Studying History in the Car

Recently I've been thoroughly absorbed by some freebie history podcasts I downloaded from the Internet. Not only do they make car journeys pass more quickly, but sometimes I'm fretting to get back on my way, to find out what happened next!

I'm really only a dabbler in this area, but am very impressed by what is available and by the potential of the medium.

Some years ago I became very enthusiastic about The Napoleon Podcast, a series produced by an Australian, Cameron Reilly, which generated a lengthy series of shows featuring Reilly as host and continuity man (and frequent provocateur), and J David Markham - American author of numerous works on Napoleon, of which Napoleon for Dummies must be one of his biggest sellers. The series was ambitious, in an amiably homespun sort of way, and when the personalities of the two presenters (and their unrelenting devotion to the Emperor) began to grate on the nerves it was rescued by a number of excellent guest speakers. That series is still worth a listen, I think - especially the sections on the Russian army and its campaigns.

Apart from the occasional episode of BBC Radio's In Our Time show, I haven't been paying a lot of attention subsequently; I've checked out a number of audiobooks, but these things are very much dependant on how well they are read, which - in turn - is very much a matter of personal taste. I was delighted that someone had taken on the task of recording Oman's Peninsular War epic series on mp3, for example, but my excitement ended abruptly when I heard the results. I was also keen to get the very good audiobook version of CV Wedgwood's book on the Thirty Years War, but it seems this is tricky if you don't want an Audible account. At the time, I thought that Audible seemed like an updated version of the old monthly book-clubs scam, but I am slowly starting to consider this more seriously. I may be a potential subscriber. [Having typed this here, I suspect I will now see adverts for little else on my email page, my eBay screens, Facebook, in my shaving mirror, etc...]

The podcasts which have been keeping me entertained recently are both American:

Dan Carlin

World War 1 - excellently done, but very heavy going

(1) Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon series - which comprises six enormously long shows, available from Carlin's Hardcore History website. Carlin, I think, is a bit like Marmite - I have really become quite a big fan, but a lot of people do not appreciate his style, nor his political views. The series in question is available free from his site, and I downloaded these shows as a taster, before exploring some of the items which require a (small) investment. Carlin's viewpoint in this particular miniseries is to examine WW1 as it affected the participants. He does it well, and impartially, though the whole thing is presented with attention to the meat-grinder aspects of the experience which gets close to obsession at times. No matter - the point is well made, if maybe a few times too many. Carlin appears to have a view with which I can empathise - namely, that there are no absolute winners in war; as a rule, wars are started for political or economic reasons by national leaders or rulers, but the cost in suffering and ruin is borne by the common people, mobilised and conscripted in support of some national patriotic jamboree. Anyway, it's sobering stuff, but I learned a great deal, and he is a stunning presenter.

Mike Duncan

Well worth a browse

(2) Mike Duncan's Revolutions Podcast, which is all available free of charge, though you are sort of expected to make a donation if you appreciate the shows. This is a weekly series - I downloaded the ECW set, and thought they were very good. They give an excellent overall view of a complex subject, and they do it well, though they focus on the political rather than the military detail. I was a little disappointed that Duncan chose to spend very little time on the many sieges which were central to the wars, though he probably decided they were difficult things to present in an interesting way. The shows are well written, and well presented, though for my taste the insistence on introducing a matey joviality at times does not work well. Maybe this is compulsory for the Informal Internet, but, no matter how charismatic the presenter, inclusion of phrases like "awesome" and "kicking the crap out of the King's army" in a narration, even of popular history, adds little for me. Overall, though, I liked the slick way the shows were written and edited. I'm going to have a look at the wealth of other material on offer on the site. Mr Duncan is to be complimented on his efforts.

For zero cost, these podcasts offer a lot of entertainment and, in the series I have been following, a great deal of insight. I have enjoyed my motor trips much more of late, no doubt. Recommended - and I shall look further to see what else is out there.

ECW - in which I almost discuss audiobooks

I like to listen to stuff when I’m driving – music (a lot), radio (a good bit, though I have to switch off current affairs phone-ins because they bring on road rage) and increasingly I have a liking for audio books, which is a fairly new area for me.

My new car will play mp3 files, from CDs or flash drive cards of any size you like. This is such a boon and such a novelty that I’m still experimenting with the possibilities. A few months ago I started downloading promising looking audiobook titles from LibriVox and elsewhere – sadly, I have found this to be mostly very disappointing.

The idea that you can get a free download of someone reading a worthwhile book is exciting – the reality is that the actual reading is done by someone who considers that he has a good speaking voice, often without very much apparent justification. It’s easy to find fault – if I’m getting this much entertainment for nothing, you would think, I should just shut up and make the best of it.

Doesn’t work for me. As a native of Liverpool, who has lived most of his life in Scotland, I am probably not well placed to criticize anyone else’s accent, but I am very familiar with the problems of making myself understood by a (potentially hostile) stranger. A number of these books are read by someone whose accent I find distracting, and it is surprisingly common to find mispronounced words; there was one chap whose speech is punctuated by a strange clicking sound, which I believe may be his dentures, and it is very common indeed for the reader to demonstrate that he has little or no understanding of what he is saying – which actually makes it hard to follow. The funniest audiobook I have is a brave effort by a husband and wife team who have done a huge job reading one of the better-known 19^th Century works on military strategy; quite a lot of this book makes reference to French and German place names and people. The couple, between them, do not have the beginnings of a clue on pronunciation, but compensate enthusiastically by reading a phonetic English version in a strangulated, “foreign” voice – shades of Moriarty from the Goon Show – there is a short but distinct pause as they take a run-up at each fresh challenge.

Reading aloud a text – especially someone else’s text – so that it is easy to listen to and understand is a tricky business, and certainly something that I would not attempt – at least not where anyone could hear me. For a start, a script which is written specifically to be read out should be written with that in mind – sentences should be reasonably short and clearly structured, and great swathes of attached clauses, parentheses and afterthoughts should be avoided. “Fine writing” of the type promoted at your local night school Creative Writing classes – never use one adjective if you can use two – is tricky to read aloud. Spoken presentation of a formal, written piece of prose requires a very great (and rare) skill – that is why Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and a few others did such a lot of it. They were good.

Before I went to visit Chester I downloaded an excellent podcast about the Siege of Chester, presented by Melvyn Bragg in his BBC radio series on “Voices of the Powerless” (you can buy it here if you are interested).

I put it on a CD, for my in-car homework prior to the Chester trip, and took the opportunity to fill up the rest of the disc with the mp3 version of an audio CD about the ECW I bought about a year ago. I hadn’t listened to this before – never got around to it – but it’s surprising what you can get through on a solo car journey.

Hmmm. I’m not going to spend a lot of time analysing it, but I did buy the thing so I guess I’m entitled to a view. It is, again, an enthusiastic, rather amateurish production – well recorded, with some nice sound effects and some pleasing period music from Packington’s Pound and others, but heavy going. The producer was also the writer and the narrator. He pulled out all the stops on the serious writing effort, but left himself with an almost impossible reading job as a result. The format is a series of earnest dialogues – mostly with Oliver Cromwell – written in a carefully hand-polished style and delivered in a clear Luton accent – I found that words like “troof” and even “nuffink” did little for my listening experience. Cromwell is asked a load of serious questions, and replies appropriately. It is not a lot of fun, though the sleeve notes and credits suggest that a fair amount of fun was had by those recording it. Sir Laurence would have made a better job of it.

You what, luv?

In a roundabout way, this leads me back to what might have been a central theme for this post, if I had thought of it earlier – what did spoken English sound like during the Civil War? If we had met Lord Goring and his mates, could we chat with them? What about William Brereton? Or Lettuce Gamul? Would the Voices of the aforementioned Powerless have meant anything to us? I haven’t been reading ECW material for long, and when I first started I had major problems with the spelling and wording of 17^th Century texts. Somehow, I seem to have gone some way toward getting the hang of this, since I now find the contemporary quotes and correspondence very entertaining, and also intriguing. I realize that people expressed themselves in a different manner in those days, and the rules of grammar were not what we might expect today. In the absence of standardised spelling, what we see must be each writer’s attempt to record what he heard people say – names of places and people show a surprising variety of spellings, and there must be a lot of clues in there about how people spoke – what did English sound like in those days, officially and locally?

All I know about the voices of the day is that Richard Harris stares at the horizon and shouts throughout the movie Cromwell – there must be more to it than that. I did manage to dig up a lengthy, learned text on the subject of the changes in English dialects since Tudor times, but that isn’t a lot of fun either. Unless everyone promises to behave nicely, I may record myself reading it aloud – preferably when I’m drunk – and release it on LibriVox. It will be a surefire cure for insomnia.

Hooptedoodle #3 - The Napoleon Podcast

Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with TPN's Napoleon Podcast, and if you have heard it, or follow it, then you will have your own views on it.

For those who have not heard it, I must explain that it is an extended series of podcasts presented by (and produced by) an Australian, Cameron Reilly, and co-hosted by the American Napoleonic historian, J David Markham, author of Napoleon for Dummies. They have been doing these shows for some 3 or 4 years now, and the latest episode I am aware of is #57 in the series.

You can download all the shows, free, from their website - here. Shows last anything up to an hour and a half, so I hope your broadband download speed is rather better than mine..

I came across the TPN shows by accident, and, initially, I regret to say, was not impressed. I hasten to add that I have dramatically changed my opinion, but I'll get to that.

These podcasts are not the same as radio broadcasts - this is probably obvious to anyone else, but I had to get the hang of it. There is much more of a homespun quality, presentation style tends to be conversational, and you have to listen to them in an appropriate frame of mind. Of course, I ran the first show sitting in front of the computer as if I were watching BBC2, thinking "Right - impress me, then".

Wrong attitude. I was quickly turned off by the informal structure, by Reilly's grating inability to pronounce the name of any person or place which is not English, and by Markham's long-winded and rather rambling avuncularity. The pronunciation thing is of passing interest, by the way, since it reflects on me rather than anything else. I confess I come from a long line of petty intellectual snobs, and we have always rejoiced in the things which we knew better than others, glossing quickly (of course) over the much larger number of things about which we knew nothing at all. With more appropriate exposure to the podcasts, I have seen the error of my ways, and have very much warmed to the whole idea - I am suitably ashamed of my early prejudice and have become a big fan.

Reilly, in truth, is well informed on the subject, organises and threads together the podcasts skilfully (they are recorded live via a Skype link, with Reilly in Australia and his collaborator in the USA), while Markham is a treasure - an expert who is knowledgeable but also an extremely amusing speaker. The trick is to understand that a podcast is not a formal lecture, it is your friend, and should be regarded as such. I spend a good portion of a week in each month distributing a community magazine in a very rural area, and I walk miles in all sorts of weather. This is podcast territory - with my little Zen mp3 player I can pass the time quickly and pleasurably - and I have also learned a great deal recently.

If you have not heard TPN talking about Napoleonic history, I recommend that you check them out.