Thank you for all your kind comments upon our seventy-second Tale for Our Time. There are two ways to enjoy our audio adventures: you can tune in nightly, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp - or you can save them up for a good old binge-listen. Josh, a Massachusetts Steyn Clubber, preferred the latter:
I binged episodes 2-5 on a brisk walk through a languid early morning. Not exactly "Africa hot", as Neil Simon described it in Biloxi Blues, but steamy enough to give a tangible sense of Marlow's early steps in the Dark Continent. I also think of Kipling's "Road to Mandalay" on such mornings, when "the dawn comes up like thunder outer [Swampscott] 'crost the Bay!"
What an extraordinary book, too long since read. And a fascinating companion to Moby Dick, which I'm reading with Talmudic attention in a small group. In one, a sailor plunges deep into an impenetrable wilderness to seek a mad white man; in the other, a mad sailor pursues a white whale across the earth's seas, a watery wilderness no less dark than the headwaters of the Congo.
Both wonderful beach reading this summer! More, please!
Okay, maybe we'll add Moby Dick to the list, Josh.
Meanwhile, welcome to Part Six of our current audio entertainment in Tales for Our Time. For this steamy summer, we're enjoying Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a crisply told tale from up the Congo at the end of the scramble for Africa. In tonight's episode, the protagonist is beginning to get a handle on the somewhat whimsical prevailing organisation:
What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping down—and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every week the messenger, a long negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in hand, left our station for the coast. And several times a week a coast caravan came in with trade goods—ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.
The steamboat, alas, is now "an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter".
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Six of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
We'll be back here with Part Seven of Heart of Darkness tomorrow evening.
If you're minded to join us in The Mark Steyn Club, you're more than welcome. You can find more information here. And, if you have a chum you think might enjoy Tales for Our Time (so far, we've covered Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, H G Wells, Dickens, Forster, Kipling, Kafka, Gogol, Jack London, Jane Austen, P G Wodehouse, Robert Louis Stevenson and more), we've introduced a special Gift Membership that lets you sign up a pal for the Steyn Club. You'll find more details here. Oh, and don't forget, over at the Steyn store, our Steynamite Special Offers on books, CDs, and much more.
