Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King" as a podcast

Benjamin Rosenbaum's magnificent, absurdist hacker story, The Ant King, is read aloud in this weeks' StarShipSofa podcast (starting around 35:00). My listening day is complete.

Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon’s stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt-to-equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.

Aural Delights No 42 Benjamin Rosenbaum, MP3 Link

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by Coriander , September 17, 2008 9:33 AM

"The Ant King" has already been adapted for the podcast medium by PodCastle. Read by Steve Eley.

I've listened to StarShipSofa before and I like their stories and their readings, so I'll give this one a go as well. What a lovely, bizarre little story. Really bizarre.

#2 posted by Talia , September 17, 2008 9:34 AM

This was also read on 'Podcastle' a couple months back, if anyone's interested in hearing a different reader (Steve Eley of Escapepod, specifically) give their take on it.

podcastle episode link

I know I posted this in the previous thread, but it is relevant, and possibly interesting to some people for comparison purposes, so..

#3 posted by Talia , September 17, 2008 9:35 AM

damn, coriander beat me.

*fail*

#4 posted by The Blow Leprechaun , September 17, 2008 10:14 AM

I listened to this on Podcastle way back when. It's a good story. I don't know that I would have been able to sit and read it through the absurdism, but having it read to me worked really well.