Hello everyone! So I wanted to use this week’s blog to address a point made by Matthew Rubery in his journal Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audio Books and New Ways of Reading that I consider being key in how we read literature across multiple parts of the world. To preface my discussion, Rubery wrote the following:

“Although it would be easy to overstate the degree to which technology changes the way we communicate, there is nevertheless compelling evidence of its influence over the way people read that should not go unheard.25 Advances in audio technology have the potential to change the way we think about reading practices for two reasons. The first is that digital audio will turn more readers into listeners.” (Rubery 64)

That last sentence is key here, “The first is that digital audio will turn more readers into listeners” (Rubery 64). When we read, it is very difficult to pick up how something is supposed to sound. Thus, we may miss the point intended entirely. The context behind the things we say is what drives how we say it and the connotation of what we’re expressing. That brings me to the audiobook I have chosen to present to you all in class today:

“The Bells,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, at first glance is a rather simplistic piece. As readers, we often just read through it or read it how we think it is supposed to be read. Especially for those of us who do not directly study English literature. However, upon taking a second look, and reading the poem out loud or having someone else read it to you, we can discover some unique characteristics of the piece before us. In each stanza of “The Bells,” Poe starts to describe another type of bell, and when reading to yourself it seems like a pretty flat piece, but when you bring audio tools into it you realize that with each stanza there exists a switch of mood and sound.

During the first stanza, Poe describes the experiences associated with silver bells. We all know that to be Christmas time, the holiday season. This stanza utilizes language in a way that portrays a sense of happiness, jolliness if you will. There are specific influxes in your voice when reading the language with the associated cheerful emotion that portrays the sound intended. Then he moves onto talking about golden bells, which we associate with weddings (also associated with wealth and love in general). This stanza uses calmness as a tool, a smooth and happy block of text symbolizing the long-term content that marriage/love brings us as humans. Finally, the brazen (bronze) bells, he uses them to create a sense of fear. There exists a lot of urgency in this stanza that strikes discomfort in the listener when reading how it was intended to be read. Rubery’s point was that listening is starkly different from just reading a text. It also helps to bring out the brilliance of the author. This especially applies when reading literature from other regions. Rhyme, for example, can only sometimes be deciphered when reading in a specific accent. For example, a New Yorker may not understand the audio cues of a poem written in Scotland.

Now, how can we do all of this sound analysis when there are situations where audiobooks/readings are unavailable? Lucky for us, there are digital tools out there being further developed to map these audio influxes in literature. Below I am attaching a screenshot of the tool Poemage, developed by the University of Utah, which is an incredible tool that takes the uploaded piece and shows you how each word is supposed to sound and where it overlaps with other words:

Unfortunately, the University of Utah took the download link down while they do some updates, so I cannot show you guys the extent of the tool. I used it back in late 2016 and it has only improved since. All in all, Rubery drew a line between reading and listening, and I agree. They both stimulate different parts of the brain simultaneously in order to further our understanding of literature and assisting with decoding the intention of the author (or a variation of the author’s intention).

“A Report for an Academy” (1917) by Franz Kafka is a short story told by Red Peter, an ape who was captured on Africa’s Gold Coast (now Ghana) and shipped to Europe, and who learned to act like a human to escape captivity. Red Peter tells the story of his transformation from ape to human to a scientific academy in an undetermined European city, observing that it was only when he mastered human language that he was able to secure a way out of his cage on the ship. He puts a seal of sorts on his humanization by writing his story and telling it aloud to a sophisticated audience. This rhetorical situation makes “A Report for an Academy” an intriguing audiobook, and the voice of Martin Reyto reading Ian Johnston’s unabridged translation of Kafka’s short story for Librivox brings Red Peter close.

Although Librivox does not categorize this audiobook as “Dramatized Reading,” Reyto throws himself into his role, and I imagine Red Peter clad in a red satin dressing gown (he has become a music hall star) seated in his heavily upholstered apartment (I wonder if Reyto recorded his voice in a closet) deep in the ancient streets of Vienna or Prague, sheltered from the inclement weather, drinking a strong cordial and perhaps smoking a cigar. At first it was not easy to reconcile my idea of Red Peter with Reyto’s audiobook. For one, I thought Red Peter was younger because he says that he was captured five years before, and Reyto’s voice is clearly the voice of an older man. Secondly, I did not imagine Red Peter so weary. My first impulse was to reject Reyto’s reading of “Report for an Academy” because it seemed counter to how I had imagined the tale, but I listened on and as I did, Red Peter changed in my mind. Reyto’s reading is convincing; his cadence is fittingly mournful, and the harrowing last two sentences of the second to last paragraph are delivered with an awareness of the horror they admit:

When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her, for she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it. (Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy”)

The sound quality of Reyto’s recording is excellent. There is no echo, and no sound of breathing or background noise (the absence of background noise is good for this story; other stories would be better with background noise). Altogether, listening to this audiobook was not unpleasant but for now, I find that listening to a novel or short story requires more effort than reading it would do. However, humans are adaptable creatures and I trust through practice listening gets easier.

Note: as I explored Librivox in search of an audiobook I wanted to write this blog post on, I was impressed with the great variety of recording qualities, voices and styles. To be honest, most of the audiobooks I started listening to bothered me in one way or another, but one that struck me as an inspiring model – I find I like to hear a variety of narrators – is Wuthering Heights (version 3 dramatic reading).

I approached finding my audiobook in the wild by thinking about the relationship of the author’s voice to a work of fiction. The comparison of the audible voice, versus the stylistic written voice seemed like it could have a pushing and pulling effects in the perception of a story. I immediately thought of Truman Capote, whose voice is famously distinct and whose style is distinctly rich in description which has the effect, to me of being equally tight and intimate, as it is ethnographic and isolated. I chose to find a recording of him reading any of his short stories, or an excerpt from a novel. I’ve read a lot of his work, but not recently, so I thought that any story would be a good example of this performance. I searched online for a recording of him reading his short story “A Christmas Memory,” and found a video on Youtube of the recording, which was originally published on vinyl in 1959. This them really set me out into the wild as I tried to instead find a physical copy of it to play on my record player at home. The album cost $60 on Amazon, and would not arrive until September 17th so that wouldn’t work; I called every record store in New York and notable ones outside (but nearby) the city with no luck. I called the New York Public Library who advised me on the proper search terms to locate it in their archives; they had 2 copies, available to listen to at the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

At the library I was hoping to be able to sit with a record player to have the physical interaction of setting up the record, flipping it to the B-side, etc. but they have it set up where they hook you up to a computer and a person “in the basement” (the librarian told me specifically they were in the basement), plays it on the record player down there. This added a new component to the physicality of this audio, because it added a new author and participant to the mix. I was not listening to the audiobook alone, but through the discernment and acuity of an incognito librarian in a basement somewhere under me. I was especially aware of this while waiting for the story to begin playing, and even more-so when I waited for this person—who played the roles of technician, co-listener with me, and co-author with Capote—to flip to the B side of the track to play the second half of the story. This interruption gave me a time that I would not have given for myself to contemplate the story so far, which would not have existed with a typical audiobook playing all the way through. It also made me cognizant of what control Capote would have had over where this break occurred: it was at the end of paragraph and sentence, but I wonder if he made the decision of which paragraph to flip the record on, how much space or leeway there was on each side of the track for him to have a choice in this decision or if it was purely dictated by the size of the sides. This was something I would have been interested to make an assessment on based on the appearance of the vinyl, but alas I was not allowed access to it.

As they would not give me the record, I had to make a special request to see the sleeve. This actually proved an instrumental tool in my reading of the audio book. The front of the sleeve had artwork by the artist Gray Foy, who I learned was a prominent and widely respected surrealist artist of the 20th century, while the middle and back of the sleeve has the entire story printed on it. Both of these visuals created a physical space upon which to navigate the story as I listened to it, creating a physical space much closer to a book than the typical audiobook.  But even the tangible flatness of a record sleeve gave a strange two-dimensional effect to a story which when traditionally printed is around 40 pages.

Listening to the audio presented the questions I expected to encounter entering the project: I was confronted with Capote’s unique sound and inflections, where he stumbled on words, missed (or skipped) sentences, changed his voice, even slightly, to match his conception of the characters. These affected the story by giving me a hyper-truthful understanding of his intentions of the story; however, it disrupted my reading (or, rather, listening) by giving me little room to impose my own interpretations. There was also symphonic music by Irving Joseph that sandwiched Capote’s reading of the text, a music that also imposed a mood and feeling onto my perception of the text. Ambient noise such as the fuzziness from the record player which came through on my head phones, the occasional quiet scratch and scrape, as well as the not-completely-noiseless pause when the record was flipped which was a silence filled with ultra-low, ambient bumps and “woosh” sounds. They made me aware of my own context, as well as the age and antiquated novelty of the record itself (this copy was 59 years old.) On a text that is all about the prevalence of memory, the participation with time and space in reading it, as well as in what most people of my generation would call an old-fashioned environment to listen to an audio book (the library).

I ended out finding that the typical questions of the effects of sound on a text in the audiobook was a lot less interesting to me than the odd physicality of the audiobook on vinyl. The record itself, which is made of its own language and modes of inscription and form, and the way they re-created the experience of the traditionally written text, next to the sleeve with the text written out invented a unique space and an unconventional audiobook experience. It reaffirmed a certain level of grounding in the technology and act of inscription onto a surface that texts, and this text especially, cannot seem to escape, and forced my participation with it.

I had not previously been aware that public readings of entire novels had taken place during the age of the Victorians.  It did not occur to me, as someone who has been accustomed to the solitary enjoyment of reading (a la Rubery’s explanation of today’s literary scholarship on p. 60), that public reading would be a fashion.  After reading “Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways of Reading” it seems to be an obvious pastime and one that I would most likely enjoy being an audience member of.  I know that I love reading with my nieces and nephews as they learn to be independent readers, but it’s so far been a tradition that ends when they do establish their ability to read on their own.

It also makes sense to me now, that the modern day audiobook has evolved from the practice of reading aloud in audiences, and as Rubery points out that it’s possible the “audiobook is the latest step in the long process of commodifying literature, this development presents us with an opportunity to reflect on how our own attitudes toward reading aloud have evolved since a nineteenth-century inventor first imagined a ‘talking book’…” (59).  Until the requirement for this course to listen to an audiobook, I hadn’t thought about reading/listening to a book in that way seriously in quite a while.  I’d seen the many advertisements for Audible.com and get occasional emails from Amazon about my first free audiobook, but music and podcasts are what I listen to today, not books.  Nonetheless, I do fondly remember a long car ride to Ohio from New York for a friend’s wedding many years ago where the 8 CDs required to listen to The Memory Keeper’s Daughter kept me occupied (I found the book on clearance in Barnes & Noble which I remember thinking that it was so deeply discounted because no one listened to books, they read them!).  But here I am, after this assignment, newly enamored with the format and want to ask my family if they’ll indulge me in establishing a read aloud tradition for us.  I also want to suggest to the director of the library where I work that we have a series of events around the reading of various literary titles available in our library.

What has me so excited about the audiobook (much like Thomas Edison’s excitement over the possibilities of his invention of phonograph) is the feeling that this could be an entertaining endeavor with my family (Rubery 62).  I am looking forward to learning more about the process of creating audiobooks in the next weeks of class.

When deciding what to listen to this week, I considered several things:

• What platform would I use?  I looked at Audible (through Amazon), Librivox, and finally the NYPL’s mobile app: Libby (which is what I ended up choosing from as I didn’t want to have to pay for the book)
• How much time did I have to listen to the book?  I wanted to choose a title I’d be able to complete by class, but saw that many books took hours to read.  At first, I was going to choose an abridged Mansfield Park from the BBC that ran at 2 hours, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted an abridged version, despite the all star cast of Benedict Cumberbatch, Felicity Jones, and David Tennant.  What I ended up choosing was the unabridged version of Between the World and Me, authored and read by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I was familiar with Mansfield Park, but had failed to complete the reading of Between the World and Me, so I took the opportunity to complete it.
• I was concerned with who was reading the book.  Librivox is read by volunteers and a famous actress had read The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, but I was interested in hearing the author read their own work to me (like Dickens had done many years before).

Thus, I decided on a book read by its author and provided to me free of charge that I could complete in the allotted time for the assignment.  Having read the first section of the book over a year ago, I knew that the author was writing this book as a letter to his adolescent son, but that it was also meant for a greater audience.  It was very personal, and at times I felt as if I had no right to be listening in, but at other times, I felt like this was a book (letter) that everyone in America must read/hear.  Rubery cites Camlot’s study and writes that “the sound of the audio book inhibits our own imagination by performing our potential imagining of the text’s voice for us” and continues “listeners…complain about how unsettling it can be to find a narrator’s voice at odds with their own ideas of how that voice should sound” (72-73).  Yet, for this book, I believe that Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only person qualified to read this book aloud to an audience.  Perhaps it’s the title I chose, that only has one voice, and it’s the author’s innermost personal thoughts, and it’s not a made up story.  Had I chosen a work of fiction, with many characters, Rubery’s statements on the sounds of the readers’ voices might make more sense.  Rubery goes onto describe how “central voice is as a source of meaning” and I do think I’m better able to understand Coates’ book after having had him read it to me (74).

To conclude, we briefly discussed in class last week the idea of the “sage on the stage” and I want to argue that there are times where that model is appropriate in the classroom.  To reiterate, I feel I have a better understanding of Coates’ arguments after having it read to me, much like how I feel after attending a good lecture, but I also think that, as Rubery introduces, that a “multimedia approach” to literature is the “lingua franca” of students today (68).  He goes on: “[t]his fluency with technology stems from years of downloading entertainment, filming with digital cameras, and communicating through mobile phones.  Students have little trouble understanding how these devices shape their communication – the way in which the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it…” (68).  Reading in a multi-modal fashion (and using technology in a meaningful and useful way) will get students (and hopefully my nieces and nephews, too) to think about literature (and reading, more generally) in new and different ways that opens up the possibilities for interpretations, discourse, and learning in, and outside of, the classroom.

For this assignment, I read/listened to Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. I don’t have much experience with audiobooks, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from trying it out, other than the obvious. However, I’ve found that I really enjoy “a-books” and that I am able to visualize the story much differently in my head when listening to the words as opposed to reading them with my eyes out of a book.

The production values are rather flawless in my audiobook. The voice actor (Christian Rummel) has many other books available on Audible and when I Googled him I learned he is a professional actor, namely a voice actor for video games like Call of Duty. As I listened, I kept thinking how if it were me narrating, I would surely breathe through my nose too hard or cough or anything of the sort without realizing, however this voice professional did not. So obviously, there was some scrupulous editing in the background because there is zero percent chance he was able to read through the entire novel so flawlessly.

The style was my favorite part. He very actively did “voice characterization,” bringing to life the very dry, lax subtlety of the story in a very dynamic way. His voice would change believably between characters of the same or different gender. Even though that while “occasionally readers are themselves celebrities (for example, James Mason or Jeremy Irons reading Lolita) whose name recognition promises to boost sales [66],” the voice actor in this case is very dedicated to working almost exclusively with the audiobook medium and takes his work very seriously. While it will probably never bring him fame, it is funny that I never thought of reading audiobooks as a profession worth pursuing, but I am really impressed with what I heard in this book in terms of the scope of this blog’s requirements.

The conversational nature of the book is not lost within this audiobook, to say the least. All the while, all the actor’s different voices would stay consistent with each character throughout the book, and apparently he has a very convincing and impressive registry of individual Californian voices/accents. The characters sounded like I’d imagine the author imagined them. Everyone is so lost in this story, so detached, and the voice actor really and truly personifies this.

I don’t have the text nearby, so I couldn’t compare if every word is the same, but from what I remember when I read this book, it is not abridged or changed from the original. The author writes in a very lucid, conversational way and I would imagine it would have been a good experience for the actor bringing the audio of this book to life.

As far as what I experienced, I didn’t realize I would be so gripped to listen. It really drew in my attention more than I thought it would. I first imagined I would be easily distracted but this was not the case at all. It was very easy to get caught up in imagining the playout of scenes of the novel in my head as I listened. Perhaps even more so than when I read without audio. Definitely food for thought about the medium as a whole. If I could enjoy literature even more than I already do by tweaking how I obtain the narrative, then sign me up.

“Signature Research” by Dylan Gauche, 2017, [Trigger Warning]: https://www.theheartradio.org/solos/signatureresearch

The piece I chose is technically not an audiobook, but an about 7 minutes long audio piece written and produced by Dylan Gauche. It has been published in an episode of the podcast “The Heart” and deals with the narrator’s childhood, youth, and family—and the various forms of pain he experienced as well as with his resilience. I chose this piece, because applies an incredible variety of the possibilities that audio as a medium provides but is based on the reading out loud of a written text. (Still, as this text has most probably been written for the piece and therefore for audio, it cannot be considered to be an audiobook in the traditional sense of the word.)

First of all, there is Gauche’s voice. He tells, he whispers, he imitates others, his voice gets loud and intense—at some point it feels as if he was shouting at the people who hurt him, the ones he’s talking about—and then quieter again. And he thereby never seems to be acting or “merely” reading. What I found especially interesting is that Gauche even used different levels of recording quality depending on the content of the narration. At some points the recording is deliberately rough and noisy to enforce the rather dark atmosphere of the text at this point. Gauche’s narration is also perfectly paced, he’s sometimes talking faster and sometimes slower depending on the mood and the content of the story. And, his narration also contains a very strong onomatopoetic moment when he quickly speaks out the word “drink” three times in a row and thereby imitates the sound of drinking.

Second, there’s the music. The piece contains two different kinds of music. On the one hand there is a rough recording of someone singing and playing the guitar—most probably the narrator’s father who is introduced as someone who would record himself playing self-written songs. At this point, the music works like an illustration of the content of the piece: while the “I” talks about his father, we hear him singing in the background. Then, a different application of music follows: two piano pieces are used to underline the emotional content of the story.

Third, there are sounds. In some moments, the piece consists of three different layers: A voice, music and other ambiance sounds. Some of them, such as the sound of probably a beeping medical machine, function as illustrating the story’s narrated content. Others, such as whirring noises, are undefined or at least not “readable” for me. I have interpreted the use of those noises as the creation of general unrest, which reflects the content of the presented story.

Fourth, there are other people’s voices. As already mentioned we (most probably) hear his father singing in the beginning of the piece, and we would also hear recordings of him on the phone. Another time, it’s the narrator himself imitating the voice of his brother. At a later point, we hear one sentence, a question, from his mother to which the narrator then responds.

Finally, there’s the silence. The piece talks about how during his childhood and youth, the narrator would constantly hear his father talking, leading to the “I’s” claim: “I can’t stand silence now.” This is reflected within the above mentioned creation of an overload of sound within certain moments of the piece. Moments in which we can hear the narrator’s voice without any underlying “background” of music or noises, are well placed and rare. The use of silence as a tool of storytelling is most strongly applied at the end of the piece. Its last sentence is: “And my house is quiet now.”—followed by a few seconds of this silence.

Overall, I think that—additionally to its challenging content—this piece wonderfully illustrates how rich the possibilities of translating a text into audio can be: one can work with voices, sounds, music, pacing, sound-illustration and “sound-counter-narration” of the actual content of the text etc. I therefore hope that it can be an inspiration for our projects!

(& very belated—sorry!) Blog Post 1:

After having read (and discussed in class) the texts by Kirschenbaum, Liu and Spicher Kasdorf et al, all of which focus on different aspects of reading and literature in the digital realm, I started thinking about the relationship between form and content, and I was astonished that if at all, this topic only appeared quite indirectly in the presented texts.

The thought came to my mind first when Liu introduced Blair and Sherman’s work about annotation practices and mentioned scribbled notes in the margins of books. As someone who cannot read without a pencil to underline and write, and as someone who loves handwriting and paper, I am one of those who still find it hard to read longer texts on a screen even though I used computers from the age of 13. When I do, I use the underlining and commentary functions extensively, but I am pretty sure that what I write in the “digital margins” is different from what I would write down in the margins of a book displaying the same text. I would not call one of those ways to write into the margins “better” than the other, and I certainly don’t want to join the ranks of those who lament about the disappearance of analog writing and reading as a matter of principle, or who decry digital technologies. But I do think that it is important to reflect critically about the media, the technologies and the digital infrastructure we use, and to acknowledge that there is a relationship between the content we express and the form in which we express it. This accounts for the book as a medium as well as for digital platforms and means to display content. The texts do this, but in a way that seemed to me as if the authors implicitly would accept the digital realm as a sort of “second nature”, as something neutral, something that mainly adds new possibilities to engaging with literature instead of understanding it as an infrastructure created by humans and commercial companies, and as an infrastructure that promotes certain forms of expression as well as it is defined by certain limitations.

One of the best, and indeed overworked, examples therefore is twitter with its limitation to 140 characters per tweet. As Kirschenbaum states in a side note, twitter’s “format encourages brief, conversational posts (…) that also tend to contain a fair measure of flair and wit” (my emphasis). Twitter is only one example for digital infrastructures providing various new possibilities to engage with (and produce) literature and to explore new “agencies of the readers” (McKenzie/Liu), but—as is any sort of analog printed text too—these new possibilities are not only provided but also restricted and to some extent determined be the means used in order to write, publish, read and respond to texts. Hayles’ differentiation between deep and hyper attention as two distinct forms of cognitive styles could for example be a starting point in order to analyze which digital medium could be best suited for certain projects associated with the Humanities.

Therefore, when Liu presents the use of Facebook to help students engaging with Shakespeare’s works, I think that it would be as interesting to explore what the students learned about the possibilities and limitations of Facebook as about Romeo and Juliet. While Liu asks: “how does engagement with literature or literary communities inflect, extend, or criticize the culturally dominant tools and practices of vernacular social computing?”, he concludes that these questions “can wait until we have more experience with literary social computing.” I would disagree and suggest that an analysis of those culturally dominant tools should be a part of any undertaking in the Digital Humanities from its very beginning.

Until this assignment, I had never listened to an audiobook. The closest I get is a yearly listen to Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which I have on the original  Caedmon LP (1958). In searching for audiobooks, I came across a claim that this particular recording was one of the first iterations of what we’d now call an audiobook. However, that is clearly untrue, as it only makes sense that recordings for the blind would have been produced since the early 20^th century, and Rubery confirms this in his brief history of recorded spoken word (62-63). Perhaps it marks an early example of a recorded fiction that was meant to appeal to the masses.

Because I had never listened to an audiobook I decided to pick something I’d never read. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 seemed like a good choice, since it’s about books, and although I’d seen the Truffaut film adaptation I’d never read the book. It’s a short novel as well, and because my time is extremely limited I wanted something that wouldn’t take too many hours, and which I wouldn’t have to listen to while doing other things or skip sections to get through it.  In other words, I made a conscious choice to listen to it in the same way I would have read it in an ideal scenario: solitary and with focus, and only on the subway or at the gym if necessary. But I also discovered that this approach to listening (i.e., as if it were reading) is extremely ingrained and very unconscious. While I was looking for something not too long, my main concern was that I tend to be a slow reader, and I was worried that even a recording of 5-6 hours might take longer for me to get through.  I was not anticipating a situation like the public reading of Dickens described by Rubery: a performance in which “the recitation of a scene that takes a mere ten minutes to read silently to one’s self can take upwards of forty minutes when read aloud before an audience” (58). I was anticipating somehow being a “slow listener,” because I was equating listening to the physical act of reading text and the cognitive act of interpreting it.

This led me to think more about my own bias towards the traditional reading experience and the weird neuroses that (I now recognize) go along with it. My ideal reading experience is tactile, focused, solitary–albeit too slow and occasionally distracted–and in some way amounts to an accomplishment once a book is finished. Not getting around to reading  books l’ve begun or reading “enough” books feels, to me, like not doing other things I like and really should do-–like going to the gym, seeing my friends more often, organizing my life more effectively.

But why should listening not count as a type of reading? Just as Edison advocated, blind people and those who cannot easily manipulate a book or e-reader undoubtedly consider it reading (62).  Although reading and listening engage different senses and “sense data” as well as different kinds of language processing, they both involve a reading voice and a narrative interacting with one’s imagination.  There are drawbacks to audiobooks (not everyone has a voice like Dylan Thomas) but for me the benefit is that I can concentrate entirely on the narrative without the act of reading mediating it. The physical process of reading and the inner voice that silently repeats the words can sometimes distract me from the world of the text. I am sure  this experience must vary according to the way one’s brain is wired. However, I think the verdict for me in terms of which is a more “effective” method will depend on how much I retain of Fahrenheit 451 and for how long.

There is so much I could write about Fahrenheit 451 in audio format and the way it accentuates elements of the novel that speak directly to contemporary culture and electronic media consumption. But that would entail a very long essay. “Meta” is an understatement, to say the least. Written in 1953, the novel explores reading vs. listening, memory vs. text, scripted reality, voyeuristic mass media, and the effects of ubiquitous audio devices in everybody’s ears, for example. It even includes a form of solitary, immersive narrative entertainment that has superseded the interior-yet-immersive experience that reading–whether visual or aural–can be. Broadcasts on the wall-sized television screens that define the “parlors” of people’s homes in the novel enact the “secondary orality” discussed by Ong and Donoghue. In fact, they are precisely the “programmes imitating participatory communities such as book groups without actually bringing readers into contact with other human beings” (69). At the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist discovers real human connection–and himself–through interacting with others who value books, reading, and the roles creative thought and narrative play in humanizing the world.

For this assignment, I chose a LibriVox recording of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Having already heard some commercial audiobooks, I wanted to try an amateur production. I chose Souls not only because I know it well, but because it presents two big challenges to narration: the chapters are a mix of genres, from critical essay to fiction, and each begins with an epigraph followed by musical notation of part of a Sorrow Song, the music of enslavement.

The quality of the production is excellent. The narrator, known simply as toriasuncle, has what Rubery calls “verbal muscularity” (67)—a resonant, warm voice that could easily belong to an African-American man like Du Bois. (I listened to a recording of Du Bois himself, and toriasuncle’s voice is nearly identical in register and in his slightly slushy s sounds.) The recordings from chapter to chapter were impressively consistent aside from an occasional variation in volume and one chapter where the reader was so close to the microphone that it picked up the breath of aspirated consonants.

Toriasuncle is the sole narrator, and with impressively well-chosen pauses, he takes to heart the LibriVox manual’s hope of “controlling the pace in order to engage the listener.” He makes effective choices to modulate his voice for different characters, whether historical or fictional, and his treatment of female voices is particularly noteworthy, as he softens his voice rather than changing his pitch—a technique Rubery notes, explaining, “male narrators often have more success speaking female parts in a whisper rather than a falsetto” (67). This softening reinforced the diminutive role of women in Du Bois’s collection of thoughts on black life at the dawning of the 20^th century. Because I knew the printed text well, I did a lot of what Rubery called “prooflistening” (68) and found that only one character—white John in chapter 13—didn’t speak as I had imagined.

Impressively, just as toriasuncle shifts his voice to reflect the speaker, so too he changes instruments (in what seems to be a digital program like GarageBand) as he plays the bars of the sorrow songs, seeking to reflect their “characters” and to match the tone of the chapter. For example, a lone, plaintive guitar picks out the notes opening chapter two, which speaks to failed Reconstruction. Chapter three is a scathing critique of Du Bois’s philosophical arch-enemy, Booker T. Washington; Toriasuncle plays its opening bars with clipped, plucked strings despite the legato marks—an abrupt departure from the more fluid bars of the first two chapters. This license he takes with the musical notation is the only evidence of him “editing in the guise of auditing” (67). Otherwise, toriasuncle stays true to every line of printed text.

Overall, listening to this edition Souls was ear-opening.* The most striking contrast from the print edition was hearing the music that opens each chapter. It highlighted what had become for me a forgotten last chapter—“Of the Sorrow Songs”—where Du Bois traces the contribution and evolution of music from Africa to popular minstrelsy. Similarly, in reading the text on paper, I had skipped the German Du Bois peppers throughout. Hearing the language underscored Du Bois’s scholarship and worldliness powerfully juxtaposed with the white perception of black academic potential at the time—a perception Du Bois addresses directly in the text. It also helped me make connections to his reference in chapter 13 to Wagner’s Lohengrin and to an alliterative line in chapter 14, “to Queen and Kaiser,” as well as to hear how white audiences might have received Du Bois himself as an intellect in 1903. By contrast, I was jarred by white characters’ use of the n-word—a markedly uneducated and base term and one that seems more contained on the page than when spoken in the ear. Toriasuncle rightfully imbues it with all the superiority and hate with which it was spoken then and now.

One true revelation of the listen was the continuity it gave the text, broken up only by the boilerplate librivox language at the start of each chapter. Since Souls binds together chapters of many genres, the narrative voice for each sounds different to me in print. Toriasuncle kept the autobiographical tone of the forethought and first chapter throughout, even in the chapter that is fiction, “Of the Coming of John.” That consistency knit together the variety of threads through which Du Bois looks at the African-American experience and made it feel, as it of course was, intensely personal to him.

The audio experience had far more perks than I imagined, and I’m already planning to listen to more, starting with the only other toriasuncle recording, a collection of poetry. Yes, I had to take notes on paper or my phone, and yes, arriving and departing subways made me miss what may have been important sentences, but the ability to read while moving through the city on my commute or, as I did twice, taking a long walk in McCarren Park, did make the text feel immediate and alive.

*If Rubery can make bad puns, so can I.

Patrick Grady O’Malley

Blog 1

What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?

MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM

When we look throughout humanities departments, it isn’t difficult to find a place for the Digital Humanities within most of the darkest corners of the many factions of study. Take art history for example, and how with imagery recognition, the entire field could be revolutionized. While the author takes a more meta approach than the title should suggest (largely talking about humanities departments in all as opposed to strictly English), I believe the article is stronger for this. As readers we gain insight into what has formed the Digital Humanities over the years and what they are to become. The author reserves only one of the final paragraphs for purposes of comparing Digital Humanities strictly to English departments.

While the author doesn’t necessarily stay strict to the English department as the sole home to Digital Humanities work, he does invoke ideas of textual representation that could be computationally monitored and explored in some way such as through social media, namely Twitter, but he also mentions “electronic discussion lists, blogs, Facebook walls” to give us the impression that the Digital Humanities, while new and still forming, are everywhere and have been for some time. Even his overarching/working definition comes from Wikipedia (and Google), the hubs of internet textual data. It is also interesting that Kirschenbaum briefly mentions some of the more notable Digital Humanities projects happening in labs across the nation, all that largely have to do with text.

To me, an interesting project would be taking the many academic journals that focus on the digital humanities, and text mine for words that can be said to define the field from different periods within said field’s history. What would the Chronicle of Higher Educationsay differently about the Digital Humanities now versus five, ten years from today? How different/necessary/helpful would Digital Humanities be to institutions at these various time frames and what could articles root in its study have to tell us about such an inquisition?

As mentioned, the author is largely devoted to social media outlets such as Twitter to pursue Digital Humanities research. But what of Instagram and the many hashtags used as well as captions and comments? What could we learn of image recognition through the use of such text? There are surely many interesting projects on social media that extend beyond Twitter. Obviously, his choice for focusing on Twitter is obvious, as this seems to be the industry standard of DH/SM choices, probably because it has a largely cosmopolitan/coastal following (at least more so than Facebook, which has likely become more generalized), it is rooted in text, and tweets are very, very short bits of data. But just as with Instagram, let’s suppose we were allowed access to Snapchat’s secretive, but surely available, data storage and able to mine through images and videos along with the many hilarious textual narratives compiled amongst the Snaps themselves? That would surely be a new way of harboring data from social media that must be possible in some way (unless Snapchat actually deletes what we create after it is seen, but who believes that!)

While the author is more dedicated throughout the text to explain the convoluted history of Digital Humanities, as least more so than to explore the nuances within social media, both past and future. However, this is just as much an element within as the Digital Humanities belonging largely to English departments, in that he explores many of the realms Digital Humanities fit and have been tried to be part of. I’d have been more interested if instead of English, we were talking Comparative Literature, and the usage of multiple languages had been discussed than Twitter mining, but maybe that’ll be in the sequel.