Author Topic: PC Giant: The Curandero And The Swede: A Tale From The 1001 American Nights  (Read 32254 times)

stePH

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I highly recommend those who had a hard time with the audio to give it another try and hang on. It's well worth it.

I finished it, and it is a good story, but I can't fault those who give up because the sound quality is really shit.

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Kaa

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Yep. Tried to listen on the way to work in the car, and between the lethal amount of hiss and the narrator whispering his reading, I couldn't hear a damned thing. This may be the first escape artists podcast I don't listen to simply because I hate straining to hear.

Too bad. From the comments above, it sounds like the story itself was quite enjoyable.

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Poppydragon

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Another one who's given up due to sound quality, I normally listen in the car but couldn't make anything out, tried at home in a quieter setting and still struggled. Hope that it can be re released with better sound as the comments made by those who could hear it sound really positive.

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kagillogly

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Thank goodness I wasn't the only one who noticed the unlistenable audio.  I turned it off after 5 minutes.  Is there any way this story could be remastered or just rerecorded?  I'd love to listen to it, but won't do so as-is.

I concur.  Can the hiss be remastered out?  I was so happy today, knowing that I'd get to listen to a Podcastle Giant on the long commute home.  I was so disappointed that I couldn't hear the story.  This is the first time I was unable to struggle through audio problems.  What a shame for the author. 



Heradel

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I found the following settings helped dampen the hiss, though it did clip the voice a bit.


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Ventzi Zhechev

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I would like to also post my wishes for this episode to be remastered. This is the first time I have been unable to listen to an EA episode because of sound quality—and I’ve been listening from the very beginning.

I usually listen to audiobooks and EA stories before going to bed as a way to relax and such audio quality—especially on a Giant episode—is simply unacceptable. The noise was so distracting that I often found myself not listening to the actual reading and just thinking my own thoughts on the background of the white noise.

So please, do remaster the episode. All your listeners will appreciate it!



lunastrixae

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I'm sorry to voice a complaint for something that is free and labor intensive. Just another to add that I could not get through more then a few minutes of this recording. Because of the hissing, low reader voice volume and echo I just couldn't stand it for a long episode. Really, it should have been held back and re-recorded. I so look forward to the long episodes, and not being able to hear one was pretty disheartening.




DKT

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So please, do remaster the episode. All your listeners will appreciate it!

FTR, we hear this, too, and are seriously considering it. It's not something that can happen immediately due to time, but we are really thinking about it, and we really appreciate everyone who's posted something like this. It helps us know whether or not it's something all you listeners want. Right now, it sounds like it's something you do want, even if it takes a little bit of time to make it happen.


stePH

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So please, do remaster the episode. All your listeners will appreciate it!

FTR, we hear this, too, and are seriously considering it. It's not something that can happen immediately due to time, but we are really thinking about it, and we really appreciate everyone who's posted something like this. It helps us know whether or not it's something all you listeners want. Right now, it sounds like it's something you do want, even if it takes a little bit of time to make it happen.

Count me as another vote in favor.  I'd love to listen to this story again, but not that recording.

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eytanz

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Let me start with an audio quality comment - I was luckily to be listening to this story while on a walk outside of town. Yes, I had to press my ipod's "30 second rewind" button every time a car drove by, but overall, I could hear the entire thing, which I don't think I could have done anywhere where there was a background noise.

As for the actual story - well, the story itself was great. Really great. I really loved the multi-layering of the story, how each sub-tale introduced a different aspect of American history and interwove them into a cohesive whole, forming the American present. It is a rare, yet wonderful, story where the final point - stories shape who we are more than actions - is not just said, but actually demonstrated by the very story we were listening to.

And yet -- And this is a big, yet personal, "and yet" -- and yet, it does not really work for me. Because, I am *not* an American. This story isn't about shaping my cultural heritage, it's about shaping someone else's cultural heritage. All the "we"'s in the above paragraph were a lie - I am not included. And this was brought very much to life by the fact that my actual history - the history of my country, my people - shows up in the story. My culture, my past, the right and wrongs committed to and by my parents, are a cautionary headline in a newspaper you show to a ghost so that the two of you can agree that hey, America may be built on a past of violence and bigotry, but at least we're not those guys, right? And just like that, it all came down crashing around me, and I suddenly realized - why am I buying into this? Why am I buying into a discourse that tells me that the lines of racism are drawn between distinctions like black, white, Mexican, native American, when none of those categories mattered to me when I grew up - and trust me, racism was everywhere in my upbringing, but the categories were very different. Why is it that I am listening, over and over, to a media that tells me that American issues and troubles are more important than my own?

And then I calmed down, and realized that the story is called "a tale from the 1001 american nights", and that at least it's honest about it's perspective. And it is a wonderful story, on many levels.

But yeah. It's never a lot of fun to discover that you've been reduced to a footnote in someone else's story.



cdugger

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Well, it seems that everybody liked this story.

Guess I'll have to be the odd man out.

Once you get going with a story-within-a-story, you start to lose me if it isn't exceptional. This story was not exceptional.

By the time it got back around to the Swede, I had lost why he was there. Oh, yeah! Those little crawly things under his skin.

THEN, we get back to the guy getting married! I forgot about him completely.

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Sgarre1

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Circles inside circles works for Aikido. Not story telling.

Borges, Jan Potocki and many others would disagree, but to each their own!



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As others noted the audio quality in this was just terrible.  Add me to the vote for re-mastering or re-recording this.  Nobody can really enjoy a story to its full potential if they have to strain to hear over the noise.  And, being a writer, I'm sympathetic to the poor author.  Granted, he got paid for it, but it's too bad for him that so few people will listen to this version just because of technical problems.

That being said, I realized about 10 minutes in that I've read this story before in F&SF.  I already gave them feedback on it, so I'll repost it here:
Quote
I had a fair-to-middlin' reaction to this, between the "love it" and "hate it" reactions exhibited by others.

The Good:
I read the whole thing mostly because the narrator's voice was compelling enough to interest me. Otherwise I would've skipped ahead after a couple digressions. The tall tales reminded me of the book "Big Fish" which I very much enjoyed. The ending was reasonably good once I got to it.

The Bad:
The digressing random storylines were okay, but I think they went too far. At one point in the story, one of the characters in a digressing story starts digressing on a totally unrelated story. At that point I almost put it down. The story easily could've been trimmed back to half its length without losing anything and made way for another short. I liked "Big Fish" better because I felt that the tall tales really enhanced the overall story arc, but here they were used to the extent that they obscured it.

Of course, in this case "made way for another short" doesn't apply.  I said that in F&SF because I wish they'd spent that extra page space on another short story instead of having this one be much longer than it needed to be.

This strikes me as a story that would not be particularly well-suited for audio because of all the meandering subjects.  When I read it in F&SF, I had to flip back and forth to figure out which trail I was picking up on again.  I can't do that for audio (at least not easily), so if I'd missed a transition sentence or something I'd be totally lost.



Sandikal

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I think this is one of those stories I would need to read rather than listen too.  I was listening to it on my iPod in the car with an FM transmitter.  Those things don't really work well here in the OC because we really don't have any empty FM stations.  Add the difficulty of the audio quality to the hiss of the transmitter and I was completely unable to follow this.  I gave up.  I don't know that a better quality recording would make much difference for me though.  It seemed like it needed to be on the printed page.



yicheng

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I wasn't bothered all that much by the sound quality.  It sounded like a bad microphone, but it wasn't totally unlistenable.

The story was simply amazing!  The imagery was vivd, and the words just pull you in.  There's a kind of Tom-Waits-like American-gothic flavor with this that I love.  Normally I lose track of nested stories (i.e. a story of someone telling a story), but this one kept me hooked and didn't lose me at all.  It makes want to buy the book and see if the other stories were as great as this one.  The narration was also very good, despite the bad recording.  I found the accents (especially the curandero) to be natural and spot-on, without feeling unnatural or going to exaggeration.



jhfenton

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Here's one more request for a do-over. The audio quality started off poor and got worse. After about 10 minutes I bailed--the first time I've ever bailed on an EA story. I simply couldn't hear it--at maximum volume--over outside noise.



Loz

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It's odd, because I generally find the longer the Podcastle story the more likely it is that I won't like it, I don't know why but I often find the lost art of brevity a powerful aid to the success of a story. However, struggling past the awful quality of the sound file, I was really taken with the story. It reminded me of 'The Hunt' from the Sandman, with it's tribe of Romany werewolves living in the modern suburban America. Each digression coloured the world wonderfully, and I found it's message at the end to be a positive and inspiring one. I hope that this will get remastered quickly for those that couldn't listen to the original to hear and appreciate.



Unblinking

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It's odd, because I generally find the longer the Podcastle story the more likely it is that I won't like it, I don't know why but I often find the lost art of brevity a powerful aid to the success of a story.

I don't find that odd at all.  For me, one of the greatest attributes for a great story is "it was exactly as long as it needed to be".  If a story is too short, then you're missing important details, or the character wasn't developed enough.  If a story was too long, then there's needless fluff.

The longer a story is, the more likely it is too long (for my tastes).  I've read very few stories that were 20k words that couldn't have been improved by cutting them to 15k. 

That's one of the reasons I like flash fiction so much (and I'm a slush reader for flash fiction).  Even if you don't like the story, at least it didn't take long to not like it.  :) 



brab

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I unfortunately had to stop listening to this. It's the first time ever, but as English is not my first language, and as the sound quality actually decreased as I was listening, I could not understand anything.

If we can still vote to remaster it, please add my vote!



Listener

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A lot of comments about the audio, so I'll just add a hearty "me too".

I think the narrator did a good job with Uncle Dab's storytelling voice.

For a long time I really, really didn't like this story. Obviously the whole point of it is to parallel "1001 Arabian Nights", and that's fine, but I guess I just don't like that style. It really only works for me as a graphic novel (Sandman, anyone?); when Elizabeth Kostova did it in "The Historian" -- which was pretty damn boring anyway -- I didn't like it there either.

The individual stories were very cool -- the trucker on Route 666, the young woman visiting the Curandero, the Swede, the Swede's "cure". I have to admit, though, the moment Uncle Dab started lecturing the MC I knew how the story was going to end. If the MC himself didn't realize it then I fear I'm going to lose a lot of respect for him.

I don't know if I'll read the book when it's released, because (as I said) I didn't really care for the storytelling style, but this particular piece had a lot of great historical details told through the eyes of a character who, as someone living in the South, I totally can recognize and understand the viewpoint of. If anything was wrong with the telling of the tales themselves it was that Uncle Dab was a little too apologetic about how he referred to people in the whole "well I'm going to call you this but I'm not really bigoted" fashion of reformed racists. It was somewhat heavy-handed toward the end, when the Swede got his "cure". Maybe that's part of Uncle Dab's character, but if so I think that probably could use a little rewriting to make him less verbally apologetic -- him throwing the MC a look is enough.

I do wonder what tale Abbie will tell when her turn comes.

Overall, a lot of good stories crammed into a framework I didn't like, which lessened the episode somewhat, as did the technical quality of the recording.

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internalogic

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For me, the main character of the story was Storytelling itself.  That was the point for me of all of the stories within stories, branching out and tendriling and some disappearing and some coming back to the main thread.  The story was about the power of just wrapping all of your experience in story and thereby imbuing it with irreversible significance.  There are risks in doing that too of course, but then there are always risks.  Anyway, I thought it was beautifully done.  A real meta-tale.




FamilyGuy

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I vote for the remaster as well.  As a hearing-impaired person, I had great difficulty understanding what was being said.  From what I could tell in the first 10 minutes, I think it would be a story I would like, if I could hear it.

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Dave

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Wow. I wanted to know how the story went, but after a few minutes, the poor sound quality forced me to hit Skip on my player. It was hurting my ears. Too bad, it was an interesting start.

(having gone back and read some comments)

Oh good, it wasn't just me.

Put me down on the petition for a remastered version, too. I'd like to hear the rest of it.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2009, 09:50:37 PM by Dave »

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MrElzebub

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I feel bad that my first post on these forums is to fuss about something but the audio quality of this episode was appalling. Escape Artist Productions has been one of the standard setters for quality in podcasting. I remember Steve Eley apologizing on early episodes of Escapepod for what to me seemed minor glitches in the sound. However, this episode was inexcusable. If a reader turns in audio this poor again it should be scrapped and handed out a different reader to rerecord. The fact this episode was released is very confusing considering the hard work that so many people are putting into making this podcast as good as it has been up to this point.



Gamercow

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Well, I listened to the whole thing on my commute to and then from work, and my ears actually hurt after both times, because the amount of white noise produced by the combination of the road, my car, and the background noise in the reader's environment was immense. 

But it was worth it.  If I had known that the author of this story was the author of "The Cambist and Lord Iron" I would have listened a lot sooner, as that is one of my favorite short stories of the last 5 years.  The story within a story is very reminiscent of my father-in-law's storytelling style.  He was from Texas, and would often take an innocent topic, and stretch it out to hours of storytelling on his front porch, while he and I enjoyed a few beers.  Most of his family had heard all his stories and tales over the years, but they were all new to me, so he was more than happy to share. 

Thank you for featuring this story, it was heartily enjoyed, audio flaws and all.

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