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Theater, Audio, Video, Prints, Music

Contact me: Robert W. Bethune

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Welcome to Freshwater Seas!

Coming out soon--stay tuned!

Mary Louisa Molesworth, Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales.

Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious.

What's new?

I'm very pleased to say that my translation of The Mistress of the Inn is being used at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia as a text in an Italian literature class taught by Dr. Alessandra Capperdoni. This is the third time the text has been used at the university level. Recently it was used at Penn State, and some years ago was used in a course in the UK; unfortunately, I've lost the details on that one.

When William Morris wrote The Wood Beyond The World, he created a genre that has lasted to this day: the fantasy story set in a world of magic and sorcery, where bravery and love must struggle to survive against dark forces that work in mysterious ways.

The Early Poetry of Conrad Aiken: Charnel Rose is Conrad Aiken's fourth book of poetry. He takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and emotionally draining search for love, and how some of us turn away from real love when we do find it.

The Early Poetry of Conrad Aiken: Nocturne of Remembered Spring is Conrad Aiken's third book of poetry. He continues his major themes, exploring love, passion, and the yearning for tempestous freedom, along with a shockingly dry-eyed vision of the realities of war in the trenches of World War I and his constant great sensitivity to nature in all her forms.

The Early Poetry of Conrad Aiken: Turns and Movies is Conrad Aiken's second book of poetry. He gives us portraits from a fascinating world: the world of small-time, nitty-gritty vaudeville a bit after the beginning of the 20th centry. Each poem is a portrait of a person from that world; as Edgar Lee Masters does in Spoon River Anthology, Conrad Aiken does in this book. He also gives us a set of four longer poems, all on a subject that strikes home today: what happens to love when the flame of romance flickers, or even goes out?

The Early Poetry of Conrad Aiken: Earth Triumphant, is his first major book of poetry. He took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find rest? Aiken's answer is unequivocal: in the ancient, ageless, inhuman, nurturing, commanding, accepting Earth. Where many poets might fly off in high abstraction with such a theme, Aiken does not; he keeps his feet on his good earth and connects to everyday reality in ways that have not dated in nearly 100 years. His verse is sophisticated, musically structured, and reads very well. Enjoy!

The Curfew Tolls the Knell of Parting Day: Poems by Mr. Gray, is a recording of the 1768 Dodsley edition, the primary publication of his poetry that he published during his lifetime. It consists of only 10 poems, written mostly during the 1740s. Although he continued to write after 1768, it does seem as though he regarded this collection as the definitive body of the work he most valued. These poems are remarkably varied. From the solemn philosophy of the "Elegy", he moves to dramatic portrayals of history and even some rather humorous verse, though always with a moral tone. I invite the reader to enjoy this small collection of Gray, in which one can get a sense of the man behind the verse, the man who wrote the immortal lines of the "Elegy".

Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac offers us, as he himself put it, "moral Sentences, prudent Maxims, and wise Sayings, many of them containing much good Sense in very few Words, and therefore apt to leave strong and lasting Impressions on the Memory of young Persons, whereby they may receive Benefit as long as they live, when both Almanack and Almanac-maker have been long thrown by and forgotten." It is my particular pleasure to bring you the complete Almanac, not just the jokes and proverbs, but the complete work - minus, of course, the astronomical tables - that give such a fascinating picture of Franklin's mind and times.

Susie has continued her beautiful voicing of Sara Teasdale's poetry in our second Teasdale title, Love Songs. Sara Teasdale believed passionately in the power and beauty of love. Teasdale's poetry ranges from utter joy to deep loneliness. She expresses herself with utter simplicity

Carl Jung is one of the fundamental thinkers of our time, and it's a shame his work isn't available in downloadable audiobook form. So we've done something about that! His early work, Theory of Psychoanalysis, is now live. It's "young Jung" as it were. He's just starting to follow his own thought after his break wth Freud.

The Kalevala is live - a great poem of ancient myths gathered for us in Finland to be listened to in English! It's selling like hotcakes too - best ever for a single title in the most recent quarterly results.

The Lord Byron series is now complete--all the non-dramatic poetry, live and ready for you to hear!

Theater

Translations and adaptations of classic plays and literature for the stage: Aeschylus, Goldoni, Marivaux, Strindberg, Sophocles, Stoker, .Lessing.

Most of our plays are available on DVD on Amazon.com!

Audio books

Audio performancess of poetry, short stories, novels and plays for your listening pleasure.

Our audio productions are all available on Audible.com! Click here to jump to them there!

Photography

The Katagrafika project
Visual work that starts out as photography, and then is transformed into a visual metamorphosis, a unique way of seeing the world.

 

Video

Video productions from the world of the freshwater seas of North America--better known as the Great Lakes!

Celebrating the tour through the Great Lakes of the Picton Castle. Click here to go to the Amazon page for this video!

Music

The Tintinnabulum Project
Explorations of classical and modern music centered around exploring the possibilities of melodic percussion.

Click here (if you have iTunes) and go straight to this album.

 

Thank you for visiting! I'd like to take a moment, since you've been so kind to scroll down this far, to introduce myself, what I do, and what this website is all about.

I'm an independent artist. I work in many kinds of digital media, creating works for theater, audio books, photography, video and music that I hope many people will enjoy.

Theater

I do translations and adaptations for the stage from the classic literature of the world, including authors such as Pierre Marivaux (The Game of Love and Chance,) Gotthold Lessing (Minna von Barnhelm,) Carlo Goldoni (The Mistress of the Inn,) August Strindberg (Miss Julie and The Stronger,) Federico Garcia Lorca (The House of Bernarda Alba,) and Bram Stoker (Dracula.). I'm currently working on a full translation from the ancient Greek of the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

Audiobooks

I work with Susie Berneis. We've done a over 40 titles by a whole bookshelf of authors.

Imagery

I'm working on what I call The Katagraphica Project. I start with a normal photograph, and then I play with it until it starts changing in some interesting way. I then follow the changes and find more changes, until finally I have an image that might resemble a work of art in traditional media such as watercolor, acrylics or oils, or might look like something done in some medium that hasn't quite been invented yet. In this area, my next project is to apply this approach to theatrical photography, so there will be some interesting crossover there.

Video

I am an independent film producer. I offer DVD versions of several plays I have translated for the stage, including The Game of Love and Chance, The Mistress of the Inn, Minna von Barnhelm, and Miss Julie & The Stronger. I also offer a documentary on the tall ship Picton Castle, taking the viewer on her travels through the Great Lakes.

Music

I am fascinated by harmonic percussion, and the strange and amazing, or amusing, or appalling things that happen when you run classical music through a harmonic percussion ensemble. I call this The Tintinnabulum Project, and I will soon be posting some of the results here. If you'd like to hear Khachaturian done by a steel band, or Bach done by a team of maddened vibes players, this is the place--stay tuned!

How and why I do what I do

I make things, and I can't help but go on making things; it's easier to do it than not to do it, and besides, the work is there, like Everest was for Edmund Hillary. So I do it! And I have one cast-iron rule: the work must please and provoke me while pleasing and provoking others. If it does that, I'm happy, and I go on to try to do it again!

Links to some websites that have been helpful

Lens.com - contact lenses - offers a huge online inventory of brand name contact lenses with reasonably priced prices. Services include online order and shipping straight to you .

 

Google
 

Click here to visit the Ann Arbor Auditions website: a free service of Freshwater Seas.

Please note: all images on this website are copyright 2001-the present by Robert Bethune, copyright registered with the US Copyright Office, all rights reserved. Anyone may view these images and pages or make copies of them for their own personal use as is allowed under US copyright law. However, I reserve all rights to reproduce or redisplay these images in any medium and by any means. In particular, I do not permit any re-display of these pages or pictures, whether by copying the image to another server, by framing these pages using pages on another server, or by linking to the images on this server in such a way that images or pages from this server appear at the same time or on the same screen as pages or images from any other server. Any such re-display or re-use of these pages or pictures will be treated as a violation of my copyright and I will pursue all remedies available to me under the law to ensure that any such practice ends promptly.

Credits for materials created by people other than me appear here.

My pages about bullpups.