"Tower. And you?" "A regular ziggurat."

The title of my blog, Balm Carousel, was never really meant to make any sense -- it's a quote from Fawlty Towers that even most Fawlty Towers fans don't remember. But today I realized that, as I tend to come back to read and write in my blog when I'm blue or angsty, the blog does become sort of a revolving repository of things that make me feel better. But that's not what I logged on to say...

The other day I was poking around Stephen Fry's website (I've been addicted to watching QI episodes on YouTube since we got AppleTV last month; see forthcoming posts re: my emerging Alan Davies fixation) and I noticed for the first time that Stephen once recorded an audiobook of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. This formed in my mind what Nabokov's character Ada Veen conceived as a tower: three especially beloved or meaningful things occurring together (the third thing, I suppose, was a set of sleep headphones that I found again while cleaning the apartment). Could it be that I might actually, if I chose, listen to beloved author and entertainer Stephen Fry read to me at bedtime from Oscar's fairy tales?

Most people who know me know that I've held up Oscar Wilde as a personal cultural icon from the time I was 12 or so. I'd already had squidgy popstar crushes on Donny Osmond and Elton John at roughly the appropriate ages, but I went pretty wack with Oscar: scrapbooks, posters, a shrine of sorts in my bedroom at home, and of course, lots and lots of reading (since he hadn't released any records for me to play, you see). One of the books I borrowed over and over again from the public library at that time was a volume of Oscar's fairy tales that was illustrated with attractive watercolors and bound in very pretty violet cloth. I hadn't thought about those stories for so long: The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, and my special favorite (Christian allegory notwithstanding), The Selfish Giant. The stories reveal a sensitivity, a non-cynical earnestness (!) that (as Stephen points out in an older post on his blog) many people don't really associate with Oscar.

Anyway, last night I had the chance to slip into the sleep headphones (these, if you're interested -- so comfy) and play the audiobook as I went to bed. And... I was weeping after the first few lines or so -- happy, and so overwhelmed with how sweet an experience it was to hear Stephen (whose work and life story and personality I've admired for years and years - got most of his books and everything) reading the Oscar stories I've loved for... well, decades. His voicing of each character was pitch-perfect, especially the Happy Prince's lilting "Swallow, swallow, little swallow." A high tower, truly. So thank you, Stephen Fry, for recording that audiobook (although I was a bit sad The Birthday of the Infanta was missed out). My next purchase will be Stephen reading Chekhov's short stories. Because... well, to be honest, it's because I read in Alan Davies' book that Chekhov is a favorite of his. (I'm hopeless.)