The Trouble with Podcasts

I was trying to listen to this sci-fi podcast/reading of a short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum called "Start the Clock" on the recommendation of Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. It started out with some host guy talking about his son who just started to learn how to talk, and he spliced in words spoken by his son into his little soliloquy, which was ostensibly to introduce the actual reading, but I couldn't help thinking, man, I wasted my bandwidth downloading this? And then, to top it off, the woman reading the story was, well, terrible. It's like printing a perfectly good short story on newsprint, flanked by an ad for Tylenol and set in Comic Sans.

I like to think I'm as hip and open-minded as the next web2.0 dork, but podcasting hasn't quite gotten me all hot and bothered yet like, say, RSS (I <3 netvibes) or Widgets or whatever. There are some podcasts that are pretty great, like TEDTalks, which I can't get enough of, and Ze Frank (who actually vlogged -- god, can we get a better word for that? Geez). I guess you can tell I'm not that psychoavid a follower of podcasts.

Actually, I shouldn't discriminate against podcasteurs. I mean, I probably should, but really what I mean to say is, audiobooks have the same problem. And that is: some things are not meant to be read out loud. Some things are written in silence and should stay that way. Cormac McCarthy probably did not dictate The Road to his secretary who then typed it up for him. Plus, it doesn't help that most "professional readers" have a way of rendering most things they read puerile and artificial, like a newscaster or something. I'm not saying I could do any better. I'm just saying maybe these words were not meant for saying. Out loud. For 27 hours. In my earbuds.

I'm just saying...