Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

Anyone with a casual knowledge of the lives and works of Andersen and Burroughs could compile a superficial list of surface similarities. Both men were misfits, eccentrics of a certain sort, who were fortunate enough to find acceptance in large or small circles that would tolerate (and even celebrate) certain sorts of eccentricity. Had they consulted a present-day psychotherapist, both might have left the practice with a daunting range of acronymic diagnoses, a list of syndromes and conditions. Both travelled widely, in part because they felt ever so slightly more comfortable or truer to their authentic selves in direct proportion to the exoticism (and even the discomfort) of their physical and geographical surroundings. Both wrote works set in theatres (surgical and dramaturgical): fictions in which it is nearly always possible to hear Death chortling away ominously in the wings or in the front row. Both were fascinated by the complex interrelationship between freedom and obligation, the rococo interweavings of autonomy, creativity, social pressure and control. Both were profoundly subversive in their nervy determination to mine the subconscious for its fascinating or appalling treasures. Both had a predilection for what is generally called dark humour, and they shared an odd interest in hanging – a theme that surfaces in Andersen’s paper-cuttings and, with increasingly upsetting intensity, in Burroughs’s later fiction. Both felt a compulsion to explore the scary, attractive borderland between beauty and terror. One wrote for children, but both of them knew, and knew well, exactly what frightens adults.

This quotation is extracted from Brick Magazine

WERNER HERZOG: Adventure! I cannot stand the term “adventure” nowadays, – I lower my head and charge, – it has degenerated into such an obscenity that you can go to the travel agency and book an adventure trip to New Guinea, to the headhunters, to the cannibals. So I really do not like this anymore. Why did Petrarch climb a mountain, actually? He was looking more into the interior, he was stunned by what he saw, the first one in modern time who climbed up a mountain. And you gave me the translation today, I only knew the original, he wrote it in Latin, but I have a translation now. And it’s very interesting, I have the letter here because he quotes, he quotes something important. He had a little volume of Saint Augustine, Confessions, with him and he opens the book, and he opens it by—randomly, he claims it, he swears to God that he opened it randomly at one spot in St. Augustine and it’s a very, very interesting quote. And he opens it—oh yeah, he got severe, serious warnings by a shepherd, an old shepherd, don’t climb mountains, because fifty years ago, this shepherd had climbed the mountain as a young man, never remembered that anyone else ever climbed it and regretted it deeply that he did that as if it were a sin, and it was a sin, and Petrarch had a feeling of that. Once up on the summit, he opens Saint Augustine, and he quotes Saint Augustine and I’d like to read it, because it’s a very significant statement. St. Augustine says, “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” So this is a very, very significant moment in the history of humankind. Number one, he should not have climbed it, there was something, an arch sin in it in taking all mysteries away from our planet, and tourism is one of the consequences in the long run. Tourists and tourism has devastated cultures, it has had devastating effects.

My thanks to Sophia Preston for the link to this one