I love reading stories aloud, and our kids are a bit beyond that now (just a bit, all being thoroughly adult), so I enjoy Librivox as a hobby. As well as the William book Barbara and I are (slowly) reading together: More William by Richmal Crompton I have started a version of the Just So Stories. LV already has more than one, but since I had made my readings of the book available online before LV started I felt it was not unfair to do a LV version now.If you'd like to see what it sounds like the first story: How the Whale Got His Throat is available in draft form (please report any problems or errors).
Appeal for help: there is a thirteenth Just So Story, added to the US edition in 1903 (which was absent from the 1902 UK edition, and most subsequent editions) called "The Tabu Tale" if anyone can source a copy (published before 1926) that I can use I coulld read all thirteen. (There is also a fourteenth but it is in copyright and does not have the wordplays that make the "real" ones fun.
PS: The heading is a quote, it is how the 'Stute fish describes humans, I think the fish was spot on, we are (usuallly) nice, but (often) nubbly!
Labels: audio, children, librivox, literature, open.source
¶ 8:36 AM
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Along with all the marking and paper preparation getting ready for leaving for SBL I have finished my latest Livrivox project. An early PG Wodehouse novel, Uneasy Money, pure escapism!Uneasy Money is a romantic comedy by P.G. Wodehouse, published during the First World War, it offers light escapism. More romantic but only a little less humorous that his mature works, it tells of the vicissitudes of poor Lord Dawlish, who inherits five million dollars, but becomes a serially disappointed groom.
When the story opens Bill (Lord Dawlish, a thoroughly pleasant man) is engaged to a demanding actress. His first thought when hearing of his massive legacy from a stranger whose tendency to slice he once cured on a West Country golf course is of the disappointed relatives. His trip to the USA attempting to give back the windfall results in complication after complication, including firearms and burglaries as well as the usual human misunderstandings that accompany any human life.
Uneasy Money was first published as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in the USA from December 1915, and in the UK in Strand Magazine starting December 1916. It first appeared in book form on March 17, 1916 by D. Appleton & Co., New York, and later in the UK (on October 4, 1917) by Methuen & Co., London.
A silent, black-and-white film version was made in 1918.
Labels: audio, entertainment, literature
¶ 1:46 PM
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Modernity worships factuality. It reduces life to facts. Mystery and wonder are relegated to "entertainment". Moderns know "the price of everything and the value of nothing" (as Oscar Wilde2 said).
No wonder, then if the Bible is important it must be full of facts, or if it must be dethroned then it must be full of errors! This is the student's approach to the Bible, examine, test and discuss it's facticity. How different the reader! Julia quotes James Joyce3:
[in reading novels,] we walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.Readers of the Bible "walk through themselves" and in doing so not only meet themselves, but also meet God. What we need is more readers and less students of the Bible. For all students meet is information. But there's the paradox, our profession produces Bible students
Dare we, dare I, adapt the way we teach so that we may be less good at developing biblical scholars, but better at producing Bible readers?
This post is an expansion of a comment I left on Julia's blog.
1. In "Le texte biblique et le contexte africain" Revue Zaïroise Théologie Protestante II, 1988, 11-17, I argued that "conservative and "liberal" approaches to the Bible "la trahissent au nom de l'histoire" [betray the Bible in the name of history].
2. Wilde, Oscar, and Joseph Bristow. The picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford University Press, 2006, 42. (Bristow notes that Wilde adapted this pithy saying in Lady Windemere's Fan two years later, so he was perhaps as fond of it as later generations have been ;)
3. James Joyce, Ulysses. The Modern Library Edition. New York: Random House, 1934, p. 210
Labels: bible, bible.reading, biblical.studies, literature
¶ 7:02 AM
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As I get ready to start a new semester of teaching Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, I'm thinking about how the learning can help people be better readers rather than "students" in the way you describe. How can the focus shift from skills and competencies to helping folks learn things that aid in appreciation and recognition?
By 
Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 12:38 AM
I posted my reply to this post and some of the comments on Jim West's blog in a new post: Commenting on the Comments. http://juliamobrien.net
By Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 3:39 AM
Julia, I think skills and competencies are important, it is just that we focus on the wrong set. But (I think) worse than the "learning outcomes" are the "content" I include in class time and the assessments I use. Largely inherited from the past these elements of the course direct too much attention to history and/or ideology and too little to the literary working of the texts.
I have recently taught in two loci that in different ways put pressure on me to teach like that:
- in a denominational college (of a conservative Protestant family of churches) pressure from students interested in "defending" the Bible
- in a "secular" university pressure from colleagues to avoid anything that smacks too much of a religious approach
between the two reading oneself in reading the text seems to get left as casualty by the wayside.
By 
Tim, at
September 2, 2009 6:00 AM
Tim, I share your hunch that we spend too much time on "content" in the classroom. A lot of stuff I've been reading lately suggests that content is actually delivered better on-line than in person. What face-face interaction is best for is discussion and interaction. But, at the same time, I find that fewer and fewer students know the basic content of biblical stories and often aren't able to get that by their own reading of this often difficult text.
By Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 12:52 PM
Oh, yes, I agree, content is easy to deliver, on the web, in a textbook... that's why increasingly I relegate "content" to outside the classroom and test it's acquisition using simple online computer-marked quizzes. That way we can try to develop higher order skills and understanding in slass time :)
By Tim, at
September 6, 2009 7:03 AM
