Thinking about writing from an aural standpoint

My friend has a new book out. We are both Mac nutcases, and I'm very proud of her, as it is getting some good reviews.

J.D. Biersdorfer: iPod: The Missing Manual

I'm also an iPod owner, but probably not for the reason you might think one would be. That's what I want to talk about today.

I don't think the iPod is the be-all and end-all for what I want to do with it yet, but when it comes to Apple, I've always been willing to be an early adopter. I got one with the wheel that turns, so you see, I was even kinda stupid to be such an early adopter.

But I have really no interest in RIAA or music MP3s unless they come from independent, unaffiliated musicians. I think I've been basically boycotting popular music for the past 20 years. That's what I get for originally training as a disc jockey and seeing too much.

I am in love with radio, but radio as it no longer exists. Voices and songs bleating out of the dark. FM dead air space and philosophical wack job DJs. Talk radio in the middle of the night. No advertising, or maybe just the crap that doesn't think it is an ad even thought it is on NPR (and no, I'm not talking about those interminable beg-fests). I can't stand all the homogenization out there. It is the aural version of a strip mall that looks the same in every town.

So I stopped listening to radio altogether, and I won't listen again until it finds its soul. I am always amazed at people who think the status quo defines a thing for all time. When I can't live inside the status quo, I shut it out of my life altogether.

So why did I get an iPod? Are you kidding? What's not to love about a hard drive that fits in your pocket? Do they work with digital cameras yet? I am a bandwidth pig, so I want to be able to dump a massive flash memory card into there and keep shooting hi-res, so that is one idea I had.

I also synch the iPod with my Palm/Address book and iCal data. The navigational interface on the iPod is quite obtuse for that use, I must say, but I keep hoping. Wonder what will come down the pike with WiFi for the iPod. Right now there's no stylus, there's no data input, without synching to a CPU.

Here's what I use my iPod for: audio books. I got a friend who does this too, buys them on CD and moves them to MP3 cuz with audio books, you don't really care about the fancy sound qualty.

It has to be UNABRIDGED too. Pity me, cuz I like long books. The Harry Potter series is my favorite. My friend and I both do it for bedtime stories. Hey, it cures insomnia. Harry, Ron, and Hermione dashing around if my attention floats to the surface, half sleeping, half waking.

I've gotten some from Audible.com, which is an OK company, but the selection isn't exactly right on (it tilts like your basic public library, toward popular fiction, how-to, blockbusters, and sometimes really mediocre readers). Also, when you punt Audible titles to the iPod, they don't break down into chapters or nodes or chunks, so listening, you either bookmark your spot or start over. Try doing that in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which is dense, even if it is shorter than Cryptonomicon.

I'm not as fond of coverting Audiobook CDs I own to MP3s, like my friend is. Huge files or smaller (relatively), it all gets pretty unwieldy and slow. I need a bigger hard drive on my computer, or a new computer. Wouldn't that be nice? Wish I had the $$$.

What does all this have to do with writing and blogging? Not a whole lot on the immediate surface, although thinking about audio files and radio makes me think about people trying audio blogs, which chunks sound up, but still can't change its linearity. And I think about functions of orality vs literacy.

Audio chunks are linear and maddeningly always in a "box," a click away, whether on audio blogs or massively big audio books. I love playing these through my car on trips, btw. And I'm giving thought to the Audible subscription to All Things Considered or Marketplace (does Audible have Marketplace yet?), because I work at the time it is on the regular radio, and I miss it sometimes. Other times public radio affectations make me insane. Usually the parts I love outweigh the insane parts.

I got Dante's Inferno in an audio book too. It was one of those classics I said I would always get around to reading, but I never did. The effort of reading, normally not a problem for me as I read like a sponge, put an odd barrier in front of some titles that made me always set them aside for another day, sort of like reading French deconstructionists for fun. Not something you often do at the beach, although I'm more likely to do such a thing than most folks.

Once an audio book is started tho, you get hooked in, passively. Generally I have a religious conviction AGAINST passive media experiences. But voices bleating out of the dark, or the trance drive cross-country, they speak to me in peculiar ways, ways I will try not to let TV do (unless I happen to be watching a Xena, Warrior Princess marathon or something like that, cult and quirky).

And it is that experience that inspired me to write this post. In Dante's Inferno HEARD on audio book (without relying on my halting reading of an unfamiliar style), I heard the iambic, the rhythm of the lines. I also started to feel the movements through the levels of hell as they related to the rhythms of the lines. I didn't so much listen to Dante's Inferno as much as I rode through it, ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump. That was way cool.

Oh, and not just old moldy classics. Check out Tolkien. I wish the reader were as good as the Harry Potter reader. Confession: I am too dyslexic to actually read Tolkien in text form. Too many strange words, and I learned to read like a sponge as a kid through word recognition, subconscious memorization, and subconscious contextualizing. I checked it again the other day. Tolkien is just inpenetrable for me.

And I love the movies, no matter how boring. I want to live in New Zealand, want to live in Middle Earth. I'm entirely under the spell, so I went for the audio books on CD. Now THERE is a dude writing in rhythm, nearly prose poems, especially the Tom Bombadil section. (Ursula LeGuinn has an essay about the prosody of Tolkien, btw. It's in one of those sci-fi essay collections). There are larger prose movements you start to FEEL in Tolkien in the audio format too, picaresque movements (that means learning through a journey), rhythms of scary parts, then resting parts, then scary parts, then resting parts.

So listening to audio books and other kinds of audio artifacts make me think about other ways that words can be, see? That's what I'm getting at. You hear different things inbetween sentences. I'm even thinking that my own writing is affected by more and more practice HEARING (ooh, wouldn't Father Walter Ong be proud?). I'm thinking there's something more going on here. Not hypnotic, but definitely tied back to the Greek mythos and topoi of the great speech makers of the Greek and Roman democracies.

I kinda feel like I'm touching the edges of those massive memory skills they had, as well as visualization skills, which go with it and are often overlooked. In our literacy-focused age, you sorta assume their big memories were strictly verbal, left-brained. But I think orality, sound, is closer to the imagistic and visual than alphabetic texts (which of course are read visually) are.

This is probably obvious to many, and I'm just stating the obvious, like a bozo. Oh well. So be it.

Chris