typically spent shuffling through the array of musical diatribes and radio playlists through the discovery of podcasting. NPR News and Notes, Democracy Now, and the Indiefeed Performance Poetry channel have been my morning salve and salvation up until this point echoing perfectly off of one another offering me a consistent supply of African American news, World news, and artistic interpretation of the aforementioned two.
Yesterday as I sat contemplating thoughts that I needed to read “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius”, my mind grasped for some vision of how I might complete this daunting task. I leave for work each morning at 4 am. When I finally close my 6 am to 2:30 pm shift at Beam Global, I make a small pit stop at home to refresh the iPod, check some email, and get a small meal before I am back out of the house to pick Jah’kaya up from school. Upon picking up Jah’kaya, I head over to Auset’s house to assist her with homework, oversee the cleaning of her room, and generally engage in quality discussion regarding her day. This entire cycle ends at 8 pm when I return home to fall into a deathly sleep for the dawning of a new day.
My self assigned writing tasks demand that I feed my mind anew with rich language, anecdotes, and broad shades of philosophical discourse in the midst of such a rigorous schedule. Enter here LibriVox, LearnOutLoud, and eJunto which expanded my aural awareness of the number of narrated works that are available in the public domain and often with no cost associated. In a single day, I was able to expand my library with not only “The Meditations”, but the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen, and longstanding standards such as Plato’s “Republic” and Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”. I don’t imagine that I will entertain the latter two with any great frequency since I gain far more from the actual written works, but they are literary necessities in every available form.
As I sat engaging this morning in “The Communist Manifesto”, I was struck with a notion. While I found many of the classics in the domain available in audio, I noted that many smaller works of a more particular nature to my own personal experience were absent. I imagined that I might soon decide for my own personal enhancement to dictate these works into my computer with the assistance of Audacity, the Shure microphone, and what I have often been told is a compelling voice. I thought I might also share a few of these select recordings with you on this blog, whence I had loaded them into an Odeo player. I don’t know when or where this project might launch, but I offer the thought to you as fodder for future consideration. If you are a reader of this non-descript blog, frequent or otherwise, tell me what you want to hear and I and my voice will make our best damned effort to see it through to completion. Otherwise, you will be at the behest of my literary collection and I can tell you confidently that I do not read for pleasure and my library reflects that.
Peace(s) Of Me!
The AOMagnanimous
Categories: culturalife |
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