Posts tagged this is my life

gingerhaole:

Benedict Cumberbatch reads John Keats’ “Ode To A Nightingale”, and triggers my ASMR so violently that I totally collapse in warm shivers. Having trouble sleeping? Listen close.

A short selection of things I would have Benedict Cumberbatch read aloud to me, if the world was perfect:

• Pablo Neruda’s “Every Day You Play”
• Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady by Selina Hastings
• the chapter “Tokyo Redux”, from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential
• any page from Haven Kimmel’s The Solace of Leaving Early
• the master recipe for Choux pastry from my Williams-Sonoma baking book
• Mark Helprin’s A City In Winter
• something sexy by Anaïs Nin for good measure

What would be on your dream list?

Jesus this man has a voice like the bottom of an echo chamber. It’s like putting your face against a double bass while somebody plucks real slow; when the jazz club is empty. Reminds me of when my dad read Moby Dick to me as a bedtime story.

I would lay my head on his chest and stare at the alphabet runner that ran the length of the room; the runner that had an invention for every letter, and I would wonder about the man who invented velcro. Dad liked inventors: his job was to put the brains into microwaves and make the foil for spaceships. Someone had invented that, and my dad had put foil into space. I built a space telescope out of kitchen foil; not quite as nice, but it sure was shiny. I built a lunar module out of cardboard and was always telling Houston about my invented problems. I was born when they landed on the moon, Dad liked to say. Somebody had invented foil and sent it to the moon. Somebody must have invented me. As I ran along the alphabet runner I wondered about the Swiss man who had invented velcro. He had invented this invention on a mountain. I imagined the first rip of velcro echoing across a snowy chasm in Switzerland.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAP

Dad would read about Ishmael staring at a painting of a ship, and I would listen to his voice rumbling. Rumbling like it came out of some warm ancient place deep in the earth, where somebody in a white lab coat had invented that sound to send to the moon. Staring at A B C D E F G Inventions and not hearing a single word or understanding a single idea put forth by Herman Melville, but I imagined Queequeg and the rumbly, soft sound of his tattoos. I saw the inside of a ship that was dark and woody and strong and masculine. The sound of my father’s voice.

………

Apparently I just had an incredibly vivid flashback. Sorry about that. My dream list of “stuff for Cumberbatch to read to me” is real short (but I wrote slow first by accident, because clearly my mind has been drenched and weighed down by this sound)

I’d have him read Moby Dick.
I’d have him read Paradise Lost.
But most of all, a thousand times and once more again, I’d ask him for my favorite poem by Margaret Atwood.