posted by James Reel
Is there anything sadder than a neglected blog? Well, yes, come to think of it, there are many sadder things. Still, it’s about time I took pity on this blog and posted something new. Except that what you’re about to read isn’t new at all. It’s an essay I wrote in the late 1990s, and I have no idea if the few statistics quoted herein are accurate. But you’ll get the idea.
Logolingus Is A Private Pleasure
These are the sounds of a book: A gentle scrape as you remove the volume from the shelf. A minute creak as you open the cover and bend back the old binding. A scratch-rustle-plop as you riffle the pages. A remote breaking of miniature waves as you turn a single page. A sharp thop as you slam the book against a desktop mosquito.
A book does not speak. Though crammed with words, a book can be no more than vaguely susurrant. The words find their sounds only in the reader's head.
A “talking book” may be a valuable compromise for people with impaired vision, but for the rest of us it is a brain-rotting malignancy. It imposes the imagination of some other reader—often a poor reader—on our own. It cuts us off from the important clues and contexts of the printed page, leaving us to drift gently in a stream of poorly distinguished words.
Yet talking books assault readers at every turn. Most bookstores stock them in shelves near the entrance, so tape-zombies may find them without having to be distracted by any demanding printed matter. Talking books have infiltrated video stores. And the 18-branch library system in my city owns nearly 3,300 book-on-tape titles, fully half of which are in circulation at any given time. Librarians report that the average talking book circulates twice as much as the average print book.
What is the appeal? People making long automobile commutes, or taking cross-country trips, feel that they’re making better use of what would otherwise be intellectual down time. But how well do they attend to the tapes while contending with traffic and gawking at scenery? And what about people who put on a spoken-word recording at home, then go about their household routines? Do they really stop scrubbing the toilet long enough to follow Ian McKellen through one of the serpentine similes in The Odyssey?
I admit that part of my antagonism toward talking books is my own dislike of being read to. Surely at some point in my slobbery toddlerhood somebody narrated to me the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But I don’t remember such a thing. My earliest literary memory is of reading Little Golden Books myself as a pre-schooler, being traumatized by the way the jungle animals mocked the Saggy Baggy Elephant, and thereby learning at a tender age never to put myself at the mercy of my peers. I could weep over these stories without embarrassment, because I was reading them myself, in privacy, forming my own understanding of the narrative, hearing the characters’ voices in my head.
I never developed a tolerance for readers who brought less color to a sentence than I could without opening my mouth. And face it: Most people are poor readers. They go too fast. They adopt a sing-song rhythm. They gloss over periods and get lost in dependent clauses. Or, most commonly, they simply drone. Consider the somewhat twangy but otherwise uninflected delivery of public radio’s Dick Estell. Or the monotone of professional news readers, which is supposed to convey impartiality but really only implies that anchors never glance at a script before going on air.
People don’t seem to care, and I think it’s because these people themselves don’t read aloud with any skill. In college, I once took a course in the oral interpretation of literature. I did so well that the instructor tried to recruit me as a major. Not because I was a budding Olivier, but because I instinctively knew how to read with the oral equivalent of a cocked eyebrow, and my classmates couldn’t get beyond spluttering out phonemes.
Poets are no better. In 1996 Rhino Records issued a four-CD set titled In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry. It gets off to a promising start, with Walt Whitman offering a measured, confident reading of “America”—exactly the presentation you’d expect from Whitman, unless you feared he would indulge in 19th-century melodrama. But then comes the incantatory monotony of William Butler Yeats, the merely dull monotony of Robert Frost, the nerdy nasalism of Steven Vincent Benet, Ezra Pound menacingly intoning his own words with no concession to meaning. Things improve somewhat with the living poets, although they are still too often subject to affectation or indifference.
The brightest track in the set is Allen Ginsberg riffing his way carelessly through a bit of his own America. Somehow this reminded me of a book I once saw in the Charles Dickens House in London; it was one of the texts from which Dickens did his celebrated public readings, and it was full of underlinings, cross-outs, and such stage directions as “slap the table!” Today’s readers must by comparison be bland, inoffensive, uninvolving.
Even good readers fail to engage me. I sampled a bit of the New Testament delivered by the late Alexander Scourby, my favorite narrator of TV documentaries; he was the bearded fellow who introduced art films on the Bravo channel in the 1980s. But on the Bible tape, Scourby’s voice made gentle bedtime stories of everything—parables and scenes of temptation alike.
Why should I listen to someone else read when my own sub-vocalization is so much richer? Yours may be, too, even if you speak with the finesse of a fan belt about to snap. For as you read silently, you absorb not only the author’s words, but the punctuation and layout. Roddy McDowall does a fine job with Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, except that he loses us in passages of dialogue involving insufficiently differentiated minor characters—passages we could sort out simply by looking at the arrangement of quotation marks. And there’s no way McDowall can smoothly convey the paragraph breaks that guide us into and out of interior monologues or quick changes of scene. Without seeing the text, we cannot grasp its full substance or its nuance.
It’s true that some passages insist on being read aloud. Whisper to yourself the following line from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven: “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain...” The early succession of four gently rocking sibilants—the Ss—perfectly conveys the very sound Poe describes. But then intrudes the affricate ch in “each,” followed ballistically by the four rapid aspirated stops in “purple curtain.” Poe jerks us awake with these little explosions, setting us up neatly for the mood of the following line: “Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before...”
Yet we’ve seen that neither poets nor actors can be relied upon to linger over such sounds to produce their full effect. Perhaps wrapping one’s lips and tongue with sufficient decadence around a word seems too sexual an act, a sort of logolingus, inappropriate for public display. So we are best off practicing this ourselves in private moments, alone with a book we love, a book representing an author with whom we develop understandings that remain unspoken.
quodlibet,
April 13th 2010 at 7:58 —
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posted by James Reel
KING-FM, Seattle's longtime classical radio outlet, can no longer support itself with advertising. But rather than change formats to some more lucrative, audience-grubbing strand of popular music, the station is switching to a non-profit model and retaining its classical programming. I don't know whether this is because the people running the station truly believe in classical music, or because the station has an unusual ownership arrangement:
KING-FM was founded in 1948 by King Broadcasting founder Dorothy Stimson Bullitt. In 1995, her two daughters donated the station to a nonprofit organization owned by the Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony and what is now ArtsFund, in the hope of keeping classical-music radio alive in Seattle.
Over the years, KING-FM has paid nearly $7 million in dividends to those three organizations. But dividends have declined since reaching a peak in 1999 and this year, for the first time, the station is projecting zero dividends.
You can find the full article here. Whatever the motivation, it's good news that KING will not become just one more classical station playing its own Requiem.
radio-life,
March 24th 2010 at 7:17 —
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posted by James Reel
With the vernal equinox upon us, we're going all out with spring music Saturday morning (and right after the Metropolitan Opera, too). You'll hear the pieces you expect--between 7 and 8, it'll be an excerpt from Copland's Appalachian Spring, Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata for violin and piano, and Schumann's "Spring" Symphony--but we'll also have some comparative rarities, including Respighi's virtually unknown big cantata Spring. For various reasons, however, we will not be playing that hit from Mel Brooks' The Producers, "Springtime for Hitler."
Classical Music,
March 19th 2010 at 11:35 —
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posted by James Reel
Considering, first, the swarms of American and European journalists across earthquake-ruined Haiti and Chile, and the current controversy over what constitutes a literary “mash-up” and what remains out-and-out plagiarism, this seems like a good time to revive an essay I wrote a decade ago about a more benign form of “borrowing.” Remember that all references to things “recent” date back to around 1999.
Plagiarists of Experience
Proponents call it literature of witness. I think of it as social voyeurism. A First World writer dons an L.L. Bean pith helmet, jets off to some jungle hell, is horrified by reports of exploitation and slaughter, and catches the next flight back to the home computer to document it all in a slim volume of outrage and elegy. The book moves its American and European readers to momentary despair.
Back in the jungle, the atrocities continue.
I do not question the sincerity, integrity, or physical courage of such a writer. Nor do I claim that the nature of witness literature requires any artistic compromise. I merely question the relevance of witnesses now that the actual participants may testify on their own behalf.
Consider the work of Carolyn Forché, a distinguished, still youngish American poet who balances the elusive allusions so dear to academics with passion and conscience. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), develops the themes of kinship and ritual. In many of these poems, she assumes the persona of her Slovak grandmother. In a few others, though, she insinuates herself into Native American culture, and seems something of a poseur when taking on a heritage other than her own.
The Country Between Us followed in 1981, shortly after Forché served a two-year stint as a human rights activist in El Salvador. Compared to Gathering the Tribes, her style is now even more direct and less self -conscious, but the subject matter is suddenly more artificial: political oppression and torture of mind and body on a scale alien to any U.S. citizen at this end of the 20th century. Whatever Forché may have experienced in El Salvador, these poems make her seem little more than a second-hand witness to atrocity. The people in her poems have already been mutilated, or killed, by the time they enter her text; this is by no means an account of direct experience. Forché has mounted an aesthetic colonization of others' anguish.
Fortunately, Forché remains aware of her status as an outsider, with outstanding results in the poem “Return.” The poet, back in the U.S.A. and snug in a supermarket—the chain, not coincidentally, is Safeway—frets over what she has observed in El Salvador, and how she is unable to change anything there. A friend admonishes her:
Your problem is not your life as it is in America, not that your hands, as you tell me, are tied to do something. It is that you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others. It is not your right to feel powerless. Better people than you were powerless. You have not returned to your country, but to a life you never left.
Clearly, Forché's need for kinship in an alienating world has remained constant since Gathering the Tribes, and her work in Central America has made this need even more intense despite its apparent futility. Even when the poems in this second collection resist the gravitational pull of politics, they orbit a sense of oneself as isolated from others, a sense of how individuals grow apart and are separated by huge differences in interests, commitments, and intentions—the "country between us." She is, more often than not, writing about universal concerns that resonate through her personal cares.
This rarely happens in her most recent volume, The Angel of History (1995). Forché overcame several years of writer's block by writing about silence in a larger sense: how the perpetrators of this vicious century's most heinous acts refuse to admit their crimes, and how victims remain reluctant to discuss their experiences. Naturally, Holocaust ash blackens many of these pages.
Forché is even farther removed in time and place from these events than she was from Salvadoran sadism, and although she now steps outside her Carolyn Forché persona more often than in earlier poems, she seems less a witness than a tourist logging her snapshots. Here we are visiting my aunt in Brno. This is us on our daytrip to the concentration camp. Here's a photo we took on our layover in Hiroshima.
I'm being unfair to what is, in truth, a moving lament. But Forché does not persuade me that the lament is her own. She is a noble plagiarist of experience.
Which puts her in good company. As Edward Said posited in Culture and Imperialism, and as many a post-colonial lit-crit twit has parroted since, the great figures of Western literary culture have long conspired with grasping politicians to justify not only the colonization of foreign lands but the domination of foreign cultures and collective imaginations. I need remind you only of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which an Englishman's confrontation with Darkest Africa (not to mention the blacker aspects of the British Empire) culminates in the scrawled journal entry, "The horror, the horror!" And perhaps I should bring to your attention Rudyard Kipling's Kim, in which an English boy raised "wild" in India prefers to go native and live like the subcontinent's denizens, who are shown to be by turns comic and sinister, although the boy's innate English intelligence eventually allows him to become a cunning undercover agent for the Crown.
The post-colonialism whip is too often employed to flog long-dead writers produced by a society far different from our own, except in its smugness. But post-colonial theory does sound a useful warning to contemporary writers endeavoring to speak for other cultures. Those cultures are perfectly able to produce voices of their own, thank you.
Consider as a single example Taslima Nasrin, a feminist poet with an aggressive social conscience, who emerged from (and found it necessary to flee) Bangladesh. In an online essay, Harry Russo III situates her succinctly: "She uses the repressive, male-dominated culture of her homeland as a vehicle for her indictment of men, governments and zealots who dismantle human spirit and dignity through isolation and oppression." All I need add is mention of Taslima Nasrin's one collection in English, translated by Carolyne Wright: The Game in Reverse (1995).
Does the development of literary expertise within oppressed developing nations mean that Western writers should now ban other cultures from their word processors? Not at all. The dictum "Write what you know," when taken literally, would clutter the closeout catalogs with even more novels about self-absorbed professors of creative writing. It is our nature, as creative writers and readers, to explore new realms, at least in our imaginations. But we cannot afford to lose ourselves in those exotic realms, as do, to their peril, the protagonists of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky.
(Interestingly, Bowles is one of the few American writers to penetrate a foreign consciousness with complete success. Hie thee to Bowles' third and finest novel, The Spider's House, and meet the complex, conflicted Muslim youth Amar; he makes Kipling's confounded Kim look like a Saturday morning cartoon.)
Carolyn Forché's admonishment from a friend plots our safest course, with its reminder to each writer and reader that "you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others." If we stand detached, yet not aloof, we may observe with greater clarity—and report with the compelling sadness and longing of the stranger within the gates.
quodlibet,
March 2nd 2010 at 8:53 —
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