Spoken Word Mythology and Folklore Recordings

I still have the open-reel tape on which I dubbed this LP, borrowed from the Enfield Public Library, ca. 1974. We didn't yet have a cassette deck in the then-current stereo system.

I genuinely loved the mythology and folklore (as well as fiction/poetry-reading) spoken word (and sometimes music) albums I could find when very young, from such labels mentioned in the not-great but legible OCR'd NY Times article at the link. More of these should be available still than are...from such labels as Caedmon, Spoken Arts, CMS, Folkways, Miller-Brody Productions (which did the Newbery Award Records), and others cited. And certainly read the books by Harold Courlander and others as I found them...this NYT article being from 1977 so that cheerful references to "the Mysterious East" were still "A-OK"...

ARCHIVES | 1977

Spinning Around the World On Recorded Folk Tales

By PAUL KRESHJULY 17, 1977

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

• Share
• Tweet
• Email
• More

Folk tales have apparently existed ever since there were people to tell them to each other—”tales or stories,” as the dictionary puts it, “handed down by word of mouth, by the common people.” All literature has its roots in these oral origins, and it is surprising in how many guises and in different cultures the same basic situations turn up. Talking tortoises and frogs abound on every continent; Cinderella surfaces in Africa as Umusha Mwaice; the heron and crab who run their race along a Melanesian shore are surely distant relatives of Aesop's hare and tortoise. The foolish folk in the South American story who believe that the moon has drowned in local lake and must be fished out have their counterparts in Ireland's Hudden and Dudden, who leap into Brown Lake to retrieve the reflections of their lost sheep and cattle. The stock of plots is limited. Bruno Bettelheim has said that such stories are best conveyed to children in live readings, or better still recounted spontaneously by parents or patient uncles in their own words. That is not always possible, so the hundreds of, recordings available on tapes and disks would seem to be the next best thing, and the performances are likely to be a good deal more absorbing. Beginning our recorded journey close to home with America's own tall tales, we meet up with Paul Bunyan and his Southern counterpart Tony Beaver spinning hyperbolic yarns of their prodigious feats. The reader is Ennis Rees, the drawl echt Southern (The Song of Paul Bunyan and Tony Beaver, Spoken Arts SA 954). The late Ed Begley is a droll delight as he speaks gruffly and straightfacedly of the weeping Squonk, the enormous Moskittos that buzzed around Bunyan's lumber camp and the square eggs laid by the Gillygaloo bird, in two volumes of tall‐tale animal stories as set down by Adrien Stoutenberg (American Tall‐Tale Animal, Vol. 1 & 2, Caedmon TC 1317/8, cassette CDL 5137/8). J. Frank Dobie's tales of the Southwest get bucolic readings from their author (Southwestern Folk Tales, Spoken Arts SA 722, cassettes SAC 6127/8). Diane Wolkstein, in her level, honest, earnest way, reads California tales, some with Spanish roots, in prose supplied by Monica Sharon (Spoken Arts SA 1107, cassettes SAC Really native American folklore, of course, belongs to American Indians. They are well represented through bird tales recounted around their hogan fires by the Navajos, in legends that transform the sun into a youth at dawn and crimson swan at dusk, in numerous anecdotes about the cleverness of the coyote. Here Caedmon favors real Indian performers‐actor Arthur Junaluska, himself a full‐blooded Cherokee, reading Clah Chee's Navajo Bird Tales (TC 1375, cassette CDL 51375); Swift Eagle, a Pueblo Indian chief, telling the legends of Kuo‐Haya and other stories of his people in The Pueblo Indians (TC 1451, cassette CDL 51327); Jay Silverheels, another Indian actor, dealing authentically with The Fire Plume and other legends of the American Indians (TC 1451, cassette CDL 51451). • On Folkways, an Indian Princess named Nowedonah, born on a Shinnecock Indian reservation in Southampton, Long Island, reads a legend about the island in the days when its name was Paumanok, but the voice is nasal and dubbed‐in piano music doesn't help (The Enchanted Spring, Folkways FC 7753). Spoken Arts fares better with Diane Wolkstein, in tales that deal with an Indian boy's efforts to get hold of a hunting dog, Now the coyote learned his crying song and how he lost out to the rooster as official sunrise‐greeter in Tales of the Hopi Indians from Harold Courlander's collection (SA 1106, cassettes SAC 6121/2).

More at this link...

FFR: THE ZOO STORY by Edward Albee, performed by William Daniels and Mark Richman (Spoken Arts Records 1964?); NO EXIT by Jean-Paul Sartre (as translated by Paul Bowles), performed by Donald Pleasance, Anna Massey and Glenda Jackson (Caedmon Records 1968); LUV by Murray Schisgal, performed by Alan Arkin, Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach (Columbia Masterworks 1967?); JUST SO STORIES, Volume II by Rudyard Kipling, read by Sterling Holloway; music by Tutti Camarata (Disneyland Records 1965)

I've noted before on the blog that storytelling albums, such as a Smothers Brothers item I was given as a very young child (Aesop's Fables, the Smothers Brothers Way) and a very few other comedy albums my parents bought (SmoBro, Firesign Theater) helped bend the twig, along with such inputs as an audio dramatization of Dracula I borrowed on cassette from my elementary school library (and my very young brother managed to record over) and a wider range of audio materials I found at the public library from about age 9 onward, have left me a lifelong fan of the audio drama and the well-performed reading. 

So, this week, revisiting some of the items of my past in this regard, which have become kind of remotely accessible when sought after at all...and certainly not on display for loan from public libraries or new purchase as they once were.


The Spoken Arts recording of The Zoo Story was probably the last of these I caught up with, in this week's set, and it was almost certainly not the first encounter I had with William Daniels in those days of the 1970s, but this was before I first saw the film of 1776, or of course his turn in St. Elsewhere or other, later television work...though I suspect I'd already seen him as the officious villain of the likes of The Rockford Files episodes. His name didn't mean much to me, if anything, though, any more than Mark Richman's did, though his voice seemed instantly familiar. Albee I'd heard of, mostly for Who's Afraid, but it was much more fun dealing with this bit of unprovoked parody, where (as you probably know) a somewhat fussy publishing executive is bothered while sitting, eating his lunch on a park bench, by a random stranger with a rather less settled life, and an outlook to match. Richman's bluff, somewhat reflective but arrogant swagger seemed even better-fitted to his role than Daniels's growing vexation...the role didn't allow him his later patented rage against whatever small irritants were bedeviling him. This was all but the Original Cast recording (apparently, the first US production had featured George Maharis in the Richman role, for about a week, before Richman took over), and it was an excellent introduction.

The Caedmon recording of No Exit, on the other hand, was among the first of the adult plays in the LP set format I listened to, given the horror-related theme of the work in question...and the production and performances struck me as excellent, as well as the play compelling (I don't think I was introduced to the concept of lesbianism by the play, but it wasn't too long after I learned the word, I'm sure...might've been as old as ten when I first heard this one). I was mildly aware of Donald Pleasance before the production, in much the way I was mildly aware of Sartre (I had read descriptions of his play, this Monty Python thing had a few jokes about him), but I was very impressed by this set...the recording below is slightly scratched up, but listenable:
No Exit

Now, by the time I tried this recording of Luv, Murray Schisgal's hit black comedy about suicidal and scheming NYC intellectuals in the then-present day (mid '60s), I was already a veteran of a number of plays on vinyl, and this one looked promising, even if doomed triangles (see above) were not a novel concept in my listening; I was already an Alan Arkin fan, from such films as Wait Until Dark, and was broadly aware of Jackson and Wallach...though the broad performances at the beginning of the play as recorded were a bit more offputting than I had hoped (I still haven't seen the little-loved film version, though as a stone Elaine May fan, I'll have to eventually...Nichols directed this version, and May takes the woman's role in the film, though as far as I know neither was involved with thought of the other in either version).  Another YouTube transcription of a scratchy but listenable copy (I have Never loved surface noise and worse damage on vinyl).
Luv, side 1

Luv, side 2

Luv, side 3

Luv, side 4

And while such labels as Spoken Arts, Caedmon, Argo and to a lesser extent more generalized labels such as CBS and RCA (or the little jazz label Prestige) would do spoken word recordings of often high caliber, one item that was actually purchased for my younger brother when he was only a year or so past recording over library tapes caught my ear, from the slightly improbable source of Disneyland Records...but Sterling Holloway's recording of Rudyard Kipling's fables was work that could and can stand alongside the fine work in folklore and youth-accessible literature the other spoken-word labels were offering...and the music, usually not missed in the other labels' recordings, was often not too shabby in at least such recordings as this. I don't think my parents ever got around to finding Vol. I for Eric, and I'm not sure I sought it out, but I did enjoy hearing this one with him.
"How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin"


For more purely literary contributions this week (except usually from Gerard Saylor, if he's contributing), please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films (And/Or Other A/V Items), Round 1

Jeannine Kaspar in Paper Covers Rock.

Welcome to a revival of the shortlived Forgotten Films roundelay a few of us were engaged with a few years back...now more or less formally expanded to include television and other audio/visual artifacts...and what a wealth of artifacts and formats and delivery systems we have, and sometimes no longer have.

I hope to have a weekly example or so of my own, and as many citations of examples of the insufficiently appreciated as others wish to share, every Tuesday. I will post links to their blogs (and specifically to their relevant posts) when possible, and will post any contribution that blogless folks wish to make on my blog, if they like...very much in the mold of the ongoing Friday's Forgotten Books, hosted by Patti Abbott, and the monthly (last Wednesday) Forgotten Music, hosted by Scott Parker.

The following folks have a post up today:
Bill Crider: Condemned
Eric Peterson: Boiling Point
Evan Lewis: Metropolis
James Reasoner: SOS Coast Guard
Jerry House: Loose Shoes
Juri Nummelin: The Murder Maze
K.A. Laity: Straight to Hell
Randy Johnson: Cop Hater
Scott Parker: π
Todd Mason: The Limits of Control; Paper Covers Rock; The Exiles

and, honorarily:
Dan Stumpf: The Night of the Eagle and other adaptations of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife
Pearce Duncan: on the directorial career of Orson Welles
...but the more the merrier (and these links will be refined at first opportunity.

Now, the range of audio/visual materials for which we don't have easy access any longer is pretty large, and beyond even the lost films and television and radio, whose original prints or recordings were discarded or allowed to deteriorate, when any recording was made at all. While the Internet Archive is just one (and perhaps the most impressive) of the sites on the web that can help ferret out any number of materials hart to get at in any former otherwise (comparable in its excellence and in its necessary incompleteness to the likes of Project Gutenberg), there's so much still only accessible in orphaned formats (up to and including the 33 RPM LP and 16 RPM talking book vinyl discs)...among the supposed facts that used to boggle my young mind was the number of early recordings in the Library of Congress, and presumably collected elsewhere as well, with, as the Guinness Book put it, "no known matrix." I suspect at least a few engineers are working on those...

For another example of Stuff You Probably Don't See Much Of Any Longer: ViewMaster. Now, there's a thriving collectors market, aided like most such by eBay and its competitors over the years, but the new ViewMaster offers for sale the last time I was around a VM display were very sorry, indeed...which I suspect indicated the worsening fortunes of the retail outlet almost as much as the downgraded state of VM in a video and console-game age, with animated 3D still problematic but available. But the beauty of at least some the nature and science packs (VM typically sold its slide discs in three-packs), and the mild (or not so mild) joy of some of the entertainment packs, at least if one was capable of enjoying that kind of photography, was hard to deny (I did throughly enjoy the clay artistry of some of the Peanuts cartoon adaptations). And, of course, that sort of stereo photography wasn't just useful for the entertainment and instruction of children: my only college roommate was a studio art and pre-med major, and as such brought home discs of autopsy photos...a corpse missing a mandible was among the most disturbing images I'd seen to that time. And in dead, nearly palpable color.




The 1970s and the decade before were probably the ViewMaster's heyday, and that of other slide-based toys (I certainly had others, less impressive than VM), and the widespread availability of William Castle's organization's silent 8mm film highlights reels from horror and adventure films, and from his travelog short subjects. And, also, there was no lack of investment, on the part of several small spoken-word record labels, such as Caedmon, Spoken Arts and Argo, in not only readings by authors of poetry and prose, and actors, but also full-cast audio staging of plays; Caedmon particularly would arrange them on three- and four-LP sets so that one could put them on a stacker, and disc one would have side one, then disc two would drop with side two, and on a three disc set one would flip over the stack after side three on disc three and eventually finish with side six on disc one. Tough on the records, but very easy on the listener with the tall spindle on their turntable. Spoken Arts's full-play recording I remember best was their staging of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, but it'd be hard to recall all the plays I heard through Caedmon Records; they included O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra, and an excellent Ah, Wilderness!; Williams's The Glass Menagerie; my favorite of Miller's plays, Incident at Vichy; Sartre's No Exit; Cocteau's The Infernal Machine; the Peter Weiss/Peter Brook Marat/Sade; and many more, including Shakespeare and Sophocles...only the American Film Theater complete soundtracks, such as of Ionesco's Rhinoceros with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, were likely to disappoint, in part due to the rushed nature of the productions and in part due to the fact that they were soundtracks to filmed plays that might, in many cases, depend even more than the Caedmon-staged productions on their visuals rather than dialog and sound effects. HarperCollins, who now own the Caedmon catalog, have done a remarkably poor job of getting it back out on the market.

And all that (nostalgia) doesn't even take into account all the nationally-broadcast radio drama one could find in the US in the 1970s, I'd guess at least twice as much as in the '60s, when matters had dwindled to the last two CBS series, Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar ending in 1962, Bob and Ray continuing largely as a part of NBC's weekend Monitor umbrella, and some Pacifica Radio productions. While few series were consistently good among the new series from CBS and the new NPR, Pacifica (which shared the Firesign Theater with "underground"/free-form commercial rock stations at the turn of the '70s) and such projects as the ZBS production and syndication unit, there certainly was a ferment, ranging from such long-running series as the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and Earplay (and Christian radio's Unshackled) to a new series of full-length Bob & Ray shows and The National Lampoon Radio Hour, Rod Serling's Zero Hour through The Sears Radio Theater to The Fourth Tower of Inverness...and such British and Canadian imports as The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, (1980's) Nightfall and such kids' fare as The General Mills Adventure Theater and the NPR Star Wars adaptations.

Tilda Swinton and Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control

But most of the contributions to this weekly list are likely to be cinematic and television (and perhaps increasingly web) presentations, and I've got some of those to briefly discuss, too (believe it or not, given all the above). I haven't been exploring too many of the really obscure corners of these arts, recently, but I'd like to draw your attention to at least The Limits of Control (2009), a typically beautifully-shot, extremely deliberate, funny and not altogether vague Jim Jarmusch film, which involves characters involved in a conspiracy that borders on the edge of crime and espionage, and has a weight and thoughtfulness that can easily be taken, by the likes of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers, for excruciating pointless pretense. I'd disagree, of course...I think the point is pretty clearly spelled out in the title, for all the characters and for the larger forces around them. If you want more traditional thrills amidst an attempt to add some weight and humanistic wit to spy drama, you might want to check out the similarly good A Few Days in September (briefly mentioned in yesterday's reprinted list) with Juliette Binoche as a spy-master thrust into trying to keep the young-adult children of one her ex-colleagues alive long enough for him to reunite with them, or the slightly more clownish, but still impressive Fay Grim, the sequel to Henry Fool I half-liked upon first viewing, and liked much better upon the second viewing...again, Parker Posey's Grim is forced into a ridiculously complicated situation while simply attempting to see her spy husband again, and does her damnedest to try to make sure as few as possible of the people around her get killed while she attempts this.

Paper Covers Rock (2008) is a pretty grim film, even in comparison to Limits, featuring Jeannine Kaspar as a woman attempting to pull her life back together, after falling into a trough of suicidal depression and being hospitalized for it; we join her, and see all the interpersonal and other obstacles she has to face, and good and not so good people close to her, sometimes supportive and too often insufficiently-so, and how her behavior can trigger them as well as vice verse. Very well-acted and absorbing, and worth the time.

More alienated than actually downbeat, the characters in The Exiles (1961) are from various Native American nations, mostly first-generation escapees from the reservations, who are mostly not doing so well in lives spent in and around the now-vanished Los Angeles largely-native-ghetto Bunker Hill. Made with almost no money with a mostly amateur cast, and meant as a document of the players' actual lives or at least those of their peers, it has post-filming-recorded sound, and a lack of throughline-plot that would presumably enervate those who find The Limits of Control pointless, as it follows the adventures, such as they are, of relatively young adults through the course of a night in the city. Nonetheless, the utter lack of slickness helps the film, in part in the same way that many better no-budget films have a certain fascination for the viewer, as you can see how the desired effect was almost achieved, or achieved in spite of the handicap; the amateur cast isn't put through the kind of ridiculous paces that one finds in such films as Kids, but instead seem to be doing their best to represent the Way We Live in that Today. This film might even be the least obscure of the three I'm highlighting here, as a "lost" film, from its completion by newly graduated USC Film School student Kent MacKenzie in '61 till a revival, with much attendant publicity, in 2008. And, personally, it was very striking that the women in the film looked a whole lot like my aunts, who are, oddly enough, like my mother in being Italian/Cherokee/Irish, but my mother the most Milanese-looking by far among her gen, and the rest of the family much more strongly Cherokee in features, when not also complexion.


I saw these films in those utterly obscure venues, respectively cable channels Showtime, IFC, and TCM...cable does have its uses, still (quite aside from upgrading the budget and showcase of the likes of Children's Hospital). I look forward to what others have to suggest for us, today and in the weeks to come...and please feel free to join in (and please let me know, in comments or via email, that you've done so! Thanks).

Alternate World Recordings and Analog Records: Spoken-Word and Audio Drama devoted to fantastic fiction

Alternate World Recordings first issued an LP, by actor and professional reader Ugo Toppo, of Robert Howard's work as From the Hells Beneath the Hells in 1975,  which had sold out by the point in 1977  when the ad below was put together, offering the balance of the recordings they would release. Analog Records was a short-lived flier taken by the staff of the magazine to see if there was much of a market that AWR and the more established spoken-word labels (Caedmon, Spoken Arts, et al.) was perhaps not saturating...the dramatized Nightfall (with a brief conversation between Asimov and Analog editor Ben Bova appended) was their only release, though if there had been a second it was apparently set to feature Gordon Dickson's Dorsai stories and at least one or two of the songs he had written to go along with them. AWR's Shelley Levinson, in the '70s married as Shelley Torgeson, went on to co-found the Harlan Ellison Recording Collection among other work; her short film "Violet" won an Oscar in 1982.

Theodore Sturgeon also recorded excerpts from More Than Human for Caedmon, and the Library of America has some on-line here.

From UnEarth: The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries, Winter 1978; courtesy Jesse Willis at SFFaudio.

 Includes "When It Changed", "The Great Happiness Contest", "Gleepsite" & "Man, One Assumes, Is The Proper Study Of Mankind". 

Featuring the painting Ed Emshwiller did for the Sturgeon issue of F&SF

As reissued by the HERC (note logo at bottom right)

Courtesy Evan Lewis, who has the sound files up at his blog.

Further images of Nightfall:

Further images of Frankenstein Unbound:

Further images of Blood!

Prestige Lively Arts, a mostly spoken-word sub-label of the jazz, blues and folk recording company...: Saturday Music and Spoken Word Club on Sunday

Prestige Records was first and foremost a jazz label, one of the many interesting small jazz labels of the 1950s, but one which also branched out over the course of that decade and the next, to include considerable blues, folk and what would now be classed as world music...and a small line of what eventually became a spoken-word sub-label, though the first release, in 1961, was an attempt at a pop album, one by Billy Dee Williams...Prestige was bought up by Fantasy Records as one of its early major purchases in the 1970s, and now as a result belongs to Fantasy's inheritor, Concord Jazz. (The links below are to online archives of the albums' content, or at least samples.) List below courtesy of the Prestige Records Discography Project.

I'm just old enough to remember her best from the sitcom Maude...

Prestige Lively Arts 30000 series (12 inch LP)

LA 30001   Billy Dee Williams: Let's Misbehave

1. A Taste of Honey
2. Let's Misbehave
3. Don't Cry
4. Life's a Holliday
5. I Like It Here
6. Warm Tonight
7. Nothin' for Nothin'
8. I Wonder What Became of Me
9. House of Flowers
10. Red Sun Blues

LA 30002   A Taste Of Hermione Baddeley

Hermione Baddeley (reading) 1961

	I Changed My Sex A Week Ago Today
	Winter In Torquay
	Poor Little Cabaret Star
	Missing The Bus
	Je Suis
	Lonely Little Lotus
	Old Girls
	You
	Reprieve

LA 30003   Roddy McDowall Reads The Horror Stories Of H.P. Lovecraft

"The Outsider"
"The Hound"

Bradbury's own 22 copies of the Meredith reading LP.

LA 30004   Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury

Marionettes, inc 
There will come soft rains 

LA 30005   Larry Storch Reads Philip Roth's Epstein

from Goodbye, Columbus

LA 30006   James Mason Reads The Imp Of The Perverse And Other Stories By Edgar Allen [sic] Poe

The sleeve proofreading at Prestige was perhaps not all it should've been...

LA 30007   James Mason Reads Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener

LA 30008   Morris Carnovsky Reads Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground

LA 30009   Norman Mailer Reads Norman Mailer

Short Story Wednesday: HAUNTINGS edited by Henry Mazzeo (illustrated by Edward Gorey)

This book can be read here, at the Internet Archive (sadly denuded of its jacket).

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:

Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
"The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth
"In the Vault" by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Man Who Collected Poe" by Robert Bloch
"Where Angels Fear" by Manly Wade Wellman
"Lot No. 249" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Haunted Dolls’ House" by M. R. James
"The Open Door" by Mrs. Oliphant
"Thus I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier
"Levitation" by Joseph Payne Brennan
"The Ghostly Rental" by Henry James
"The Face" by E. F. Benson
"The Whistling Room" by William Hope Hodgson
"The Grey Ones" by J. B. Priestley
"The Stolen Body" by H. G. Wells
"The Red Lodge" by H. Russell Wakefield
"The Visiting Star" by Robert Aickman
"Midnight Express" by Alfred Noyes

This might be one of  the most important books to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection Delight, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his Mapp & Lucia comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone. This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I shall have to seek out those reviews [and have, below]...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

And looking at the book at the Internet Archive let me see, for the first time in years (decades?) that Mazzeo thanks prolific (and often horror-fiction) anthologist Seon Manley (usually in tandem with her sister, GoGo Lewis) for assistance on this, again possibly only book. He asked the right editor, clearly.

Further appreciations: 

Gahan Wilson in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1969 (Joanna Russ also has reviews in this issue, just before Wilson's occasional column about horror fiction and related matter, "The Dark Corner").

Fritz Leiber in Fantastic, September 1973 (page 110), published around the time I found the book...

And please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's short stories...

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: HAUNTINGS: STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL, edited by Henry Mazzeo (Doubleday 1968)

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:
Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
The Lonesome Place by August Derleth
In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft
The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch
Where Angels Fear by Manly Wade Wellman
Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Haunted Dolls’ House by M. R. James
The Open Door by Mrs. Oliphant
Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier
Levitation by Joseph Payne Brennan
The Ghostly Rental by Henry James
The Face by E. F. Benson
The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson
The Grey Ones by J. B. Priestley
The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells
The Red Lodge by H. Russell Wakefield
The Visiting Star by Robert Aickman
Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

This might be the most important book to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection DELIGHT, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone. This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I shall have to seek out those reviews...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for this week's other "forgotten" books.

FFB: Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Theodore Sturgeon read their work for old media and dead labels...

featured recordings:
Harlan! Harlan Ellison Reads Harlan Ellison (Alternate Worlds, 1976)
Lolita and Poems Read by Vladimir Nabokov (Spoken Arts, 1965)
Theodore Sturgeon Reads from His More Than Human: The Fabulous Idiot (Caedmon, 1980)
82.5 Minutes of Algis Budrys Reading from His Own Work (Unifont, 1995)

There are four albums under consideration here today, four of the more memorable of the records of writers reading their own work I've heard...and it's rather surprising to me, looking back, how infrequently I've come across recordings by women reading from their own work, even when (as with Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ's recordings for Alternate Worlds Records, or C. L. Moore's for Caedmon) I was acutely interested in hearing them...I'll start looking around for them at this late date. Such recordings as Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy" would pop up on poetry anthologies from Caedmon in the libraries of my youth, but I was usually lucky to find the items below in circulating collections or on sale (another regret is in not finding Fritz Leiber or Robert Bloch's recordings back when)...we can hope that that speaks less of unconscious sexism on the part of librarians than of the pilfering habits of unsavory patrons. Most of the better audiobooks I've picked up in my majority have been actors' recordings, when not dramatizations, of varying degrees of quality...including a fine anthology of short mystery fiction on cassette, with particularly good readings by actors of Liza Cody and William Campbell Gault stories, that I've managed to misplace some years back (and I might be conflating two different anthologies on cassette, too). But for some work literally in the literary artists' voices:



Alternate World Recordings was a project of the Torgesons, Roy Torgeson also being active in the 1980s as an editor for Zebra Books, and their label briefly flourished in the latter '70s and early '80s as one of the best for recording fantasy and sf writers particularly...Harlan!, featuring Harlan Ellison reading his early "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Tictockman" and the then fairly recent "Shatterday" (published almost simultaneously in the US in men's/skin magazine Gallery for September 1975, and in the UK in Science Fiction Monthly v2 #8, dated August 1975), was one of their most popular offers. I believe it was the first recording issued with Ellison, an enthusiastic and skilled dramatic reader, in this role, and he later recorded "Repent" again, I think less well, for HarperAudio (and with his subscription club, the Harlan Ellison Recording Collection, probably eventually rerecorded the other as well). "Repent," an absurdist dystopian/rebellion short story, was the first story to get Ellison much positive critical attention in the sf field upon publication in Galaxy magazine in 1965, despite Dorothy Parker positively reviewing some of his crime-fiction and related writing a few years earlier, and having established his professional bona fides over the previous decade in several fields. "Shatterday" was one of his most warmly-received horror stories of the past several years, involving a fellow who has apparently developed his own Secret Sharer sort of doppelganger, and that Other is living his life rather more adeptly than he himself is. Ellison reads both stories with brio, stumbling just once in each of the (single-take?) sessions, and it's a pity that (apparently) copyright concerns (as far as I know, all Alternate Worlds records fell in a black hole after the death of Roy Torgeson) have helped keep these out of the public ear for decades.



Vladimir Nabokov reads a selection from Lolita on side one, and on side two:
The Ballad of Longwood Glen
Rain
Lines Written In Oregon
On Translating "Eugene Onegin"
An Evening of Russian Poetry
The Swift
The Discovery

Nabokov's poetry reading can lean into singsong at times, but the performances here are generally good, and better when it comes to the passage from Lolita, the physical confrontation between Humbert and Quilty. The cadences and wryness of Nabokov's delivery are everything one might want, and I think I detect a bit of the Nabokov in the vocal approach Jeremy Irons took in his assaying the role for film. Here is a radio episode that offers much of the content of this album, including the Lolita chapter. While this is a complete upload of the album, with the chapter and poems broken out by track.



When people speak of the parts of Theodore Sturgeon's most widely-hailed novel, the Gestalt-group-mind tale More Than Human, they usually focus on the middle section, published by itself as "Baby is Three" (a punning title in context), but for his Caedmon recording Sturgeon chose, at least to begin with, to read the opening section, "The Fabulous Idiot," and he does so with a subtlety and grace that allows the elegance, empathy and insight of the prose to hit home, as an apparently mentally disabled, homeless youth finds himself drawn to the syzygy (so important as a metaphor in Sturgeon's fiction at that time) that begins to take place by the end of the passages read. I wish we had more recordings of Sturgeon reading his short fiction, but I can't imagine too many being disappointed by this album, except in that (as far as I know) he never went on to record the rest of More Than Human.

Algis Budrys, actually Algirdas Budrys and like Nabokov a Slav for whom English was not his first language, was also like Nabokov in his precise and graceful use of the not quite mother tongue, and for his incisive and often sardonic view of human events. With his recording engineer son, he decided to release a collection of his short fiction on cassette in 1995 as the only audio release from his personal imprint Unifont, which was one of his tabletop businesses in the '80s and '90s, most visibly to the public publishing some bicycle-repair manuals and his magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction from its second issue, the first having come from the collapsing Pulphouse. (The April, 1994 issue had two vignettes, Harlan Ellison's "Attack at Dawn" and my first professionally-published fiction, "Bedtime".) One of the late stories Budrys wrote for himself, under one of his old pseudonyms he revived for that purpose in Tomorrow, is included here, the "William Scarff" item:

“The Distant Sound Of Engines” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959)
“Explosions!” (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, April 1993, as by William Scarff)
“The Price” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1960)
“Never Meet Again” (Infinity Science Fiction, March 1958)

All of these are worth hearing, even as they were worth reading, and at least the earlier three were among his most important work (the new story doesn't shame them), with "Engines" being his response to and different take on the matter of, I've always suspected, "Casey Agonistes" by Richard McKenna; "The Price" is a bitter little armageddon fable, and "Never Meet Again" simply one of the more devastating stories of Nazi Germany victorious in WW2, a possibility that had a particular resonance to a man who was perhaps the last official citizen, in the US at least, of pre-WW2 Lithuania and who witnessed, as he mentions in various memoirs, the beserk reaction of the German neighbors of his diplo-kid childhood to a drive-by by Hitler at his early height of popularity, an incident he describes as demonstrating to him that he was surrounded by werewolves. Good, clean readings, not much frippery, and I should look around the web to see if this is archived...cassette not being the medium of choice for anyone, except for its ease of duplication and home-recording back when, for many obvious reasons...

For more and mostly more traditional Friday Books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Meanwhile, the September 1965 issue of Billboard that announces the Nabokov album (and gives it four stars out of four) has Top 100 album and singles charts which are pretty staggering in their diversity and, with some exceptions, quality...particularly when compared to such lists for most of rest of the years since.