That someone should endeavor to write a volume such as, 'The History of Counter-Culture from Punk Rock to Ai Wei-Wei', was beyond Petra, the post-graduate research assistant whom was hired by the eccentric (perhaps, one must admit, this adjective is redundant) Lit-Theory Professor at Nubes University, to scour its every line and letter in search of a reference to what he'd called, '"a mystagogue-ical je ne sies quoi"... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

A concatenation of neorealism, cultural dyslexia, and a-rhythmic humor, Alonso Clemente's 'Tabacita', which takes place ten years hence, is an Indy Mexican Dramedy set in Los Angeles... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

A mired sense of sunset cuts in from above two saloon-styled swinging doors... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

Reality Tunnels - Monologues by Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts & Terence McKenna. Performed by Joseph Voelbel.

[The views expressed by the personages in this video are their own, and not necessarily the view of the narrator.]

Bill suspected the earth was round... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

The following suppositions were made by the Greatest Thinker in the World: words are not in fact separate, or discrete, as they seem to be nor are they ever strictly literal... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

Opening sentence worth its weight... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

Down a certain alley way off an unlit street in an old borough of London there is a door with an inconspicuous awning that reads Magic Theatre... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

They all had a strange look on their faces... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

They are not angels... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

The Lodge of the Adepts, or Taburnus Adepti, is an astral order of divine initiates from different races, creeds and continents throughout time immemorial... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel

Most had disappeared... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

Love by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

An Essay on History by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Audiobook Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Fair Use. Educational. Not-for-profit.

Beginning of Essay:

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures — in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded...

The Examination was administered without regard to the participant... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

Borges and I by Jorge Luis Borges. Narration by Joseph Voelbel. Educational use only.

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship, I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page."

Paradiso, XXXI, 108 by Jorge Luis Borges. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Educational Fair Use.

The End by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Educational Use.

Three Versions of Judas by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Educational Use.

An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

The Babylon Lottery by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Educational Use.

The Approach to Al-Mu' Tasim by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Narrated by Joseph Voelbel. Educational Use.

Sebastian Featherwood Delvantino was a prominent thirteenth century Italian mystic and polymath, christened to sainthood in the 15th century under Pope Gregory XII following a rapid succession of events which proved veridical a series of glossolalic prognostications made nearly two centuries prior by the mystic himself... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

As a child Sander followed the ascent of balloons until it hurt to look anymore... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.

The Author preferred to write by the light of a candle and from the form of his own pen after the sky turned pink with indecision... Written and Narrated by Joseph Voelbel.