bellascribe/blogs

A couple weeks ago, The NYT ran Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading! (May 26; Amy Harmon; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/fashion/thursdaystyles/26audio.html?
ex=1117857600&en=8d988ee3795d9ecd&ei=5070) that is tangentially related to one of the foremost concerns, and facts, of my days, which might be expressed thus so: Rather Quiet, Doubtful, Unabridged Perhaps Without End: Can This Really Be Writing? The NYT story, as you might guess, is about listening to books on tape, to put it crudely (the article’s nicely written, worth reading), and the [modern] age-old controversy: “If you’ve listened to a book, have you really ‘read’ it?”

There are a lot of excellent reasons to hear the written word, especially stories. A recent e-mail from a former student [newly published] reminded me that — though certain ideas or tenets I’ve held may have fluxed in importance over time — if there’s anything like an absolute when it comes to making your writing its best possible self, it is to always read aloud what you write. I won’t argue against listening to books, stories, poems, texts, what have you. I’d rather hear it live, and the author reading it herself or himself, but that is a different matter, for some other time.

But an audio version replacing the reading of what’s been set down as text, the written words, isn’t an argument I can make. Exception being if the author never writes the story down at all, i.e. means for the experience to be auditory/oral only, which I suppose is what is generally considered or thought of as storytelling (which I love and for which I have a deep and abiding respect), and which is again a different matter, some other time. With print, it’s the collaboration between writer and reader, what is referred to as co-creating, as in how this writer puts it here:

…you perform the poem (by reading it silently or aloud to yourself) rather than having it performed for you at a poetry reading or by means of a recording. The post-modernists would call this co-creating the work

Though, saint-andre is talking about poetry, it’s applicable to fiction as well — not just this quoted part, but the whole thing, really, which has everything to do with our NYT story and everything to do with how and why this saint-andre post came to my attention in the first place.

From the NYT story:

But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else.

He listened in the car, eating lunch, doing the dishes, sitting in doctors’ offices and climbing the stairs at work.

…however, he had the multitasking satisfaction of digesting a book he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading.

From the saint-andre post:

. . . life is getting faster and faster. We live in a culture of immediate gratification, sounds bites, the latest news, instant messaging (because email just isn’t fast enough — mea culpa!), continuous partial attention [my emphasis] . . .

Read the entire post for the well laid-out argument in support of “slow time” and “making special” — which (obviously) I support and which I have not at all done justice to. Before signing off on this Part I, let my disclaimer extend to repeat that — especially for a fair and balanced view — the NYT story is informative and well-written, worth reading.

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