WELCOME TO UKEMI 2021!

Over Christmas and New Year, I am very pleased to say, I received quite a few emails from regular Ukemi listeners. There was the occasional (kindly) note pointing out a mis-pronunciation, or that a track was missing a few sentences. However much we try, this is par for the course when you are producing recordings lasting up to 50 hours or more! I welcome these comments and immediately set about the process of correction – which can be simple or complex involving studios, readers, engineers and the good offices of Audible of course.

But more often (I am glad to say!), I get requests for titles. And what a varied lot! For example, OI asked for more John Stuart Mill, for G E Moore, for Humboldt and many more, including Bertrand Russell and Iris Murdoch.  KF shared something close to his heart – the Ten Commandments of Leó Szilárd, the Hungarian/American physicist and inventor who conceived the nuclear chain reaction; he tells me is looking forward keenly to listening to Saint-Exupery’s Land of Men, (it is a gem, I can assure you!) and asked for Saint-Exupery’s The Wisdom of the Sands. Alas, like so many titles requested, that is lost in the desert of unobtainable copyright. But, as I say to so many correspondents – you never know what transpires!

But I am glad to say that we are able, this year, with the support of the publishers Routledge, to bring another C. G. Jung important text fresh from the studio – The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. In it, Jung laid out clearly and persuasively the concepts key to his whole view of mankind’s consciousness. It is a challenging text (read so clearly by Martyn Swain) which does present particular difficulties for audiobook presentation. This is largely because of the many illustrations in the original volume – pictures drawn by his subjects of their dreams which are crucial to Jung’s analysis. We have put them all on a pdf which is downloadable from Audible in the context of the audiobook…and I hope that listeners feel they can now absorb this work in our medium!!!

The decision to record Kant’s Prolegomena (otherwise not available in audiobook form) also came from a listener’s suggestion – it is curious that such accessible Kant (!!) has been overlooked. It is an aid to Critique of Reason, and has prompted us to finally ask Michael Lunts (who reads Prolegomena and other Kant) to essay Kant’s magnum opus itself…It is not an easy text, and Michael tells me he has been taking advantage of lockdown and other restrictions (which prevented him going on tour doing his one-man shows on Chopin and other composers) doing a lot of reading around Kant to ensure that there is comprehension beneath the presentation!

The third new recording is Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It is really one of the major philosophical stepping stones of the 20^th century. I have been inundated (well -quite a few!!!) with requests for this, and at last it is on sale…to the relief of many according to my inbox!

SPANISH AUDIOBOOKS – Ukemi Audiolibros

Some of you may have noticed that we have just started to venture into Spanish language audiobooks.

There are three titles available at the moment:

More are on the way!

 

Best regards

Nicolas