As the editor for The Office Crew audiobook project, I was committed to adding an extra layer of complexity to the already intricate short story of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. Our three readers randomly assigned themselves their favorite bits, and those were then sent to me, the editor. I used the reader’s voices as a guide to set the mood and tone.

The Voices:

Using Adobe Audition editing software, I compiled the voices. First, Ostap’s reading, showcasing the setting and establishing the story, Lisa’s dialogue between all the men in the office, and Semon’s take on the narrator’s inner monologue. Due to his repetitive dialogue and machine-like actions, we collectively decided on a robotic voice for Bartleby. To achieve this, I used an effect called flanger; I boosted the male voice enhancer and stripped the audio of any “noise.” The effectively made Lisa’s voice cold, distant, and mechanical. I also played with the narrator’s inner turmoil. For this, I took the audio Montage already filtered through a program and enhanced the audio piece with convolution reverb effects like memory space and infinite tunnel. These gave the narrator’s voice an echo, an effect that proved fantastic for “inner thoughts.” Through these distinct voices, listeners, unlike the readers, are given a 3-dimensional narrator.  

The SoundEffects:

After editing the voices, I added sound effects by foley artists. In my Youtube Creative library, I found sounds like: walking on wooden floors, writing on paper, writing with an inkwell, newspapers, and opening/closing drawers.  I combined these via a processed called “mix paste,” which combines selected sounds into one “mixtape” the individual   I did the same process for ambient sounds like horses, cobble streets, distant voices, and walking on roads. Both mixes added to the sense of setting both inside and outside of Bartleby’s office. 

The Music:

Music gives meaning to pieces by setting the tone and pace for the story. For Bartleby, I debated between two styles: one more upbeat and wacky and another more soft and sad. When Ostap’s voice came in, describing the setting, and the wacky office characters like Turkey and Gingernut, I choose the piece entitled English Country Garden was perfect for reflecting this. It also gave the story a sense of pace, and it made, at least in my opinion, the narrator a bit more likable and relatable. This music also added to the sense of weirdness, awkwardness, and mystery surrounding the office. Once we moved to the darker, more somber setting of the tombs, I changed the music to Allègro. Allègro altered the tone of the piece, foreshadowing Bartleby’s quiet end. It also added to the sadness we can infer in the narrator’s voice when he learns of Bartleby’s previous job.

Final Thoughts:

For the final presentation, I used the Headliner App to add the final touch: a visual representation of the sound waves. Overall my experience in sound editing and podcast production proved to be a great asset in piecing together this amalgamation of voices and sound. Is this collaborative workflow that separates the audiobook from the written book. Here we can literally hear not just the individual voices, but each person’s idea and interpretation of the text given Melville’s work new life and style. This adventure reminded me of Orsen Welles’ 1938’s War of the Worlds’ radio play. Adding sound effects and music grounded the tale, engaging the listener, and creating an immersive experience and a rollercoaster of emotions (even if Bartleby didn’t have any).

The communal workplace ceased to exist in March of this year, and for those of us who have had to commute to a 9-5 office, we probably won’t be returning until next year. In this sense, the workplace is now an imagined world existing only as we remember it. There are a number of noise machines or atmospheric sound generators on the internet that replicate this environment, and allow us to relive the audial elements. They pose an interesting Philosophical puzzle to me and https://imisstheoffice.eu/ in particular is representative of a great work in digital humanities which brings this shared experience to life. MIT Technology Review also recently ran an article on this phenomenon which goes to show its contemporary relevance in technology circles.

If we were told today would be the last day in an office, we might bring home objects that were dear to us, or take photos of our desks. Few of us would think to take a field recording as a snapshot in time. Even then, a sample of sound wouldn’t be able to encompass the whole of experience. Let’s imagine we took a recording for one minute. We might miss the squeaky wheel of our neighbor we were used to hearing around lunch, or the clattering of keys as a late email comes in. These noise machines attempt to unify the standard elements and its success can be gauged on how precisely they meet our expectations. 

Sound effects are used in audiobooks in order to transport the reader, so these elements are nothing new. An audiobook on war might include machine gun fire, or a children’s book set in a zoo might include bioacoustics animal noises. These are transportive and secondary to the reading, but nonetheless important to an overall immersive quality.

I’d like to lay out one necessary and one sufficient condition of audiobooks, but leave the rest I leave to Philosophers of Aesthetics:

A necessary condition of an audio book is that it is an oralization of a text. I would argue that the office experience is one which has an agreed upon script because it is uniquely banal and practiced ad infinitum. If we allow that this script is not written down, but ingrained in us as and handed down as we spend time in a particular role, and a script is a kind of text, we may allow that it is also a candidate for adaptation. Audiobooks of “texts” from purely oral traditions also are considered audiobooks without much opposition.

We can also with a degree of accuracy ascertain what and what are not office sounds. That explains the limited scope of the office script. Street sounds, loud chatter about very personal matters, and restaurant sounds would not be counted among those we hear in the office. Opening and closing doors, low chatter, the hum of printers and copiers, count among those we would expect instead. I would argue there is a limited set and perhaps no more than 10 audial elements we might identify as essential to the office script. 

A sufficient condition of audio books is that the speaker is playing roles, or acting parts. A person is not their occupation. And in an office space they are acting out certain lines of dialogue and behavior according to their position. Whatever language used in the office must then be considered performative. A conversation for another time would be: if people are working from are they then relegated to an always-on work personality? This condition is sufficient because we must make room for the Author of a text reading of their autobiography in which case they would not be acting out anything: they are dictating lived experience.

For this week’s audio project, I didn’t go too original. I choose the original 1938 broadcast radio for World of Wars by Orsen Welles and the Mercury Theater. The ensemble of cast/characters, audio producers, and technicians retold the story of the fictional alien invasion and the unnamed human survivor written by famous science fiction novelist H.G. Wells. The audio adaptation by Howard Knoch changed the story from the original English town to a town in New Jersey, here in the US. Another alteration took place at the beginning of the broadcast for a more dramatic yet realistic effect over the radio. The change consisted of fictional news bulletins that interrupted regular programming. These reported on the events taking place during the invasion. It was supposed to play out as if it was happening right now. 

Though the original broadcast didn’t reach a substantial amount of people, the legend of it provoking panic and total evacuations of its listeners after thinking the broadcast/invasion was “real” is a wild and overly exaggerated tale all media students learn about in Media 101. The point of telling us media scholars about this “event” is to demonstrate the power and reach of the media, a great story, and of course, an excellent storyteller (both Wells and Welles).  

I enjoy science fiction and horror, but I prefer these in the audiovisual medium. Though the novel, War of Worlds, is well written, there’s no doubt that’s a great story; I can empathize with the impact, engagement, and entertaining factor that it has in the audio realm. What’s great about the written word is that readers can take their time with the material; they can put it down if it becomes too overwhelming. Readers can also look back through the pages and recall details or confirm doubts. Listeners, on the other hand, are taken on a wild ride of audio sound effects. In this case, for example, the urgency in the actors’ voices and the rhythmic tick-tock of a clock added to the listener’s engagement.  However, at that time, if you missed vital information or the name of a place or thing, you would be lost. In order to enjoy the story, one must have great attention and listening skills. This is why SOME folks that missed the introduction to the piece, tuned in during the middle of the broadcast, lost and inferred that an actual invasion was taking place!

Our relation to a cloud-based approach to unify data sources depends on how difficult the task is to compile a set of our thoughts when reading Ebooks spread across many devices. Far from the idyllic cumulus set against a patch of baby blue drifting overhead, my cloud has rendered sopping my highlights and notes, raining on any attempt to facilitate distributed reading. 

Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books presence grew in embodied size and complexity as the Mobi file was passed from Kindle app on my iPhone, to Amazon Fire tablet, and finally the Kindle software for Windows over the period of a week. I’ll leave it for Ebook historians to gauge how my conclusion Marginalia is opposed to the format of an e-text holds up; but as the “reverse bell drive” of Price’s estimation that will see books “bear witness to the mental and emotional lives of their readers” and drive readers’ annotations back to the fore, the problem of HCI has to be dealt with first. It may have to do with the legal limitations set when we “borrow” or “license” a text from Amazon. That each device, with their unique manufacturers, has built-in limitations regarding how a text can be modified. DRM and strict EULAs could also be culprits. But don’t highlights sit on top of a text, whereas notes and annotations sit alongside, and from this perspective there is hardly any modification of the original text going on?

Price notes that in East Asia the phone is the preferred method of reading ebooks, in France its laptops, and in Britain “e-readers have begun losing ground to phones”. But what about a peripatetic American who will read a text on three different devices before getting through it? Price writes that a company called Rebook allows users to generate “association copies” and “give away ebooks that they’ve underlined or annotated”. We really hold our own thoughts on texts in such damn high esteem, and still are relegated to the Sidebar! It’s a shame there isn’t a universal design system that emulates the notation capabilities of hypothes.is, Manifold, and Markdown.

Yellow announces its return Zelig-like from far-flung devices in shades of pale, mellow, and stark. I now have three sets of yellow tints to mark highlights, and their varying shades are refocusing my attention where they ought to have been uniform. I’m naturally led to believe that the stark yellow lines of text are of more importance than the mellow ones, and following the hierarchy down, pale yellow lines should be considered an afterthought. Accounting for differences in screen resolution, color calibration, and refresh rate, my laptop ought to be seen as the source of truth, but I fear that it has exacerbated differences due to its position as a Gaming laptop that supports sRGB colors. 

With my highlights proving unreliable, I move on to the notes section which has imported properly from my devices, but sits puerile. Alan Liu takes this up in “From Reading to Social Computing’: that scribbling in the margin is “a whole zone of literary activity that is undecidably readerly and writerly”. But he equates historical margins with the commentary sidebar on a blog, and the two don’t square. True marginalia allows you to get in the guts of the system and attack head on, or defend upfront a point that you found worthy. The etymology of the word might mean off to the side, but the historical development of a term should never be seen to offer teleological guidance. The sidebar is a skeuomorph, pandering to polite and perceived notions of where our own thoughts should sit in relation to the author’s.

Here’s a hope for the future of commentary on the internet. Blog commentary applications like Disqus won’t be relegated to the bottom of an article or post, but rather allow for literary zones that are messy, moving in the intestinal tract of the text where real work and digestion happens. I call for a mainstream rollout of the niche products that researchers have been using to do deep research on articles.

This week’s readings were a roller-coaster ride about Western literacy and the book.  I began with Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.  I am of an age that I, too, remember the fear that the rise of electronics would be the death keel for analog content.  When Price writes, “[a]s magazines migrated from doormats to laptops, articles vied to diagnose the disappearance of a way of life that American had once read” (Price 2), I recalled the shock I felt in 2012 when the weekly news magazine Newsweek ceased to publish its print edition, offering instead “a paid, subscriber-only product for the tablet” (Thompson). 

I grew up with Time Magazine and Newsweek, the former a voice for the more conservative thinkers in my family and the latter a sop to its younger, more liberal members.  When I moved into my twenties and thirties, I dutifully kept subscriptions going to both, the better to keep the conversations less lively at family gatherings.  My annual Christmas gifts of a subscription to Newsweek to my conservative uncles were accepted, if not embraced.  But, when Newsweek died, I remember thinking that its loss did not bode well for the civil discord of my family, and I was not mistaken.  Their attitudes hardened, and discourse soon was relegated to family gossip, fishing, and the weather.

Alan Liu’s From Reading to Social Computing was a comprehensive overview of how the arrival of the Internet has forever changed the ways that we communicate.  Of particular interest to me was the section on Web 2.0 that spoke to the evolution of specific platforms into content management systems.  Liu writes, “blogs and their derivatives (including all manner of sites powered by the WordPress blog engine and Drupal community-message-board engine that have evolved into general-purpose content management systems)” (Lui).  As both a maker and a user of these derivatives, I often think about their archives’ ephemeral nature.  A recent example is Yahoo.  When that platform was sold to Verizon, the new owner promptly shuttered Yahoo Groups to new content, and old content was deleted (Brodkin). 

While Verizon did give admin users the ability to download the data, and platforms like Groups.io created mechanisms to copy Yahoo group content to their servers (at a charge), the content of orphaned Yahoo groups was lost forever. Those archives dated back to 2001 and contained much of the history of the early Internet.  And, because Yahoo Groups was free, it was used by a wide variety of people.  I belonged to a beading group curated by an older person in Arizona; they had meticulously documented different beading methods and were generous with their historical knowledge of pattern design. When they died suddenly in 2010, there was no one to admin the group, so it went dormant.  However, the content remained visible to anyone who found it.  And now it is gone.

Perhaps it is the oddly ephemeral nature of online content that makes physical books so appealing, even if they are repurposed into other objects.  Leah Price turns to this theme in their article Reading in Place and asks the question: “What spawns this use of fake books as real reading migrates online?” (Price B10).  She posits that one reason is we live in spaces designed to house books, so we continue to collect them.  Another is pleasure reading and the advent of the paperback, which can be read anywhere.  For Price, “Books continue to connote stillness” (Price B11), and that is something that we who dwell in the cacophony of modern life often need to embrace.

Professor Allred grapples with the need for quiet reflection in his article Novel Hacks when he asks “whether students’ capacities for intensive focus and critical orientation will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking at the margins of the window, a mere click away” (Allred 115).  For Allred, the solution is the ability to give students the tools to make “their own reading, and the technologies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism” (Allred 115).  In this way, the dusty tome from a bygone era becomes a living monument to how the meaning of the novel has changed over time. For example, he shares that “students are often shocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth, scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality” (Allred 116). 

The digital tools used by Allred’s students include the ability to “share highlighted passages and marginal comments with their social networks” (Allred 117), which invites the students to become co-writers and collaborators when they create a new digital object from the source material.  I was particularly intrigued by the section on creating an Audiobook.  I did voice-over work for many years, and in the 1990s, one of my pro bono efforts was reading New York Magazine over closed-circuit radio for the blind and reading impaired.  Two readers would share the text, one would read for several paragraphs and then hand the mic over, and the second would read for a while.  That way, our voices would not tire, and we could read for several hours without a break.  I was particularly amused by how challenging one group of students found producing an audiobook of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when they initially opted to do it on live radio, but when confronted with those complexities, instead opted to assign a single chapter to each individual and have them record it privately.  I am very excited to see what our class will decide to do!

Bibliography

Allred, Jeff. “Novel Hacks, New Approaches toTeaching the Novel Genre.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagog (2014): 121-137.

Brodkin, Jon. “Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups.” arsTechnica. 17 Oct 2019. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/yahoo-is-deleting-all-content-ever-posted-to-yahoo-groups/>.

Lui, Alan. “From Reading to Social Computing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. 2013. eJournal. <https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/from-reading-to-social-computing/>.

Price, Leah. “Reading in Place.” Chronicle of Higher Education 59 (2012): B10-B11. eJounal.

—. What we talk about when we talk about books: the history and future of reading. First Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Hardcover.

Thompson, Derek. “Who’s Really to Blame for the Death of Newsweek?” The Atlantic. 18 Oct. 2012. eMagazine. <https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-death-of-newsweek/263814/>.

For next week, you will note on the syllabus that there’s a “yahoo” annotation assignment. Since we’re thinking about the history and future of annotations in the study of literature in this unit, I thought we could do a quick experiment prior to producing together an actual annotated edition of Benito Cereno. I want to see what happens when we’re confronted with, on the one hand, a relatively blank text–the Project Gutenberg plain vanilla HTML formatted text of Benito Cereno with no notes, introductions, or scholarly apparatus whatsoever–and, on the other, our own relative ignorance about the text.

The challenge, then, is to make annotations that mark areas of questioning or uncertainty, that provide interpretation or analysis of key moments, or gloss difficult words or concepts for peers, using little bits of research (e.g, the Oxford English Dictionary or other useful reference texts). We’ll use good ol’ hypothes.is for this, and please use both the allred720 tag and a “benito” tag as well, so we can pull out just these annotations as a separate stream if we like.

In terms of expectations, let’s say that you must make a minimum of five annotations for next week, but that your annotations can be on absolutely anything from any part of the text. And be sure to annotate the text I’ve posted on this site so your annotations will be with everyone else’s.

And in closing, you may find these two passages from Melville useful or therapeutic as you face this assignment.

First, from Benito itself:

Relieved by these and other better thoughts, the visitor, lightly humming a tune, now began indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray to Don Benito that he had at all mistrusted incivility, much less duplicity; for such mistrust would yet be proved illusory, and by the event; though, for the present, the circumstance which had provoked that distrust remained unexplained. But when that little mystery should have been cleared up, Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he allow Don Benito to become aware that he had indulged in ungenerous surmises. In short, to the Spaniard’s black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin.

Second, a riff on the unbearableness of whiteness from Moby Dick:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

 

Whether or not you prefer to, you will collaborate with peers in the production of an audiobook version of Melville’s enigmatic novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853). Each student will be assigned to a team, and each team will decide on how to divide up the work. I suggest that, at a minimum, each team have:

• reader/s: readers will read/record the text (duh). Each team will decide whether to have one voice read the entire text (it should take about 1:20 of continuous reading, excluding breaks) or whether to assign parts in a “radio play” format. More experimentally, a team could deliberately shift the voice of the narrator, having numerous actors voice one character.
• editor/s: editors will compile the audio files into a format that is listenable. This could involve a single long track or several chapters (though the original does not have chapters, you could create them); it could involve mixing in a soundtrack or sound effects as well. You could use Garage Band for Mac or the free/open Audacity; if you have the skills/software, you could use more sophisticated software. The key is not to have a product with high production values, however: I’m more interested in the process and how well you reflect on it.
• presenter/s: each group will present its a-book to the class on the due date of 9/24. Presentations will be brief (max 15 mins) but focused. Presenters will play a sample of the a-book and walk us through the process and the product: how the team divided the work, what strategic/aesthetic decisions were made, what worked well and what didn’t, how the final product speaks to (sorry) the secondary readings we’ve been doing.

You may want to use Slack or Google Docs or something similar to manage the workflow. The groups are small enough where things shouldn’t get terribly complicated, but it’s helpful to think through how to communicate from the outset.

The last requirement is that you compose a brief post for the blog (500 words max) reflecting on a) the process/product as a whole and b) your specific role within it, with an emphasis on what the experience taught you that merely reading about audiobooks (or, of course, merely reading Bartleby!) would have missed. The post is due on 10/1.

You will be evaluated on the following criteria, which I will not boil down to a simple rubric, since they all interact with one another in subtle ways:

• adventurousness: does the text take risks, or just play it safe? Is the audiobook a straight reading of the text, or does it do something strange/experimental in some way? Does the audiobook transform Bartleby radically or merely transpose it to a new medium?
• quality: is the product accessible? Does it sound good? Did the voice actors review the text and look up the pronunciations of unfamiliar words? Did the editors smooth out problems with the files, maintain steady audio levels, reduce noise where feasible, etc.?
• reflectiveness: does the presentation reflect the group’s careful thinking about the project? Did the secondary readings by Rubery, Allred, Benjamin, etc. feed into the conception of the project?

All group members will receive a collective grade for the group’s work. This can be unfair, I realize, and a given member can be uncooperative or unresponsive, but that’s also true in postgraduate life, so it’s good practice. Each of you will receive individual grades for your reflective post, as well. And all of the group projects will be folded into one grade (20% of total grade), so each project is “low stakes.” If your group is having problems (or has one problem member) you are encouraged to contact me privately for help.

As you plan your attack on this project, feel free to be a bit zany. It may be that “quality” and “adventurousness” are somewhat at odds (since it’s easier to have good quality if you know what you’re aiming for and easier to experiment if you’re not worried too much about quality), so consciously decide what you’re going for, go for it well, and have fun. I’d be tempted to play with the following (not a list for you to copy, necessarily, but a springboard for dreaming about it):

• representing Bartleby’s famous silences and repetitions: what if you used a whispered second track mixed in to represent B’s inner thoughts? Or played with very different vocalizations of the “same” statement that haunts the book (“I prefer not to”)?
• What about a crude video version, using photos or drawings or puppets along with the audio to capture the tensions at work in the text?
• Since the Occupy movement very consciously drew from Bartleby for inspiration, what about a transposition of the tale to a more recent setting to capture this connection in some way? Or even a montage (drawing from the above idea) of imagery of Occupy to accompany the original text?

The overarching theme here is to embody the ethic of “serious play”: there is truly no wrong way to do this, and we will all learn from your efforts, very much including the mistakes or the parts you wish you’d done differently. And I don’t know whether this is an incentive or not, but I will post the finished products to the blog so future students (or anyone who is interested) can enjoy your work. And keep the workload manageable: if you need to perform only a part of the text, or abridge it in some way, or report on what you would have done with more time, please do that!

And here are the two resulting books from the above project from my 2018 class: enjoy and think about how you might approach things. Group one used some echo effects to capture some of the derangement produced by Bartleby in the text’s narrator. Group two rather cheekily had the text-to-speech interface read the text and used that shortcut as a springboard to present to us Bartleby’s place in narratives of automation in cultural work.

You might also enjoy checking out an undergraduate effort: a wonderful Occupy Wall Street themed performance with amazing ambient sound.

Finally, here are the completed projects:

• the Ginger Nuts’ pandemic-themed version, which plays extensively with noise and distraction as a compositional principle.
• the Office Crew’s version draws out the text’s emphasis on the interplay between the mechanical and the biological, processing voices in various ways to underscore this theme.