Dear y’all!

Follow the think below to a little Spalding Gray adventure I created. I hope you find it entertaining and fascinating.

Happy Holidays!!

Lola

Immediately after reading Rubery’s Play It Again, Sam Weller, I watched an episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor travelled in time to meet Charles Dickens. In his introductory scene Dickens was performing A Christmas Carol in front of a live audience. I took this coincidence as a sign and decided that my final project would be on the history of the oral performances of novels. I am most interested in looking at Dickens and other historical and contemporary examples of literary work being read/performed in similar ways. With Rubery’s article as a starting point (mainly harvesting the bibliography of the article), I want to examine similar literary performances across time and space. 

Through this historical research, I want to investigate the element of performance, specifically when the author is performing and dramatizing his or her own work, and how it interacts with the text and the reading experience of the audience. How do these performances reflect the audience of a particular time and place? 

Andrews, Malcolm. Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves : Dickens and the Public Readings. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Yamagata, Naoko. “Plato, Memory, and Performance.” Oral Tradition, vol. 20 no. 1, 2005, p. 111-129. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ort.2005.0013.

Standish, Isolde. “Mediators of Modernity: “Photo-interpreters” in Japanese Silent Cinema.” Oral Tradition, vol. 20 no. 1, 2005, p. 93-110. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ort.2005.0017.

Chirico, Miriam. “Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 2, no. 1, American Humor Studies Association, Apr. 2016, pp. 22–46, doi:10.5325/studamerhumor.2.1.0022.

The Team With No Name members decided from the beginning of this project to focus on a particular section of the text. Coming from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives, this helped us engage with the assignment in our own individual way, although we continued to work together throughout the process. We met several times (on Zoom) and shared a Google Doc to discuss our work. Most of our interactions focused on sharing sources and sharpening our focus. Our interests ranged from the publications themselves, to a purely analytical view of the specific text, the tools of annotation, and the historical context for each audience. I chose to focus on annotating Fern and Beehive and drafting a brief introduction to our project. It was important for this project that our findings and perspectives thread together, and the remarkable and nuanced body of work about Cane in the early 1970s provided the focus of our research. 

This cornucopia of academic interests made this assignment more interesting, but we were probably too ambitious with our very academic research-focused approach, and this project feels decidedly unfinished. However, contextualizing Fern and Beehive across its different audiences clearly illustrates that an open annotation project like this one can never be finished. There can be limitations of the platform itself as we discussed in class, but a project like this, much like Cane itself, can be continually reinvented. There will always be a new reader bringing her own evolving perspective to Cane. As the next step to this project we envisioned annotating and expanding across other selections. I would have liked to include more multimedia to all the “songs”, similar to the lone newspaper find on Seventh Street, and include more primary sources from the 1920s. 

Looking through the history of responses to the novel, and considering its ‘evolving’ audience in the context of our readings (especially Iser’s The Implied Reader), exposed an interesting development in recent years. As more contemporary readers and literary critics framed Cane in the context of their own social and historical moment, there was a consistent effort to centralize the author’s own experience to speak about race in a new and nuanced way. This was consistently done by highlighting Toomer’s own words about his racial identity and experience. While this kind of engagement may appear to place the author ahead of the text, I think this focus on Toomer is accidental. His words happen to reveal what the audience already understands about the social context that Cane came out of; Jean Toomer’s own experience conveniently places Cane in a historical context to highlight the readers’ interests. 

As I learn more about new and old digital humanities projects and the history of the discipline, defining the scope of the digital humanities becomes more elusive. The space of DH activity seems to be changing and expanding constantly; not only in the nature and number of projects created, but in its values and attitudes. Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires examines the history of a few pioneering digital projects, and in the process it illustrates the very changing and expanding nature of the digital humanities. As Graham herself writes, “the discipline that has come to be known as the digital humanities encompasses too much activity and incorporates too many histories to identify a single genealogy for its protean operations.” P7

More than the evolving values and approaches of digital projects, the ultimate focus of the piece is sustainability. The Graveyard of Digital Empires came to be because the values and attitudes of digital scholarship have changed, moving away from “print architectures as the primary blueprint” etc. But most importantly, these projects are no longer alive because they did not deal with issues of sustainability, including their own. When it comes to issues of sustainability, I find myself as optimistic as Vannevar Bush about the reliability of machines, or at least I did before reading this article. I consistently dismissed concerns about the preservation of digital projects, because I was certain that this was purely an issue of technological advancement. Graham’s tour of the ‘graveyard of digital empires’ opened my eyes to the urgency of sustainability. 

There are two central values to digital humanities projects that have emerged as inherent values of the discipline in the course of this program; they are collaborative and open. I considered the collaboration and openness of digital projects primarily as means to elevate marginalized voices, by highlighting and preserving their histories and experience, but it is in the engagement of user activity that these projects truly live and are sustained. These values are central to the sustainability of digital projects. “The reliance of digital artifacts on the labor of human agents for development, support, and preservation is (it is now clear) a condition of digital textuality, even as it presents a challenge to older tendencies in the humanities to privilege the labors of the solitary scholar.”p8 

It is a little ironic that the Infinite Ulysses project is still in a coma, as Graham offered it as an example of a contemporary project focusing on sustainability. It is in the other example of James Joyce’s Ulysses that comes a unique example of conservation efforts. The project shares the data with major institutions, such at the University of Oxford Text Archive, and works to bring it to the attention of a large number of users, thus helping preserve it. But the most unique effort in sustainability is the active proselytizing, as “the project’s affiliates actively campaign to attract the interest and participation of new contributors.”

We first came together on two important decisions that dictated the course of this project: doing something unique and unexpected, and using an abridged version of the text to focus on Bartleby the character. Matt’s idea to only read footnotes, and Martin’s “pandemic-chic” version of somehow connecting Zoom and working from home, made me think of the text differently and brought out perspectives on tensions and themes that I had not considered before. 

From the beginning of this process I wanted to incorporate the intense scorching energy of the present into our audiobook. Our team discussion helped me narrow this down to a Year 2020 them, which would include an audio background to allow us to incorporate the political and social issues that speak closely to the text. The first soundbites I thought of were a compilation of Barbara Walters saying “this is 2020” and the sound of crackling fire coming in and out in the recording and intensifying into a roaring frightening sound of a huge forest fire to end the piece. We ended up using these sounds, and I think it was brilliant that Martin let the fire burn long after Matt’s reading was over.

Another part of the process that reshaped Bartleby (the story) was editing our abridged draft to find the best moments for the audio background. Not only did I develop a profound mistrust for the narrator, but I also found much more of our sweltering world’s conflicts and anxieties in the novella. I can best illustrate this with a couple moments in the text that I re-inserted into Georgette’s draft. The first was the narrator’s story about giving Turkey’s coat, especially the quote “In fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He was a man whom prosperity harmed.” I wanted to saturate this quote with Mnuchin’s voice (words) and poorly digussed disdain speaking about unemployment benefits . Another bit of text I returned to our abridged version was the moment of anticipation when the narrator returns to his office hoping to find that Bartleby is finally gone. The picture of Bartleby as a virus is complete, and he congratulates himself on removing him. This made me think of a very important 2020 relationship, Trump and Covid 19.

What I had not considered in our readings about audiobooks was how many decisions are made before the recording of an audio books takes place. These decisions bring in many more perspectives along with the voice of the reader or performer. Logistical constrictions of time and money alone can direct the way in which a book is read and recorded. When I was writing the presentation, I thought a lot about this process, our approach, and the different ideas that came together and it made me think of the different voices that can be heard in Matt’s reading. Every audio book production is different, but we won because we allowed each other to apply our strengths and supported all ideas that came forward. We were able to produce something that was truly collaborative and reflected each team member, and I am very happy and proud to be a Ginger Nut. 

Inspired by the prompt to find an “original audiobook” I chose to look at the New Yorker Fiction Podcast series, because it contains audio recordings of short stories chosen and read by other authors. Looking through the New Yorker archives I landed on an author whose work I know and love, but a story I had not yet read. I wanted to listen to the recorded voice first, without any formed ideas of the characters or the piece. 

The story I landed on is Barn Burning written by Haruki Murakami and read by Andrea Lee, a renowned writer in her own right. The most unique feature of Lee’s voice is also the reason I chose a recording from this series; she cannot really be considered an amateur reader, but she is not a professional actor. Her voice does not “perpetuate the tradition of staged readings by celebrated actors more so than the domestic pastime of reading aloud in the Victorian parlour.” ( Rubery, P65) The sound quality is excellent, but the focus and the purpose of the recording and the conversations that follows, is to listen to the story through and explore the voice of Andrea Lee.

Her reading is a performance in the sense that she lends a different voice to each character, but this is done mostly to differentiate between the characters. She applies something very close to her own speaking voice to the narrator, only slightly at a lower pitch and slower, perhaps to get closer to the voice of a male character. This could be because the main protagonist also happens to be a writer who recants the story with some detachment. As in most Murakami stories and novels, he is also the narrator. 

The most striking difference when I read the piece, after listening to it, is the visual transformation of the characters and places. In Lee’s voice the protagonist looked and sounded older and the setting was only vaguely Japanese. Settings looked more like in-between images of places I know. Much like the Mid-Atlantic accent it was neither Japan nor rural Ohio, but somehow it looked like both. The places were also more vivid when I read the story. 

I considered Rubery’s “ear contact” as I was listening to the story. I felt an intimate connection with the voice, “whispered directly into my ear” but the connection I felt with was Lee’s voice. Through her narration I felt more distant to the events and characters. Listening to a recording of the story as part of this podcast that lands her voice as much weight as that of Murakami is at least partially responsible for this. Taking the podcast as a whole, there are many voices and different media that come together to tell this story. This is a taste of the potential of digital audio technology to change the way we think about literature that Rubery discusses in his piece. It is also another form of a community moving further away from the idea of writing as a solitary experience. The original title I considered for this post was something like, Barn Burning written by Haruki Murakami, read by Andrea Lee, in a recorded conversation with Deborah Treisman, in which they also discuss the film version by Lee Chang-dong, and the loose relationship with William Faulkner’s story of the same name.

Have the anxieties of our time inspired us to find comfort in a fictional idea of what reading used to be? Are we living in an unprecedented new era, marking the end to a golden age of reading? In her introduction to What We Talk About When We Talk Novels, Leah Price argues that these digital-age questions about the printed word are not new and the golden age of reading was never what digital-age writers conceive. Making comparisons of current concerns with each historical reinvention of the book, she argues that “our own era continues rather than breaks with, a tradition of innovation that has seen new formats emerge over and over again for half a millennium.” (4)

Exploring the golden age of print from the “rise of mass audiences in the eighteenth century to the Cold War-era triumph of the paperback”, she identifies and counters three fundamental myths. The “myth of exceptionalism”, our twenty-first-reader sense that we are experiencing unprecedented change; the “myth of the ideal reader”, or equating reading with virtue; finally she lists the “myth of the self-made reader”, or the idea of an “unmediated communion between a reader’s mind and the author”, which “erases all the third parties who sell books, lend books, catalog books, give or withhold them.” This idea also erases how important and inevitable the community that connects other readers is.

One of the central arguments in the essay is that reading a book as a solitary immersive experience may have never existed in the way that is commonly assumed in the digital age. Yet the image of peacefully curling up in a comfortable chair with a good book, is pervasive in our culture ,beyond the academic conversation. Still I am not able to conceive of reading as a solitary experience, and I have not yet sensed a great difference between reading a printed book or a tablet or computer screen. This statement is always met with some level of horror, but I still enjoy both equally and I have never longed for one or the other. What has always mattered the most to me was the community of others reading the same words, but seeing and experiencing something different. 

As a child, I would immerse myself in a novel, often completely focused on the conversations that would follow. I wondered what landscapes and faces looked and smelled like to other readers, and I impatiently waited for my friends to finish the book so we could finally argue about the female protagonists. This were the last years of communist Albania, but many books were still forbidden. My older cousins secretly shared books, and sometimes handwritten stories, whose darkened corners and falling edges were covered in handwritten notes. 

It was one of my greatest aspirations to be part of their group. The thrill of peeking into a forbidden world proved irresistible and I read many novels that I was not ready for, and academic texts that I did not understand. I am still traumatized by The Stranger and just about everything that happens The House of Spirits. 

I was reminded of this when Leah Price looks at the tension between print and handwriting. Handwriting lasted up to late 18^th century in Europe, and its ability to avoid censure, in a way print cold not, allowed for radical writers and thinkers to publish their ideas. The same way reading forbidden literature worked in a communist country, this fostered a feeling of community and “forged a collective through the act of forwarding or exchanging ideas.” In many ways she argues this is similar to Twitter or blogging. I agree.