Just Press Play

Mary Burkey on Audio Literacy

I've been bugging my friend Mary Burkey about whether anyone recorded her wonderful remarks on audio literacy during a panel discussion on "Multiple Literacies" at this summer's ALA annual meeting in Chicago. Unfortunately, no recording was made. (Mary's trusty digital recorder, which she often carries with her, was on loan to someone else who was capturing another session.)

From memory then, here are some of the points I recall her making from her perspective as an educator and a fan of audiobooks:

* Listening is not cheating -- it's an alternate way to experience a literary work.

* Audiobook listening expands listening skills. For most of human history, people lived in a "culture of orality". Storytelling, oral communication, and listening are central to our makeup as human beings. But not everyone is equally good at listening -- in fact, for some students it's really difficult. Like all skills, it requires practice.

* Audiobook listening increases language fluency for both struggling and proficient readers. The listener hears language as it is actually spoken, and, in the process, is exposed to correct pronunciation, new vocabulary, and new forms of speech. When you listen, you hear punctuation and enunciation being modeled. A great way to learn about the fluidity of written language is to listen to it.

* Audiobook listening can raise reading comprehension. Students can usually comprehend about 2 years beyond their reading level. English-language learners often hear and comprehend better than they can speak. By allowing struggling readers an alternate path into a book, an audiobook can help them take in its meaning. Listening gives struggling readers or readers of challenging material a helping hand, "carrying them across" the spots where they might stumble with the printed page (think of the many German phrases in The Book Thief).

* Gifted readers often devour books, but they don't necessarily remember the details. Some gifted kids like to listen to audio as a way to make themselves slow down and take in the details of what they gulped in print. ("Gulpers" don't necessarily learn to pronounce the words they read.)

* When we share literature with kids, what do we do?  We read to them. Often the works that are read to students are filtered through the voices of their predominantly female teachers. One way to get boys more engaged with the listening/reading experience is to give them characters that sound the way they were written to be -- voiced by professional narrators and even full casts.

* Listening can help build attention spans -- audiobooks teach "long-form listening in a snippet world."

Mary tells me that she made some of these same points during her remarks at yet another session in which she participated in Chicago, this one on "Evaluating Audiobooks for Children and Teens". She did record the audio for that session, and it can be found, along with the session PowerPoint, on her Audiobooker blog at:

     http://audiobooker.booklistonline.com/2009/07/20/evaluating-audiobooks-on-audio/

Blood-Sucking Creatures of the Night: Why We Love ThemFrom Bram Stoker to Charlaine Harris

One of the members of the Playaway content team recently suggested we overhaul our genre classification scheme. Instead of the 2 or 3 dozen subject headings we currently employ, why not simplify the whole system down to just two basic categories: VAMPIRE and NON-VAMPIRE?

He was kidding of course (I think), but, as with most sardonic workplace remarks, there was perhaps a kernel of truth. With Halloween just around the corner, what better time to ask, "Why are stories about vampires so darned appealing anyway?"

A quick scan of popular culture makes it pretty clear that, as a culture, we are ga-ga about the blood-sucking undead:

WorldCat returns over 5,000 fiction titles with keyword "vampire" (including of course not only adult titles but also items such as Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe.)

On Amazon, 6,700 book titles have been user-tagged "vampire".

Such searches turn up titles like the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead and the Morganville Vampires series from Rachel Caine.  For teens, there's Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga plus what seem like a zillion copycat works. And then there's the equally huge phenom of Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books about a good-hearted telepathic waitress with some seriously odd friends and relatives.  It's now a wildly popular series on HBO, starring (OMG!) Anna Paquin.

Even the Jane Austen crowd can join in. When you're done listening on Playaway to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (the former available now and the latter coming soon, both are masterfully narrated by Katherine Kellgren), you can switch back to print and check out Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange and Vampire Darcy's Desire: A Pride and Prejudice Adaptation by Regina Jeffers (both out in paperback this year).

Remember, this all started with ONE book by ONE writer: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1847-1912).

At ALA annual meeting in Chicago this past July, Playaway, Recorded Books, and OCLC jointly hosted a very fun evening with author Charlaine Harris along with Johanna Parker, narrator of eight Recorded Books audio editions of Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books. We had over 100 librarians there, many of them huge fans themselves and all of them interested in the topic. 

Harris, herself seemed to have a wonderful time.  Of Playaway, she says on her blog, "This was all new technology to me, and I enjoyed [meeting] some of the men [and women] who’d made it possible; the people who designed the technology, and the staff of Playaway, who put it all together."  (You can see the rest of her comments here.)

“First of all, 

it's always been about sex... ”

After the evening's festivities, I got the chance to speak in depth with several librarian friends about the "vampire thing". Here's some of what I learned:

First of all, it's always been about sex, though not always in the same ways. In 1897, when Stoker published Dracula, the topic of sex couldn't be presented directly, but that doesn't mean people weren't interested. The vampire represents otherwise undiscussable social taboos. Count Dracula stalks virgins and is dangerously seductive, as are the members of his harem. It's a cautionary tale about the dangers of sex -- give in to the seduction and you will be ruined, "undead," beyond rescue.

In contemporary VampLit, those sexy vampires (it's hard to find an ugly one, one friend pointed out to me) are acting out a somewhat different set of issues. They seem to appeal to readers for several reasons:

They are otherworldy, imbued with fantastic, paranormal qualities that we ordinary folks don't have but sometimes wish we did: vamps don't age, they have extraordinary physical and psychic powers -- some turn into bats, some are telepathic. Female readers often seem attracted to stories about men who can read women's minds.  After all, what is sexier than someone who knows what you want without your having to say it outloud? It's scary, yes, but also kind of appealing. Some of these hunkie vamps really  understand women.

Yes, they're otherworldly, but not too much -- they still are recognizably human, so they make for good love interests. (A werewolf might be sensitive, but would you really want to take him or her to bed? Think of the shedding, the scratched furniture, the territorial marking... Zombies can be sympathetic, but they are in too advanced a state of decomposition to be physically attractive.)

And the vampire fills another bill: the wounded hero. The poor things are often emotionally scarred, and why shouldn't they be? They can't ever die, and so they know that they can't ever love completely. They are often sensitive, intuitive, emotionally open. But they maintain a protective shell that must be broken down so they can be rescued from their torment. Get it?

Plus they have their fun side: if you're an immortal vamp you can throw away your wrinkle cream, sleep all day, and party all night. It's easy to make friends...

At Playaway, we don't actually have a dedicated "Vampire" genre (yet), but at last count, we had over three dozen vampirish titles. Here's a downloadable list.

In addition, there are currently 13 Charlaine Harris titles available on Playaway from Recorded Books. A downloadable list is here.

And, by the way, if you've never read the original Dracula, it's really a neat book -- stylistically as well as thematically. The entire work is presented as a carefully collected "case book," telling the story from multiple perspectives such as diary entries, correspondence, and news accounts. This was a pretty different kind of story telling back in 1897.

We currently offer a great version from Blackstone on Playaway, narrated by Robert Whitfield, and coming soon, we'll have a new version from Tantor, narrated by the superb John Lee.

OK, now I've got to go get some garlic.