Poe by Lee

So I recently found a youtuber that's posting his old audio readings of Edgar Allen Poe by Christopher Lee. It's pretty great. :D.

For some reason, I've always found Poe very uninteresting to read. I've made a couple of attempts but just never got into any of it, outside of the Raven because I like the sound so much. I was originally looking for an audio rendition of "The Black Cat" and came across a recording with that, plus other stories. It was the ending of "Fall of the House of Usher" that grabbed my attention, enough so that I went back and listened to it three times over. I'll need to listen again to catch the earlier parts of the story as I was writing at the time and spaced a couple of times but I wouldn't complain about hearing the ending again.

The stories in the recording were:

The Fall of the House of Usher
The Black Cat
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Cask of Amontillado

Audiobook Archaeology is the channel. I'll put a up a link if that's alright. I've encountered Lee's heavy metal monologues and films but not this yet.

I've just listened to 'The Cask of Amontillado' (it was the shortest of the four so, just to sample). An excellent reading. And Lee was astonishingly good at Fortunato's chesty cough! I did wonder if he actually recorded the cough separately, when he had a touch of flu or something.

The trouble is that I now measure any reading I hear (horror and Gothic, I mean) by James Mason's 'My Last Duchess'. I searched the channel, but no Mason. He would have been truly great reading Poe.

>1 WeeTurtle: - For some reason, I've always found Poe very uninteresting to read.

Work at it. He will repay you. He is the master, I think.

>3 alaudacorax:

Second thoughts, if you try to read a complete Poe I have to admit there's some obscure and boring stuff. With his 'proper' horror stories, though, he's definitely the master.

>3 alaudacorax: Hear , Hear!

>5 alaudacorax: I think I was trying to read one like that, but even reading over a section of Usher that I was quoting for something, it was draining to read, though it may have had something to do with the sentence structure. In fact, I'll say definitely as I remember thinking to myself "how did the audio make this part sound so clean and tidy?"

Reading Castle of Otranto was an exercise as well, mostly with the extended sentences, and I resorted to listening to that one after a while.

>7 WeeTurtle:

I think what you are talking about here is getting your (mental) ear tuned in to the language of another age. Apologies if I've got that wrong.

I can remember finding the literature of two centuries ago difficult to read. Understanding was easy enough—if only I could keep my concentration nailed to the page! I don't think there is an easy answer; it's just down to perserverance. You have to decide to trust the critics and academics who say such and such is a great work or author and settle down to plough through—and the trouble with that is (just my opinion, of course) they sometimes get it wrong: sometimes it stops being hard ploughing and becomes beautiful, and sometimes it doesn't.
As I said, no easy answers, but you can miss out on some great stuff by not struggling.

That prompts me to a bit of a tangent. If you work through the inept prose of some modern literature academics you probably develop the patience and perseverance to tackle anything ...

>8 alaudacorax: Oh I'm sure it's exactly that. It's not that I'm averse to working through it, it's that it's become frustratingly difficult sometimes. It's no small irritation of mine that I can't get the grasp on language like I used to, but a life time of chronic illness and medical train wrecks and my mental dexterity is simply not what it used to be. I can get the sentence down, and know what it's saying, but in the process I lose a lot of the mood and flavour.

Didn't mean to post just then. Ticked something I shouldn't. Damned scam callers.

>9 WeeTurtle:

My sympathies. You make me a bit ashamed. At seventy, of course, things between the ears at not quite what they used to be, but I should more appreciate how lucky I am to still be fit and healthy and how I'm doing myself no favours at all by not making a proper effort to sort out my sleep patterns and impose a bit more routine and discipline into my life (one of the worst mistakes I ever made was on the day I retired when I resolved to never let the clock rule my life again).

>11 alaudacorax: There are good days and bad days. I know the comment was trying to be helpful and that would be (and was) my advice to readers of Shakespeare back in high school and early uni. I slogged my way through Macbeth, going from line to footnote and back to line until I could hear and understand what was actually being said. Took ages but once I did that, later years were so much easier!

I'm still in the process of figuring out what's psychological and what's a mechanical issue. I'm not reading near what I used to, so I expect there is some practice that's lacking. Not sure it will help with Poe much. Even years ago, when I tried reading 'The Tell-Tale Heart' it felt dreadfully boring. He might just not be to my tastes. ;)

On retirement, my Grandfather "retired" about 6 times I think. He found life without something particular to do wasn't that great for him. Too much laying about!