Artem Etiam Vita Brevior

RCA 44-A ribbon microphone
image: Wikimedia Commons

No, it's not as social-media worthy as baking sourdough, but I have (with Lorna and several friends) been occupying myself during the pandemic by studying voice acting at a community college. Strangely enough (given the nature of the thing we're studying) both instructors and students have been finding it awkward having to do the in-class work by remote streaming.

But that's not what prompted the dog-Latin header for this post*.

One aspect of the training has been the need for scripts upon which to practise our reading/acting skills, nascent though they be. And while we've been steered to an online repository of free-for-use scripts, a lot of those sample scripts are... not all that useful. Let's just say they wouldn't have passed muster for me back in the day when I worked as an announcer-editor.

This thought gave me an idea, though: Why not use material from my own personal archive?

It has been roughly a decade and a half since I last appeared on CBC (or any) Radio, but in the period between 1986 and 2005 I wrote and recorded nearly a thousand movie reviews or essays for MotherCorp. And while some of those scripts have sadly vanished, there is a big enough pile of them in my files, physical and virtual, that I ought to have been able to find something I could read. Hell's bells, buried at the very bottom of the physical archives are scripts from news reports and radio documentaries I wrote and voiced back in the 1970s, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

I decided I'd stick with movie reviews, because those were the most recent and easiest to find. And you know what? I couldn't remember more than one in ten of the movies I was paid so much (ha) to talk about, and not that long ago. You can certainly look them up now, but I defy you to figure out, without a search engine, just what was meant by 15 Minutes or Jet Lag or Birthday Girl or John Q or Dragonfly.

These were all big-money Hollywood projects, many of them with big-name actors and directors involved. And I'll bet my 2019 royalty check (don't bother) that nobody out there could identify half of them without help. Because I sure couldn't, and not only did I watch every one of those movies, I was paid to do so, and to write and talk about it/them afterward.

In a way this discovery was somewhat reassuring. Nobody is going to remember any of my novels or short stories even twenty years from now, I suspect. But on the evidence I'm going to be in very good company.

*The headline is my Google Translate-assisted attempt to riff on the old Latin saw Ars longa, vita brevis: "life is short but art lasts." Well, no, it mostly doesn't. According to Google the headline reads "Art is even shorter than life."