[{"id":"9284","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E6, Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 1 March 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/a9212c02-0491-458c-9d5a-eae284bc37f3/audio/3d08da82-0039-4ad4-8ed7-f1377e559fd8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,822,300 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/11/29/grippes-and-poche\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p.39 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/03/16/a-painful-affair\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/09/13/a-flying-start-2\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/25/in-plain-sight\\n\\nkyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549494956032,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["On February 14, 1984, Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University. She did a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1982  — her ninety-fifth work in the magazine. Containing the full recording of her reading, which includes Gallant’s live commentary as she reads, “Mavis Gallant Reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU” celebrates Gallant’s voice in print and audio. \n\nPart one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What is your favourite way to hear a story? How does a written work change when it’s read aloud, interrupted, or framed by moments of laughter and applause? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are always considering what transformations happen in the conversions between printed words, live events, and our un-archiving of recorded stories. These questions frame today’s episode, which will be a special treat for Canadian literature fans of prose and the short story. We present you with a full audio edition of a 1984 recording of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story “Grippes and Poche” at Simon Fraser university. This story was originally published in the New Yorker magazine in 1982. Our episode producers, Kate Moffatt, Candace Sharon, and Michelle Levy are researchers of book history.\n00:01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThey contextualize Gallant’s reading and invite you to consider the physical lives of her stories. How do we respond differently to this recording of a live reading, as opposed to engaging with a printed work? What do you hear in Gallant’s reading voice and her comments as she reads? This is part one of a two-part series based on this recording of Mavis Gallant. In June, part two of the series will guide us in a deeper exploration of the characters in the short story, the author, and recorded questions from the event we will hear today. We hope you enjoy this audio edition. Here are Kate, Kandice, and Michelle with [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Episode Six of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:02:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLike all people who read or perform – I’m a fetishist. The watch has to be there and not there. And you see, that’s why I’m doing all this fiddling. Can you all hear me?\n00:02:36\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Accordion] goes into background piano] On February 14th, 1984, acclaimed short story writer Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University to do a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche”, which was printed in the New Yorker in 1982. My name is Kate Moffatt.\n00:02:56\tKandice Sharren:\tI’m Kandice Sharren.\n00:02:58\tMichelle Levy:\tAnd I’m Michelle Levy.\n00:02:59\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as three members of the Simon Fraser University SpokenWeb team, we are inviting you to come back in time with us 37 years to February 14th, 1984, to attend Gallants reading of her story [Audience Chatter].\n00:03:11\tKate Moffatt:\t“Grippes and Poche” was published in the New Yorker in November of 1982. The print publication spans nine pages [Sound Effect: Page Flipping] and includes what one expects from the New Yorker: cartoons on every page, a poem partway through, and the beginning of the next section of the magazine on the last page, which reads “social notes from all over” and includes an announcement for a Susquehanna County Sunshine Club meeting of which municipal police chief Charles Martel and his police dog will be the guests. Gallant’s reading, of course, includes none of this. And in fact, she did not read from a New Yorker copy of “Grippes and Poche”. She mentions partway through the event that she’s reading from proofs.\n00:03:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tI have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? [Laughs] Yes. These are proofs.\n00:03:56\tKate Moffatt:\tThe recording provides us with an opportunity, not only to hear the author read her own work, but to hear a version of the story unavailable to readers complete with her inflections and added commentary. Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant is one of Canada’s most noteworthy writers, known for short stories, novels, plays and essays. During the 1940s, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard where she began publishing some of her early stories, before moving to Paris in 1950 to pursue writing full-time, and where she remained until her death in 2014. The year after she moved to Paris, saw the beginning of her lifelong relationship with the New Yorker. Between the publication of “Madeline’s Birthday” in 1951 and “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” in 1995, she published over 116 stories in the magazine. “Grippes and Poche” embodies the complex linguistic, political, and national cultural spaces Gallant occupied. Although her family was Anglophone, she was educated at a convent where only French was taught. Gallant explained that she learned to write primarily through her reading of English books. And by the age of eight, she writes, English was irretrievably entrenched as the language of imagination. Born in Canada, but living in and writing about postwar France in English for an American magazine “Grippes and Poche ” speaks to the multiple cultures and histories her writing navigates. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:05:15\tMichelle Levy:\tAt the time of this SFU reading, Gallant was an established and critically successful writer. “Grippes and Poche” was her 95th story to appear in the New Yorker. Published on November 29, 1982, the story is the third in a four-part series with recurring characters. Previously, Henri Grippes has appeared in two stories, “A Painful Affair”, March 16, 1981, and “A Flying Start” September 13, 1982. Stories that recount Grippes literary rivalry with the English author, Victor Prism, and detail their early encounters with their American patroness. In 1985 these three stories were reprinted in Overhead in a Balloon, a collection that brings together 12 stories set in Paris. Nearly a decade after “Grippes and Poche”, she returned to Grippes for her final installment in the series: “Within Plain Sight”. A story that takes us forward to an aging Grippes recounting his refusal to accept the advances of his long suffering neighbor Madame Parfait, and his troubled past in Nazi occupied central France. Importantly, Gallant collected the four stories together under the titular character’s name in 1996. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:06:31\tKandice Sharren:\tThe audio cassette containing this recording is housed in the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department, where it is accompanied by a poster advertising the event, which was hosted by the now defunct Canadian Studies program in Images Theatre, a lecture hall on the Burnaby campus. Michelle unearthed this recording because of her interest in Gallant. However, once listening, we were struck by the story itself with its sharp jabs at French bureaucracy, which were emphasized by the clarity and dramatic range of Gallant’s voice on a tape recording from the 1980s. In addition to our work on SpokenWeb, Kate, Michelle, and I research 18th and 19th century book history. And in our conversations about how to approach this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we were struck by the impact of material circumstances on the recording, both in the clues it provides as to what those circumstances were and the way it imposes them on us.\n00:07:25\tKandice Sharren:\tOur framework for working with print also impacted our interpretation of this reading. Throughout Gallant interrupts herself to explain French words or phrases, or to provide additional contextual information. Independently, all three of us began referring to these asides as akin to footnotes, even though for a listener, they are not marginal commentary that can easily be ignored or skimmed, but rather are fully integrated into the reading. As you listen to this recording, we invite you to think about the places where print and audio performance intersect as well as where they diverge. What are the gains and losses of hearing the author read the story rather than reading it yourself in print. What evidence exists within the recording about the event itself? How big does the room sound and how full is it? How many people seem to be present? How does Gallant respond to their presence, reshaping her proofs along the way? Our interpretation of the recording was also impacted by the material form of the cassette, which only allows for 45 minutes per side. This means a break occurs roughly 35 minutes into the reading that attendees of the event would not have experienced. We’ll check back in with you at this break to talk more about its significance. For now, we’ll leave you with Gallant “Grippes and Poche” in 1984.\n00:08:41\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThis is a story called “Grippes and Poche”. Henri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It’s just a very gentle send up. The Poche in question is the income tax man in Paris.\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt an early hour for the French man of — [Aside] if you can’t hear just say something and I’ll do the best I can — At an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Gripes, it was a quarter to nine and an April morning. He sat in a windowless brown painted cubicle facing a slight mop headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The men wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and buttoned up blazer. His signature was O. Poche.\n00:09:46\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHis title on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read sweating was: controller. He must be freshly out of a civil service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dung-coloured folder with not much in it. A letter from Grippes full of delaying tactics and copies of his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets. Anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale and as case-hardened as Grippes. At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes spent in blithe writer-in-residence-ship in California.\n00:10:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tReturning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden under the fifth Republic for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scrapped and converted to francs at bottom rates, and of course counted as personal income. Grippes’ unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out. Straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury Direct Taxation Personal Income. That was Poche. What Poche had to discuss, a translation of Grippes’ novel, the one about the French teacher at the American university and his doomed love affair with his student Karen Sue, seemed to embarrass him. Observing Poche with some curiosity, Grippes saw unreeling scenes from the younger man’s inhibited boyhood.\n00:12:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sensed, then discerned the Catholic boarding school in bleakest, Brittany. The unheated 40 bed dormitory and nightly torment of unchaste dreams with astonishing partners. A daytime terror of real hell with real fire. Human waywardness is hardly new, said Grippes, feeling more and more secure now that he had tested Poche and found him provincial. It no longer shocks anyone. It was not the moral content of the book he wished to talk over, said Poche, flaming. In any case, he was not qualified to do so. He had flubbed philosophy, had never taken modern French thought. He must be new, Grippes decided, he was babbling. Frankly, even though he had the figures in front of him, Poches found it hard to believe the American translation had earned its author so little. There must be another considerable sum placed in some other bank. Perhaps Monsieur Grippes could try and remember.\n00:13:11\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe figures were true. The translation had done poorly. Failure plagued Grippes’ advantage reducing the hint of deliberate tax evasion to a simple oversight. Still, it hurt to have things put so plainly. He felt bound to tell Poche that American readers were no longer interested in the teacher-student embrollio. Though, there had been some slight curiosity as to what a foreigner might wring out of the old sponge. Poche gazed at Grippes. His eyes seem to Grippes as helpless and eager as those of a gun dog waiting for a command. Encouraged, Grippes said more. In writing his novel, he had over the essential development. The airing professor was supposed to come home at the end. He could be half dead limping on crutches. Toothless, jobless, broke, impotent. It didn’t matter. He had to be judged and shriven. As further mortification, his wife during his foolish affair would have gone on to be a world-class cellist under her maiden name.\n00:14:18\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWife had not entered Grippes cast of characters, probably because Poche didn’t have one. He had noticed Poche did not wear a wedding ring. Grippes had just left his professor driving off to an airport in blessed weather, whistling a jaunty air. Poche shook his head. Obviously it was not the language he was after. He began to write in a clean page of the file taking no more notice of Grippes. What a mistake it had been, Grippes reflected, still feeling pain beneath the scar, to have repeated the male teacher-female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Fleaubair, his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. The novel had not done well in France either. Poche still had to get around to that.\n00:15:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe critics had found Karen Sue’s sociological context obscure. She seemed a little removed from events of her time, unaware of improved literacy figures in North Korea. Never once mentioned. Or that since the advent of goalism, it costs 25 centimes to mail a letter. The Pill — that’s the Pill —was still unheard of in much of Europe. Readers could not understand what it was Karen Sue kept forgetting to take, or why Grippes had devoted a contemplated a no-action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. The professor had not given Karen Sue the cultural and political enlightenment one would expect from the graduate of a preeminent Paris school. It was a banal story, really, about a pair of complacently bourgeois lovers. The real victim was Grippes, seduced and abandoned by the American middle-class.\n00:16:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was Grippes’ first outstanding failure, and for that reason, the only one of his works he ever re-read. He could still hear Karen Sue. The true, the original, speaking of every vowel a poignant question. “I’m Karen Sue. I know you’re busy. It’s just that I don’t understand what you said about Flaubert and his young niece.” He would call her with tolerance, the same tolerance that had weakened the book. Grippes was wise enough to realize that the California Bank affair had been an act of folly, a conman’s aberration. He had thought he would get away with it knowing all the while he couldn’t. There existed a deeper treasure for Poche to uncover well below public treasury sites. Computers had not yet come into government use. Even typewriters were rare. Poche had summoned Grippes in a cramped, almost secretive hand. It took time to strike an error, still longer to write a letter about it. In his youth, repaid received from an American patroness of the arts three rent bearing apartments in Paris, which he still owned.\n00:17:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe patronness has had been the last of a generous species, Grippes one of the last young men to benefit from her kind. He collected the rents by devious and untraceable means, stowing the cash obtained in safe deposit. His visible way of life was stoic and plain. Not even the most vigilant controller could fault his under-furnished apartment in Montparnasse shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents. He showed none of the signs of prosperity public treasury seemed to like, such as membership in a golf club. [Aside] And this is not a joke — on French income tax form you’re asked if you belong to a golf club. It puts you in another bracket.\n00:18:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter a minute of speculative anguish and the airless cubicle, Grippes saw that Poche had no inkling whatsoever about the flats. He was chasing something different. The inexistent royalties from the Karen Sue novel. By a sort of divine even handedness, Grippes was going to have to pay for imaginary earnings. He put the safe deposit out of his mind so that it would not show on his face, and said, “What will be left for me when you finished adding and subtracting?” To his surprise, Poche replied in a bold tone, pitched for reciting quotations, “what is left? What is left? Only what remains at low tide when small islands are revealed emerging.” He stopped quoting and flushed. Obviously he had committed the worst sort of blunder, had let his own personality show, had crossed over to his opponents ground.\n00:19:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It sounds familiar,” said Grippes, enticing him further. “Although to tell you the truth, I don’t remember writing it.” “It is a translation,” said Posche. “The Anglo-Saxon British author, Victor Prism.” He pronounced it Priss-um. “You read Prism,” said Grippes, pronouncing correctly, the name of an old acquaintance. “I had to, Pris-sum was on the preparatory program. Anglo-Saxon commercial English. They stuffed you with foreign writers, Sigrid with so many of us having to go to foreign lands for a living.” That was perilous. He had just challenged Poche’s training, the very foundation of his right to sit there reading Grippes his private mail. But he had suddenly recalled his dismay, when as a young man he had looked at a shelf in his room and realized he had to compete with the dead: Proust, Flaubert, Balzack, Scondale, and on into the dark. The rivalry was infinite, a Milky way of dead stars still daring to shine. He had invented a law, a hand on publication that would eliminate the dead, leaving the skies clear for the living.\n00:20:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAll the living? Grippes still couldn’t decide. Foreign writers would be deported to a remote solar system where they could circle one another. For Prism, there was no system sufficiently remote. Not long ago, interviewed in “The Listener,” Prism had dragged in Grippes saying that he used to cross the channel to consult a sear in Halfmoon Street, hurrying home to sit down the prose revealed from a spirit universe. Sometimes I actually envied him, Prism was quoted as saying. He sounded as though Grippes were dead. I used to wish ghost voices would speak to me too, suggesting ribbons of pure prism running like ticker-tape round the equator of a crystal ball. Unfortunately, I had to depend on my own creative intelligence, modest though I’m sure it was.\n00:21:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not know about this recent libel in Anglo-Saxon commercial English. He had been trying to be nice. Grippes made a try of his own. “I only meant you could have been reading me!” The trouble was that he meant it ferociously. Poche must’ve heard the repressed shout. He shucked the file and said, “this is too complex for my level I shall have to send it up to the inspector.” Grippes made a vow that he would never let natural peak get the better of him again. “What will be left for me?” Grippes asked the inspector, “when you have finished adding and subtracting.” Madam De Pelle did not bother to look up. She said “somebody should have taken this file in hand a long time ago. Let us start at the beginning. How long were you out of the country?” When Poche said send up, he’d meant it literally. Grippes looked out on a church where Delacroix had worked in the slow summer rain.\n00:22:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt the far end of the square a few dark shops displayed joyfully trashy religious goods. Like the cross set with tiny seashells Madame De Pelle wore round her neck. Grippes had been raised in an anti-clerical household in a small town, where posing factions were grouped behind the schoolmaster, his father, and the parish priest. Women, lapsed agnostics, sometimes crossed enemy lines and started going to church. One glimpsed them in grey creeping along a grey-walled street. You were free to lodge a protest against the funds said Madame De Pelle, but if you lose the contestation your fine will be tripled. That is the law. Grippes decided that he would transform Madam De Pelle into the manager of a brothel catering to the foreign legion, slovenly in her habits, and addicted to chloroform. But he found the idea unpromising. In due course, he paid a monstrous penalty, which he did not contest, for fear of drawing attention to the three apartments.\n00:23:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was still believed he had stashed away millions from the Karen Sue book, probably in Switzerland. As summons addressed by old Poche’s shrunken hand the following spring showed Grippes he had been tossed back downstairs. After that, he forgot about Madam Dupel except now and then. It was at about this time that a series of novels offered themselves to Grippes, shadowy outlines behind a frosted glass pane. He knew he must not let them crowd in altogether or keep them waiting too long. His foot against the door, he admitted one by one, a number of shadows that turned into young men, each bringing his own name and address, his native region of France portrayed on coloured postcards, and an index of information about his tastes in clothes, love, food, and philosophers. His bent of character, his ticks of speech, his attitudes to God and money, his political bias, and the intimation of a crisis about to explode under foot.\n00:24:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAntoine provided a Jesuit confessor, a homosexual affinity, and loss of faith. Spiritual shilly-shallying runs long. Antoine’s covered more than 600 pages making it the thickest work in the Grippes canon. Then came Thomas with his spartan mother and a Provisal fruit farm rejected in favour of a civil service career. Bertrand followed adrift in frivolous Paris tempted by neo fascism in the form of a woman wearing a bed jacket trimmed with Marabou. Renee cycled round France reading Chateau Brianne when he stopped to rest. One morning, he set fire to the bar and he’d been sleeping in leaving his books to burn. This was the shortest to the novels and the most popular with the young. One critic scolded Grippes for using crude symbolism. Another begged him to stop hiding behind Antoine and Renee, and to take up the metaphysical risk of revealing Henri. But Grippes had tried that once with Karen Sue, then with a roman a clef mercifully destroyed in the confusion of May, 1968.\n00:25:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe took these contretemps for a sign that he was to leave the subjective Grippes alone. The fact that each novel appeared even to Grippes to be a slice of French writing about life as it had been carved up and served the generation before made it seem quietly insurrectional. Nobody was doing this now. No one but Grippes. Grippes for a time uneasy, decided to go on letting the shadows in. The announcement of a new publication would bring a summons from Poche. When Poche leaned over the file now, Grippes saw amid the mop of curls at coin-size tonsure. His diffedent steely questions tried to elicit from Grippes how many novels were likely to be sold and where Grippes had already put the money. Grippes would give him a copy of the book inscribed. Poche would turn back the cover, glance at the signature to make certain Grippes had not written something compromising and friendly.\n00:26:53\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe kept the novels in a metal locker fastened together with government issue webbing tape and a military looking buckle. It troubled Grippes to think of his work all in a bundle in the dark. He thought of old fashioned milestones, half hidden by weeds. The volumes marked time for Poche too. He was still a controller. Perhaps he had to wait for the woman upstairs to retire so he could take over her title. The cubicle needed paint. There was a hole in the brown linoleum just inside the door. Poche now wore a wedding ring. Grippes wondered if he should congratulate him, but decided to let Poche mention the matter first. Grippes could swear that in his string of novels, nothing had been chipped out of his own past. Antoine, Thomas, Bertrand, Renee and by now Clement, Didier, Laurent, Hughes and Yves had arrived as strangers, almost like historical figures. At the same time, it seemed to Grippes that their wavering ruffled reflection should deliver something he might recognize.\n00:27:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWhat did he see bending over the pond of his achievement? He saw a character close mouthed, cautious, unimaginative, ill at ease, obsessed with particulars. Worse, he was closed against progress, afraid of reform, shut into a literary reactionary France. How could this be? Grippes had always insincerely voted left. He had proved he could be reckless, open-minded, indulgent. He was like a father gazing around the breakfast table suddenly realizing none of the children are his. His children, if he could call them that, did not even look like him. From Antoine to Eve, his reflected character was small and slight with a mop of curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. Grippes believed in the importance of errors. No political system, no love affair, no native inclination, no life itself would be tolerable without a wide mesh for mistakes to slip through. It pleased him that public treasury had never caught up with the three apartments. Not just for the sake of the cash piling up and safe deposit, but for the black hole of error revealed. He and Poche had been together for some years.\n00:29:22\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAnother blunder, usually controller and taxpayer were torn apart after a meeting or two so that the revenue service would not start taking into consideration the client’s aged indigent aunt, his bill for dental surgery, his alimony payments, his perennial mortgage. But, possibly, no one except Poche could be bothered with Grippes, always making some time-wasting claim for my new professional expenses, backed by a messy looking certified receipt. Sometimes Grippes dared believe Poche admired him, that he hung onto the dossier out of devotion to his books. This conceit was intensified when Poche began calling him maitre. Once, Grippes won some city of Paris award and was shown shaking hands with the mayor and simultaneously receiving a long cheque-filled envelope. Promptly summoned by Poche, expecting a discreet compliment, Grippes found him interested only in the caption under the photo, which made much of the size of the cheque. Grippes later thought of sending a sneering letter, “Thank you for your warm congratulations,” but he decided in time it was wiser not to fool with Poche. Poche had recently given him a 33% personal exemption. 3% more than the outer limit for Grippes category of unsalaried earners. According to Poche, a group that included as well as authors, door-to-door salesmen and prostitutes. The dung coloured Gaulist-era jacket on Grippes’ file had worn out long ago and being replaced in 1969 by a cover in cool banker’s green — that is with the advent of a Pompidou who had been connected with a bank — green presently made way for a shiny black and white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early ‘70s Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder, “Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn.”\n00:31:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not ask what culture. He continued, bravely, ” Food for the cats. They depend on me.” said Grippes, but they had ready, settled the cats as dependents. And for all Poche drooped over Grippes is smudged and unreadable figures. Grippes tried to count the number of times you’d examine the top of Poches’ head. He still knew nothing about him, except for the wedding ring. Somewhere along the way, Poche had tied himself to a need for retirement pay and rich exemptions of his own. In the language of his generation, Poche was a “fully structured individual”. His vocabulary was sparse and to the point, centered on a single topic. His state training school, the machine that ground out pelles and Poches all sounding alike, was in Clermont-Ferrand. Grippes was born in the same region. That might’ve given something else, them —excuse me —something else to talk about. Except that Grippes had never been back. Structured Poche probably attended class reunions as godfather to classmates, children jotted their birthdays in a leather covered notebook he never mislaid.\n00:33:01\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tUnstructured Grippes could not even remember his own age. Poche turned over a sheet of paper, read something Grippes could not see, and said, automatically, “We can’t”. “Nothing is ever as it was,” said Grippes, still going on about the marbled effect folder. It was a remark that usually shut people up, leaving them nowhere to go but a change of subject. Besides, it was true. Nothing can be as it was. Poche and Grippes had just lost a terrifying number of brain cells. They were an instant closer to death. Death was of no interest to Poche. If he ever thought he might cease to exist, he would stop concentrating on other people’s business and get down to reading Grippes while there was still time. Grippes wanted to ask, “Do you ever imagine your own funeral?” But it might’ve been taken as a threatening, gangsterish hint from taxpayer to controller. Worse, far worse than an attempted bribe. Folders of a pretty mottled peach shade appeared — that accompanied [inaudible] rain.\n00:34:10\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche’s cubicle was painted soft beige. The torn linoleum repaired. Poche sat in a comfortable armchair remember—resembling the wide leather seats and smart furniture stores at the upper end of Boulevard St. Germain. Grippes had a new straight metallic chair that shot him bolt upright and hurt his spine. It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading. Grippes and Poche had not advanced one inch toward each other. Except for the paint and the chairs and maitre, it could have been 1963. No matter how many works were added to the bundle in the locker, no matter how often Grippes had his picture taken, no matter how many Grippes’ paperbacks blossomed on airport bookstalls, Grippes to Poche remained a button.\n00:35:07\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe mottled peach jacket began to darken and fray. Poche said to Grippes, ” I asked you to come here, maitre, because we have overlooked something concerning your income”. Grippes’ heart gave a lurch. “The other day, I came across an old ruling about royalties. How much of your income do you kick back?”\n00:35:29\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Excuse me?”\n00:35:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“To publishers to bookstores,” said Poche. “How much?”\n00:35:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Kickback?”\n00:35:35\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“What percentage?” said Poche, “Publishers, printers?”\n00:35:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“You mean”, said Grippes, after a time, “how much do I pay editors to edit, publishers to publish, printers to print, and booksellers to sell?” He supposed that to Poche such a scheme might sound plausible. It would fit his long view over Grippes’ untidy life. Grippes knew most of the literary gossip that went round about himself. The circle was so small, it had to come back. In most stories, there was a virus of possibility, but he had never heard anything as absurd as this or as base.\n00:36:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche opened the file, concealing the moldering cover, apparently waiting for Grippes to mention a figure. The nausea Grippes felt he put down to his having come here without breakfast. One does not insult a controller. He had shouted silently at Poche years before and had been sent upstairs to do penance with Madame Dupell. It is not good to kick over a chair and stalk out. “I have never been so insulted!” might have no meaning from Grippes, keelhauled month after month in some lumpy review. As his works increased from bundled to heap, so they drew intellectual abuse. He welcomed partisan ill treatment as warming to him as popular praise. “Don’t forget me,” Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table of La Hune, the left bank bookstore, looking for his own name and those quarterlies no one ever takes home. “Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead.”\n00:37:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tBut even the most sour and despairing and close-printed essays were starting to mutter acclaim. The shoreline of the ‘80s, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left wing heartbeat could be heard loyally thumping behind the armor of his right wing traditional prose. His re-established hero had curly hair, soft eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, dimples, and a fully structured life. He was pleasing to both sexes and to every type of reader, except for a few thick-ribbed louts. Grippes looked back at Poche, who did not know how closely they were bound. What if he were to say, “this is a preposterous insinuation, a blot on a noble profession and on my reputation in particular,” only to have Poche answer, “too bad maitre, I was trying to help.” He said as one good natured fellow to another, “well, what if I own up to this crime?”\n00:38:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It’s no crime,” said Poche.” I simply add the amount to your professional expenses. “To my rebates?” said Grippes. “To my exemption?” “Depends how much.” “At third of my income!” said Grippes, insanely. “Half!” “Ohhh—reasonable figure might be 12 and a half percent.” All this for Grippes. Poche wanted nothing. Grippes considered with awe the only incorruptible element in a porous society. No secret message had passed between them. He could not even invite Poche to lunch. He wondered if this arrangement had ever actually existed. If there could possibly be a good dodge that he, Grippes, had never even heard of. He thought of contemporary authors for whose success there was no other explanation. It had to be celestial playfulness or 12 and a half percent. The structure, as Grippes is already calling it, might also just be Poches innocent indecent idea about writers.\n00:39:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche was reading the file again, though he must have known everything in it by heart. He was as absorbed as contented and somehow as pure as a child with a box of paints. At any moment, he would raise his tender bewildered eyes and murmur,”four dozen typewriter ribbons and a third of the fiscal year, Maitre we can’t. Grippes tried to compose a face for Poche to encounter. A face above reproach. But writers, considered above reproach, always looked moody and haggard, about to scream. “Be careful,” he was telling himself, “don’t let Poche think he’s doing you a favour.” These people set traps. Was Poche angling for something? Was this bait? Attempting to bribe a public servant. The accusation was called. Bribe wasn’t the word. It was corruption the law mentioned; an attempt to corrupt. All Grippes had ever offered Poche were his own books formally inscribed, as though Poche were an anonymous reader standing in line in a bookstore where Grippes wedged behind a shaky table sat signing away.\n00:40:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Your name?” ” Whose name?” “How do you spell your name?” “Oh, the book isn’t for me. It’s for a friend of mine.” His look changed one of severity and impatience until he remembered that Poche had never asked him to sign anything. He had never concealed his purpose: to pluck from Grippes’ bright plumage every bright feather he could find. “Careful,” Grippes repeated, “careful. Remember what happened to Prism. Victor Prism, keeping pale under a parasol on the beach at Torremolinos, had made the acquaintance of a fellow Englishman. Pleasant, not well-educated, but eager to learn, blistered shoulders, shirt draped over his head, pages of the Sunday Express around his red thighs. Prism lent him something to read because his sunburn was keeping him awake. It was a creative essay on three emigre authors of the 1930s in the reviews so obscure and ill-paying that Prism had not bothered to include the fee on his income tax return.\n00:41:42\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPrism had got it all wrong, of course. Putting Thomas Mann to die in the charity ward of Paris hospital, sending Stefan Swag to be photographed with movie stars in California, and having Bertolt Brecht, who’s playing name Prism could not spell, win the Nobel Prize and savour a respected old age in a suburb of Zurich. As it turned out, none of Prism’s readers knew the difference. Prism might’ve got off with the whole thing if his new friend had not fallen sound asleep after the first lines. Waking refreshed, he had said to himself, “I must find out what they get paid for this stuff.” A natural reflex, he was at the inland revenue. He’d found no trace, no record. For inland revenue purposes death and exile did not exist. The subsequent fine was so heavy and Prism’s disgrace so acute, that he fled England to spend a few days with Grippes and the cats in Montparnasse.\n00:42:44\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sat in a kitchen chair while Grippes, nose and mouth protected by a checked scarf, sprayed terrored cockroaches. Prism weeping in the fumes — prism, excuse me, pronouncing it in French! — Prism weeping in the fumes, wiping his eyes, said, “I’m through with queen and country!” — something like that — “And I’m taking out French citizenship tomorrow.” “You would have to marry a French woman and have five male children,” said Grippes through the scarf. He was feeling the patriotic hatred of a driver on a crowded road seeing foreign license plates in the way. “Oh, well then.” Said Prism, as if to say, “I won’t bother.”\n00:43:26\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Oh, well then.” Said Grippes, softly, not quite to Poche. Poche added one last thing to the file and closed it, as if something definite had taken place. He clasped his hands and placed them on the dosier. It seemed shut for all time now, like a grave. He said, “Maitre, one never stays long in the same fiscal theater. I have been in this one for an unusual length of time. We may not meet again. I want you to know I have enjoyed our conversations.” “So have I,” said Grippes with caution. “Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time.”\n00:44:09\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s 2021 again. And at this point, the cassette holding Gallant’s reading needs to be flipped. The recording on Side A has neatly stopped after Poche’s comment, and the tape now has 12 blank seconds before it ends. We’re none of us listening to this reading by playing a physical cassette, but at this pause where I had to close the digital file with the recording of Side A and open the digital file for the recording of Side B, we were made aware of physical limitations of the cassette holding the recording that resides in the SFU archives. If you were listening to a physical copy of this cassette on an old tape player, you would be pressing the eject button to open the little plastic door, pulling the tape free, flipping it, and inserting it again, before closing the door with its soft click.\n00:44:49\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd here time grows fuzzy. We’re listening to Gallant reading in 1984, not reading her work from a page. And that brings with it an altered experience of “Grippes and Poche”. We can hear Gallant’s inflections, her commentary that doesn’t appear in print, the audience’s laughter, all the evidence alive event. We don’t see the New Yorker cartoons on every page, or Roberta Spear’s poem “Diving for Atlantis”, which appears halfway through, or the traditional New Yorker layout that looks much the same for short stories printed in the magazine today…which makes Gallant print publication in 1982 less obviously indicative of its age than the cassette recording of her reading in 1984. Even the recording itself asks us to consider the circumstances of its creation more than 30 years ago. The 12 second pause following Poche’s complete comment suggests interference by a critical editor or recorder of the reading, someone as aware as we are of the necessity to flip the tape from Side A to Side B and aware, too, of how moving from the end of one complete sentence to the beginning of another is a very different experience than hearing only the first half of a sentence and having to fumble your way towards the second.\n00:45:51\tKandice Sharren:\tThe fact that this break does not occur mid-sentence made us suspect that the recording may have been transferred from reel-to-reel. Although our attempts to learn more about how this reading was recorded turned up little solid information, they did draw our attention to a piece of SFU trivia: that many of the events held at SFU during this period were recorded by the highly regarded Vancouver-based recording engineer, Kurtis Vanel. While we have been unable to turn up definitive evidence about who recorded Gallant, our deep dive into SFU’s AV history served as an important reminder of the often unseen human hands that shape archival materials. Conversely, the unanswerable questions this break raises reminds us of the fragmentary nature of the archive as theorized by Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire. No document, whether paper or sound, can fully capture a live lived event or practice. It is with these considerations of time and form that we return to 1984, to Gallant’s reading, where her voice is shaping the story. And we’re Poche has just told Grippes that…\n00:46:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time —” [Sound Effect: Cassette Tape Deck Open and Close] “So you have read them,” said Grippes, with an eye on the locker. “Why, I read those I bought,” said Poche. “But they’re the same books.” “No. One book belongs to me. The other was a gift. I would never open the gift. I have no right to.” His voice rose and he spoke more slowly. In one of them when what’s-his-name struggles to prepare his civil service tests —and now he quotes something, presumably from one of the books — “the desire for individual glory seemed so acquisite suddenly in a nature given to renunciation.” “I suppose it is a remarkable observation”, said Grippes. “I was not referring to myself.” He had no idea what that could be from and he was certain he’d never written it.\n00:47:56\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not send for Grippes again. Grippes became a commonplace taxpayer filling out his forms without help. The frosted glass door was reverting to dull white. There were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in. A new French fashion for having well-behaved Nazi officers shore up Western culture gave Grippes a chance to turn Poche into a tuberculer poet trapped in Pari, by poverty and the occupation. Grippes throughout the first draft in which Poche joined a Christian-minded resistance network and performed a few simple miracles. Unaware of his own powers, he had the instinctive feeling that a new generation would not know what he was talking about. Instead, he placed Poche sniffling and wheezing in a squalid hotel room, cough drops spilled on the table, a stained blanket pinned around his shoulders. Up the feeted staircase came a handsome German colonel, a Kurt Juergen’s type smelling of shaving lotion, bent on saving liberal values, bringing Poche buttered cognac, and a thousand sheets of writing paper.\n00:49:09\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter that Grippes no longer felt sure where to go. His earlier books, government tape and buckle binding them into an oeuvre, had accompanied Poche to his new fiscal theatre. Perhaps, finding his career blocked by the woman upstairs, he had asked for early retirement. Poche must be in a gangster-ridden Mediterranean city, occupying a shoddy boom period apartment he’d spent 20 years paying for. He was working at black market jobs, tax advisor to the local mayor, a small innocent cog in the regional mafia. After lunch, Poche would sit in one of those Southern balconies that hold just a deck chair, rereading in chronological order all Grippes’ books. In the late afternoon, blinds drawn, Poche totted up mafia accounts by a chink of light. Meanwhile, Grippes was here in Montparnasse facing a flat, white, glass door. He continued to hand himself a 45 and a half percent personal exemption.\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe astonishing 33, plus the unheard of 12 and a half. No one seemed to mind. No shabby envelope holding an order for execution came in the mail. Sometimes in Grippes’ mind, a flicker of common sense flamed like revealed truth. The exemption was an error. Public treasury was now tiptoeing toward computers. The computer brain was bound to wince at Grippes and stop functioning until the Grippes exemption was settled. Grippes rehearsed: “I was seriously misinformed”. He had to go farther and farther abroad to find offal for the cats. One tripe dealer had been turned into a driving school. Another sold secondhand clothes. Returning on a winter evening after a long walk ,carrying the parcel of sheep’s lung wrapped in a newspaper, he crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse just as the lights went on. The urban moonrise. The street was a dream street, faces flat white in the winter mist.\n00:51:20\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt seemed Grippes that he had crossed over to the 1980s, had only just noticed the new decade. In a recess between two glassed-in sidewalk cafes, four plain clothes cops were beating up a pair of pickpockets. Nobody had to explain the scene to Grippes, he knew what it was about. One prisoner already wore handcuffs. Customers in the far side of the glass gave no more than a glance. When they got the handcuffs on the second man, the cops pushed the two into the entrance of Grippes’ apartment building to await the police van. Grippes shuffled into a cafe. He put his parcel of lights on the zinc-top bar and started to read an article on the wrapping. Somewhat unknown to him, a new name, pursued an old grievance. “Why don’t they write about real life anymore?” “Because to depict life is to attract it’s ill-fortune,” Grippes replied.\n00:52:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe stood, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. Four gun-bearing young men in jeans and leather jackets were not final authority. Final authority was something written. The printed word. Even when the word was mistaken. The simplest final authority in Grippes’ life had been O. Poche. What must’ve happened was this: Poche, wishing to do honour to a category that included writers, prostitutes, and door-to-door salesmen, had read and misunderstood a note about royalties. It must’ve been in italics at the foot of the page. He had transformed his mistake into a regulation and it never looked at the page again. Grippes climbed three flights of dirty wooden stairs to Madam DuPell’s office — I have an editorial query here: Is he imagining this? Yes. [Laughs] These are proofs. — He observed the small— the seashell crucifix and a broach he had not noticed the first time: a silver fawn curled up as nature had never planned. A boneless fawn. Squinting, Madam DuPell peered at the old dung-coloured Gaullist-era file.\n00:53:33\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe put her hand over a page, as though Grippes were trying to read upside down, and said, “It has all got to be paid back”. “I was seriously misinformed!” Grippes intended to answer. Willing to see Poche disgraced, ruined, jailed. “I followed instructions. I am innocent!” But Poche had vanished leaving Grippes with a lunatic exemption, three black market income-bearing apartments he had recently unsuccessfully tried to sell, and a heavy reputation for male-oriented, left feeling, right thinking books. This reputation Grippes thought he could no longer sustain. A socialist government was, at last, in place. Hence his hurry about unloading the flats and his difficulty in finding takers. He wondered about the new file covers. Pink? Too fragile. Look what happened with the mottled peach. Strong denim blue, the shade standing for giovinezza workers overalls. It was no time for a joke, not even a private one. No one could guess what would be wanted now in the way of literary entertainment.\n00:54:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe fitfulness of voters is such that having got the government they wanted, they were now reading nothing but the right-wing press. Perhaps it’s steady right-wing heartbeat ought to set the cadence for a left-wing outlook, with a complex bravely conservative heroine contained within the slippery, but unyielding walls of left-wings style. He would have to come to terms with the rightest way of considering female characters. There seemed to be two methods, neither of which suited Grippes’ temperament. Treat her disgustingly, then cry all over the page, or admire and respect her. She is the equal at least of a horse. The only woman his imagination offered with some insistence, was no use to him. She moved quietly on a winter evening to St. Nicolai du Chardonnay, the rebel church at the lower end of Boulevarde St. Germaine —that is the conservative-led church— where services were still conducted in Latin.\n00:55:58\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe wore a hat ornamented with an ivory arrow, and a plain gray coat, tubular in shape, and a narrow fur collar. Kid gloves were tucked under the handle of her sturdy leather purse. She had never heard of video games, push button telephones, dishwashers, frozen fileted sole, computer horoscopes. She entered the church and knelt down and brought out her rosary, oval pearls strung on thin gold. Nobody saw rosaries anymore. They were not even in the windows of the traditional venue across the square from the tax bureau. Believers went in for different articles now. Cherub candles, quick prayers, and plastic cards. Her iron meekness resisted change. She prayed constantly into the past. Grippes knew that one view of the past is just as misleading as speculation about the future. It was one of the few beliefs he would’ve gone to the stake for.\n00:56:55\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe was praying to a mist, to mist-shrouded figures. She persisted in seeing clearly. He could see the woman, but he could not approach her. Perhaps he could get away with dealing with her from a distance. All that was really needed for a sturdy right-wing novel was its pessimistic rhythm. And then, and then, and then, and death. Grippes had that rhythm. It was in his footsteps coming up the stairs after the departure of the police van, turning the key in his triple- bolted front door. And then, and then, the cats padding and mewing, not giving Grippes time to take off his coat as they made for their empty dishes on the kitchen floor. Behind the gas stove, a beleaguered garrison of cockroaches got ready for the evening sortie. Grippes would be waiting, his face half-veiled with a checked scarf. In St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, the woman shut her missal got off—off her knees scorning to brush her coat.\n00:57:59\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe went out to the street, proud of the dust marks, letting the world know she still prayed the old way. She escaped him. He had no idea what she had on besides the hat and coat. Nobody else wore a hat with an ivory arrow or tubular coat or a scarf that looked like a weasel biting its tail. He could not see what happened when she took the hat and coat off, what her hair was like. If she hung the coat in a whole closet that also contained umbrellas, a carpet sweeper, and a pile of old magazines. If she put the hat in a box and a shelf. She moved off in a gray blur. There was a streaming window between them Grippes could not wipe clean. Probably, she entered a dark dining room, fake Henri Quatre buffet — [Aside] that means something especially hideous —bottles of pills next to the oil and vinegar cruets.\n00:58:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLace tablecloth folded over the back of a chair, just oil cloth spread for the family meal. What could he do with such a woman? He could not tell who was waiting for her or what she would eat for supper. He could not even guess her name. She revealed nothing, would never help. Grippes expelled the cats, shut the kitchen window, and dealt with the advanced guard from behind the stove. What he needed now was despair and excitement, a new cat and mouse chase. What good was a computer that never caught anyone out. After airing the kitchen and clearing it of poison, Grippes let the cats in. He swept up the bodies of his victims and set them down the ancient cast-iron shoot. He began to talk to himself as he often did now. First he said a few sensible things, then he heard his voice with a new elderly quaver to it, virtuousand mean. “After all it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”\n00:59:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tNow that was untrue. And he had no reason to say it. Is that what I’m going to be like now? He wondered. Is this the new era Grippes? Pinch-mouthed? It was exactly the sort of thing that a woman in the dining room might say. The best thing that could happen to him would be shock. A siege of terror. A knock at the door. A registered letter with fearful news. It would sharpen his humour, strengthen his own private, eccentric heart. It would keep him from making remarks in his solitude that were meaningless and false. He could perhaps write an anonymous letter saying that the famous author Henri Grippes was guilty of tax evasion of the most repulsive kind. He was moreover a callous landlord who had never been known to replace a door knob. Fortunately, he saw he was not yet that mad. Nor did he really need to be scared and obsessed. He had got the woman from church to the dining room and he would keep her there, trapped, cornered, threatened, watched until she yielded to Grippes and told her name. As in his several incarnations good Poche had always done. [Audience Applause] [Begin Music: Accordion]\n01:01:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Piano and Strings] In the June episode of this podcast, we’ll be returning to Mavis Gallant’s reading of this story in an attempt to reconstruct this event from the surviving archival and textual materials, as well as the fallible recesses of human memory. This episode had us thinking about the many connections visible in the archival recording of the reading between the story itself and Gallant’s storytelling, between Gallant’s voice and the clarity of the recording and the hands that shaped it during the recording, editing, and archival processes. In June, we’ll be thinking about these connections in terms of what they can tell us about the event itself. We’d love to hear from our listeners about what caught your attention and what questions you have about Gallant’s reading on February 14th, 1984 at Simon Fraser University.\n01:02:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n01:02:16\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb [Music Begins: Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.6474447},{"id":"9289","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E9, Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 7 June 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/701010c0-9bb5-412c-acb0-2e48a249ca09/audio/792ab3ed-977c-43e3-9e55-a10c09f5495d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:10\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,362,594 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\\n\\n“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295.\\n\\n“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549506490368,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the March 2021 episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented the first episode of a two-part series: “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU,” which included a full-length recording of Mavis Gallant’s reading of her New Yorker short story at Simon Fraser University in 1984. In the second episode of this series, we dive into what we are calling the “paratexts” of the reading: the material and contextual circumstances that informed Gallant’s performance, including an unrecorded and unarchived event that took place the day before; the audience; the theatre; and the physical tape itself.\n\nThis episode features our efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also our own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and our interactions with the surviving archival materials. This investigation led Kate, Kandice, and Michelle to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events, and talk to Grazia Merler, a professor in the Department of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the time of the reading. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.\n\nWith additional archival materials available in a supplementary gallery, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the spoken web podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. There’s a kind of magic to finding an old recording and listening to the sounds of the past. When researchers listes to archival recordings, each sonic literary record comes with silent questions: who is speaking and who is recording? Where was this recording made? And, what are those background sounds? How are we listening to and interpreting the recording in the present and how might people have listened differently at the time the recording was made? How can we preserve this physical tape so it’s protected for future listeners? In March of this year, SpokenWeb researchers, Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy brought us a full audio edition of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story ‘Grippes and Poche’ at Simon Fraser University in 1984.\n \n\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tNow we bring you part two of the series, an exploration of the questions that surround this recording of Mavis Gallant. Kate, Kandice, and Michelle refer to these as the ‘paratexts’ of the recording. And their illuminating investigation takes us back to the year 1984 and the days surrounding Galant’s presence at the SFU podium. The stories that they uncovered are surprising and often delightful, and they help us listen to Gallant’s reading with fuller awareness of the realities that surrounded the event. Here are Kate, Kandice and Michelle with episode nine of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Mavis Gallant Part Two [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n02:34\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown, so we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10!” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office.” So anyway, [Accordian/French interlude music] it was one of those ones…\n \n\n02:58\tKate Moffat:\tOn March, 2021. We – Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented Mavis Gallant reading of her New Yorker short story ‘Grippes and Poches; as an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast – [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tI’m a fetishist. That’s why the watch has to be there and not there. And you see that’s …\n \n\n03:15\tMichelle Levy:\t[Clips of audio layered] …at the time of this SFU reading Gallant….\n \n\n03:17\tKate Moffat:\t…the recording provides us with an offering…\n \n\n03:19\tKandice Sharren:\t… the audio cassette containing this recording is housed in…\n \n\n03:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tCan you all hear me? [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:24\tKate Moffat:\tWhile we were preparing our last episode, we used our grounding in book history methodologies to think about the recording as an unofficial audio edition of “Grippes and Poche”, in which Gallant’s explanatory asides take on a role similar to that of footnotes or endnotes. In our last episode, we noted, however, that unlike footnotes or endnotes, listening to Gallant’s asides were not optional, but integrated into the text. Something paratextual became textual, so to speak [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n03:51\tKandice Sharren:\tWhile putting together the second episode, we were curious about exploring the relationship between the text and the paratexts of the reading further. Paratext was coined by Gérard Genette to describe everything that surrounds a text, including the material form the text takes, contextual information about the author, and even book reviews and interviews. Genette talks about paratexts as “thresholds of interpretation”, that is to say that they fundamentally shape how we approach, encounter and engage with the text. For the original print version of “Grippes and Poche” in the New Yorker, it’s paratextual material would include the cartoons interspersed throughout the text, other articles that appeared alongside it, and even the magazine’s signature font. These paratexts established Gallant’s story as a self-consciously literary work, one that carries with it a certain amount of prestige. In dealing with an audio recording of a text, we had to expand our idea of what a paratext might be. In the case of Gallant’s reading, the paratexts include the audible and inaudible contexts that surround the event and inflect how we interpret the story. The circumstances that surrounded Gallant’s visit, the planning that went into the reading, Gallant’s delivery, the audience, and even the tape that holds the recording.\n \n\n05:12\tMichelle Levy:\tInterested in supplementing the archival materials we found with human memory to reconstruct the event and its paratexts, we sought to make these paratexts visible by talking to Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who worked in the liberal studies department at SFU and were involved in organizing the Mavis Gallant events during her visit. I also spoke at length with Grazia Merler, a friend of Gallant’s who worked in SFU’s Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at the time of the event. [Start Music: Piano] From these investigations, we have assembled a series of conversations and artifacts to contextualize the audio recording of the reading you heard in the first part of this two-part series. To establish the paratext of this reading, we asked the following questions, which structure this episode.\n \n\n06:03\tKandice Sharren:\tFirst, what were the circumstances of Gallant’s visit to SFU in 1984? Second?\n \n\n06:10\tKate Moffat:\tWhat do we know of the reading the day before otherwise known as the fiasco?\n \n\n06:16\tMichelle Levy:\tThird, how do we place Gallant’s accent and understand her pronunciation choices?\n \n\n06:21\tKate Moffat:\tFourth, who are the unseen, but audible audience members for the reading?\n \n\n06:27\tMichelle Levy:\tFifth, why did she select ‘Grippes and Poche’ to read to this academic audience?\n \n\n06:32\tKandice Sharren:\tAnd finally sixth, what physical artifacts of the events survive and what do they tell us about the event?\n \n\n06:39\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter One: The Visit, in which Michelle talks to Grazia Merler and Gallant’s reason for visiting Vancouver becomes clear.\n \n\n06:54\tKate Moffat:\tFollowing our close listening to the recording of Gallant’s reading for our last episode, we were curious about the circumstances that brought Gallant to Vancouver in 1984, given that she lived in France for most of her life. In addition to chatting with Ann and Carolyn, Michelle was able to connect with one of Gallant’s old friends,\n \n\n07:10\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant was invited to SFU by Grazia Merler, then an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics on the recommendation of her supervisor, Merler had met Gallant while researching her PhD on Stendhal In Paris in the early 1960s. Merle told me about how she was invited to Gallant’s apartment at [French addresss] in Paris for tea. Upon arriving on a frigid day in the middle of winter, Gallant asked Merler if she wished for tea or something stronger. Merler agreed that something stronger would be welcomed. They hit it off immediately and remained friends until Gallant’s death in 2014,. Gallant lived in the same apartment in the sixth arrondissement for over four decades, from 1961 or 62 until her death. Merler told me that Golan came to visit her when SFU was first being built, and she references this first visit in her introduction for Gallant at the Burnaby event.\n \n\n08:07\tAudio Recording, Gratzia Merla:\n \n\nI talk a little bit louder. Can you hear me now?\n \n\n08:09\tAudio Recording, Audience Member:\tThat’s fine. Thank you.\n \n\n08:11\tGratzia Merla:\tIn 1965, before Simon Fraser University opened, I took a friend to the top of this mountain to show her a striking piece of architecture and the awesome site or this architecture. At that time, we both decided that we should come back to see the development of what seemed at that time a master temple. I kept my promise about 15 years ago. Mavis Gallant was the other part in the promise, and she’s keeping her part of the bargain today.\n \n\n08:56\tKate Moffat:\tAs we know from the recording of ‘Grippes and Poche’, Gallant visited SFU again in 1984, to give her reading on February 14th. The poster for the reading tells us that Gallant was, at the time of the event, writer in residence at the University of Toronto. She likely took advantage of her relative proximity to Vancouver to make good on her promise to return.\n \n\n09:15\tMichelle Levy:\tMerler told me that during this period Gallant came regularly to North America. She was being paid well for her New Yorker stories and could afford to visit friends in Montreal, as well as her editor, William Maxwell, in New York. From what we’ve been able to gather, it seems Gallant gave a number of readings at universities in Canada during this time. In addition to the SFU reading of Grippes and Poche in 1984, she also gave a reading of the same story in June of that same year at the University of Toronto, a reading of her story ‘Virus X’ at the University of Alberta in 1975, and reading at the University of Victoria, although we haven’t been able to track down a date or the story she read for that event. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano][Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages]\n \n\n10:00\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Two: The Fiasco. In which attendees and organizers Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate meet Mavis Gallant, and an event goes terribly wrong.\n \n\n10:13\tMichelle Levy:\tI was hoping that you could each just introduce yourself briefly and maybe tell us a little bit about where you are now and where you were in 1984. Carolyn, do you want to start?\n \n\n10:24\tCarolyn Tate:\tSure. Well, right now, I’m in my dining room in Toronto, Ontario in the Bloor West Village. I’ve lived in this house for about 20 years. At the time Mavis was in Vancouver I was the director of Liberal Studies – the Liberal Studies program for Continuing Studies, and I was the person who was responsible for organizing the downtown part of her visit. And as we’ll discover, it was complete fiasco. But really my main reason I’m here is I’ve been a tremendous fan of Mavis Gallant for many years. And maybe I should add that since Continuing Studies, I went to law school and I practiced intellectual property law for 20 years.\n \n\n11:10\tMichelle Levy:\tWonderful! Well, thank you so much. Ann, do you want to tell us a little bit about you now and where you were?\n \n\n11:17\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, now I’m sitting in my study in Vancouver. I live in the West End near Stanley Park and I’ve lived here for a while. But in 1984, I was in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser and Carolyn came to join us. I think she came a couple of years after I did, and we became great friends. And we had babies together. I had one, she had one, I had one, she had one. So we – the same maternity clothes were floating around the office for almost five years, which drove everybody nuts. But anyway, so we’d been friends all these years. I did my BA at U of T in English – English Language and Literature it was called then. And then I did a Master’s degree in Carlton because I was married to – at that time a physiology professor who had a job at the University of Ottawa. But then I fell in love with Peter Buitenhuis and moved to Vancouver and started working at SFU about a year after that. So – and Peter was the chair of the English department at the time that this recording was made…\n \n\n12:35\tKandice Sharren:\tIt was through our conversation with ann and Carolyn that we learned that Mavis Gallant’s visit to SFU actually included two events: the reading of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU Burnaby at Images Theater at 11:30 in the morning of February 14th, which we have a recording of, and a mid day reading downtown the day before for which we have no archival material whatsoever. In fact, we were unaware of the event on February 13th until we had the opportunity to chat with Ann and Carolyn about their experiences organizing and attending these events.\n \n\n13:09\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, first of all, you’re quite right. There was an event downtown. It was the day before the event on campus. And it was in quite a small room because we were at 549 Howe in those days and we didn’t have any large rooms. So we did – as Carolyn said, she organized the downtown talk and neither of us can remember what story she read downtown. It was not the same one as she read on campus. But I think Carolyn should tell you a little bit about that event because some of the behaviour of Mavis in the recording of the second event, I think stems from her experiences downtown. So maybe Carolyn would talk a little bit more, because you were really in charge of that event. And I certainly remember the room being full of very enthusiastic people.\n \n\n14:00\tCarolyn Tate:\tI’m happy to talk about the downtown event and Mavis. It was a fiasco, frankly. I didn’t think that there would be very many people and we had this little free room down there and somebody set up the mic and I thought, well fine. You know, 20 people will come or something like that. Well, more like 50 or so people came and the room was very crowded and we didn’t have the technician – he had set it up, but then it didn’t work. So it was really quite miserable for everybody, but especially for Mavis. She was very, very put out by it. And in truth, I was a little bit put out by how put out she was. I expected her to be this kind of, I don’t know, nothing would phase me sort of person. And really, she wasn’t that at all.\n \n\n14:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tShe was very proper. She was very neatly dressed in a very good French suit. She’d come on the airplane and she told us that she had a terrible time because she didn’t want to ask somebody to help her get her suitcase down from the bin. And you know, you couldn’t just ask somebody to help you – didn’t you know? And frankly, I didn’t know that [Laughs]. I thought – I really thought she was a bit precious. I have to say. [Laughs] But, notwithstanding that, she came along and we were going to do the talk and there was no mic. So she had to shout the whole time, and she did. And she finished, she gave her reading and people heard her. I have to say – I was so fritzed by that time that I didn’t, I didn’t know – I have no idea what story she read. I have no memory of her actual talking, which was why I was so thrilled with the recording that you have because I think she is a brilliant speaker.\n \n\n16:04\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell she was a little grumpy, I have to say. And she – not only was she grumpy, she told everybody to ask Carolyn for their money back, which was $10. The event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown. So we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10.” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office”. So anyway, it was one of those moments. But the reason I mentioned that is that the next day, you’ll notice, she says several times on the recording, “can everyone hear me? Can everyone hear me?” And the thing is that she wasn’t a very large person and she had a not particularly strong voice. So I think that having exercised her voice to the max the day before she was a little bit overly nervous on that recording about how well she was being heard and so on. And she was fussing if you remember, at the beginning, she was fussing about the microphone and so on. And I I think she was nervous about technology in the same way that both Carolyn and I are. So, we have to forgive her that. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano]\n \n\n17:24\tKandice Sharren:\t[Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Three: Mavis Speaks, in which we try to pin down Gallant’s accent.\n \n\n17:31\tKate Moffat:\tDespite Ann’s memories of Mavis being somewhat grumpy and nervous about her delivery, we all agreed upon listening to the recording that it was rather brilliantly done. She’s an engaging and dynamic speaker and one who is perhaps more self-conscious or aware of the unique elements of her delivery than her audience. In the short question period following the reading, someone in the audience asks a question, barely audible on the recording. Gallant’s response indicates she heard him mention a mistake, and contextualizes her various pronunciations of Grippes and Poches throughout the reading, which she clearly considers as slips of the tongue.\n \n\n18:02\t   Audio Recording,   Audience Member:\tBut in this context, you committed the best kind of blunder, which revealed a bit of your personality to us.\n \n\n18:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tWhat kind of blunder?\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording,   Audience Member:\n \n\nRevealing your personality.\n \n\n18:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tOh! I thought you were talking about pronunciation because when I’m reading in English in English, it’s almost impossible for me to pronounce French names in French because you have to change the pitch of your voice, you know, and it’s a different pitch, the two languages, and it interrupts the reading. And that’s why I say Grippes, Grip, Grips, just as it comes most easily, I thought you meant that [Laughs].\n \n\n18:35\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant’s remarks on her uneven pronunciation of characters’ names reveals her position between English and French and between Canada and France, not just in her adult life. All of us had strong responses to Gallant’s accent, which we struggled to place until Ann and Carolyn compared it to that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who also grew up bilingual in Canada during the 1920s and thirties. Like the New Yorker’s font, Gallant’s accent conveys particular contextual information about her and her place in history.\n \n\n19:08\tCarolyn Tate:\tI wanted to ask you what you thought of Mavis’ accent, if you had any, do you have any reaction to that? Because I found her accent quite amazing, sort of mid Atlantic. It didn’t sound totally Canadian. It didn’t sound British. It’s kind of, she kind of reminded me a bit of the way Pierre Trudeau talked, it was just its own thing. And I don’t know whether you had a reaction to that or not.\n \n\n19:42\tMichelle Levy:\tI think we had trouble –I had trouble placing it. And I remember discussing that with Kandice and Kate. I asked my husband about it [Laughs], I was like, “where is this voice coming from?” It did seem really unusual. Lovely. One of my favourite stories of hers called ‘Specs Idea’, which is from around the same time, it was in that same volume, and it’s about an art dealer. There’s this woman that owns the art that her husband has left her, and her voice is described as like trilling bells. And I always feel like that to me, that’s almost like Mavis’ voice. It’s – I thought it was beautiful. But the accent, I just, I had no idea.\n \n\n20:25\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, it’s –I think that you mentioned that she was educated in French, but her English became the language of literature for her. So I’m wondering if, as Carolyn said, Pierre Trudeau had a bilingual early childhood as well. And I’m wondering if that’s a West Mount Montreal or [French word] accent or something like that.\n \n\n20:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tI think so. I mean, that’s what I thought. I mean, his mother was –Trudeau’s mother was an Anglophone and of course, Mavis’ parents were Anglophones too, but she had this French education. [Start Music: Piano]\n21:04\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Four, The Unseen Audience. In which we learn about bums in seats, how many there were, where they sat, how they laughed. [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Our listening to the recording and our reactions to what we could hear of the event, the story, and her voice, and accent were necessarily mediated by the recording and our own personal circumstances listening to it, which differ greatly from the live experience that the audience of the reading had. Ann realized while listening to our last episode, that she could hear her husband in the audience during the reading.\n \n\n21:37\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd it was really kind of spooky for me because when I listened to the recording, I could hear Peter laughing. And I haven’t heard it for so long.\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tNo action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. [Audience member laughs] The professor, one.\n \n\n21:57\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tOne of the wonderful things about Peter was that he always laughed very loudly and the kids would always say their school plays went better on the days when he was there, cause he would laugh at all the jokes.\n \n\n22:08\tKate Moffat:\tListening to the recording, we have no information about the audience except what we can hear. With Ann’s input, We know Peter Buitenhuis, chair of the English department at the time, was in attendance, and also the longer personal history of his laugh. And this prompted a general curiosity about the audience, including how many people attended, and thus how full the very large Images Theater might have been, which isn’t something recorded in the archives.\n22:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah, I think that the Burnaby audience was not bad. I think we probably– that theater is good. I think we persuaded people to sit near the front and to kind of group, but I think that the theater would have been three quarters full. And I think that theater holds over 200 people.\n \n\n22:51\tKate Moffat:\tIn asking about and considering both our own reactions to the reading and the audience, we wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed or not from that of the individuals attending the event, who we hear occasional rumbles of laughter from\n \n\n23:04\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t…Anglo-Saxon commercial English [Audience Laughter] shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents [Audience Laughter] He showed…\n \n\n23:16\tMichelle Levy:\tNow from the talk itself you mentioned, Ann, that there were, that Mavis was asking questions at lunch about how you felt it went, and I’m wondering how you felt it went during the talk itself. I mean, it sounded again from the recording, which we’ve all heard, like it was crystal clear. So it sounds like the –some of the issues that happened the day before didn’t happen, but did you get a sense people were laughing, people were getting the jokes, people were enjoying it?\n \n\n23:49\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tYes, I certainly did. And, I was listening to the responses as the talk went on. I think the story was a bit long, quite frankly. I think –there’s a point where she tells you she’s reading from proofs and that her editor had a query. I mean, is he thinking, is this in his head or is that actually happening? So – and I had had the same thought myself, like, wait a minute, is this in this guy’s head? Or is he actually having this conversation? Or what have you. And I realized that I had drifted off, listening to the recording, and my recollection in the talk itself was that it was quite a long story. I felt at the time. And I think – but I do think people got it and there was still enthusiasm. But my recollection also is that the university classes were programmed in such a way in those days. The scheduling was done in such a way that there was a certain period of time in the middle of the day that you could fill with an event and people would have to go to class if it went too long. So I remember having a little bit of anxiety because I figured having observed her behavior the day before, if people stood up and started leaving, she was not going to be happy. So, I think I had a certain amount of nervousness about how long it was and – no concern about people’s lack of interest – but just a little bit of event planner angst I guess.\n \n\n25:21\tMichelle Levy:\tThat people would have to leave. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n25:23\tKandice Sharren:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Piano] [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Five: Choosing ‘Grippes and Poche’, in which we reconsider Gallant’s story in light of the audience she performed to and are deeply unimpressed with Henri Grippes.\n \n\n25:45\tMichelle Levy:\tOne of the things that I find most fascinating about paratexts is that they don’t just work one way. Artistic choices are made anticipating a certain format of publication. When we’re talking about print, it can be hard to pin down how involved an author was in the design of, say their book. Although we do know that Gallant wrote many of her stories specifically for the New Yorker, meaning that she would have been aware of the format her stories would be published in. Again, down to the font, although probably not the cartoons.\n \n\n26:15\tKandice Sharren:\tIn the case of a reading though, it’s a lot easier to see how a writer might be responding to their immediate context, which led us to ask: why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984? As you may recall, in her introduction to the reading, Gallant describes her story as a “gentle send-up” or satiric commentary.\n \n\n26:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHenri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It was just a very gentle send-up.\n \n\n26:59\tKandice Sharren:\tShe may have chosen the story for its delicate comedy, as she sends up French bureaucracy, as we meet the hapless and misinformed tax agent, O. Poche and Henri Grippes with his secret apartments and tax evasion. The main object of her send-up seems to us to be Grippes as writer. As Jonathan Coe noted in the London Review of Books in 1997, “Grippes is one of her most memorable characters, a shallow opportunistic writer who nevertheless, somehow manages to elicit the reader sympathy by virtue of his rotten luck and his chronic unpopularity with the book buying public. There’s a mordant redeeming humor here, which has given free rein then in Gallant’s weightier stories.”\n \n\n27:41\tMichelle Levy:\tDoes he elicit the reader’s sympathy though? I have to say, as someone who rents in Vancouver, I am hard pressed to want to spend time looking for a slumlord’s redeeming qualities, especially when it’s paired with literary opportunism. I really found myself hoping that Poche would catch him out by the end. So hearing Ann and Carolyn discuss the reading really struck a chord with me in part, because I kind of agreed with Carolyn’s assessment of the story.\n \n\n28:09\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah. I’m kind of surprised, ann, that you say that people received the story well, and that they laughed and whatnot because I found the story of a bit dismal. I think of it, she mentions Flaubert, as I was saying to Kate at some point during the story, and I feel that this was her kind of her Flaubertian moment or something. And it kind of reminded me of that novel the [French book title] by Flaubert where he has the ex-bureaucrat and somebody else doing all of this extremely grotesque kind of pseudo literary stuff. And I found that when I read the story, it dragged quite a lot and I didn’t find it all that amusing. And I think of it also as sort of the beginning of the end of her North American kind of– well, maybe I’m wrong about this because I think that North American readers were fascinated and gripped by these expats that she wrote about. I don’t think they were so interested in French bureaucrats and you know, French literary life and who is this English writer anyway, you know? Anyway, as I say, I don’t think it’s her best moment. Although because of this literary aspect of things, I’m going to read the other Henri Grippes stories and see whether, you know, they kind of interest me more now that I thought a little more of a take on this kind of this world.\n \n\n29:38\tMichelle Levy:\tCarolyn, if you read the rest of the Grippes story, you will indeed find much more on this kind of the French literary scene – corruption may be a bit strong, but there’s a really hilarious whole story about this attempt to write an encyclopedia of French authors that drags on for decades because they’re constantly changing who they think is important and who should be included, and the editors keep fighting with each other.[Laughs] It’s really funny. So there’s definitely more of that in that series of stories about the writer.\n \n\n30:13\tCarolyn Tate:\tI did read them sometime, but that’s very Flaubertian too. That’s what this –I don’t know whether you’ve ever read this, [French book title], it’s a terrible thing actually, but this is their whole thing too. They’re trying to be more and more kind of literary and correct, and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete balls up, frankly. [Laughs] I think Henri, he’s sort of in that frame somewhere.\n \n\n30:44\tMichelle Levy:\tThat said, and in Carolyn’s discussion of the literary trends of the 1970s and 80s,, a period that I didn’t live through and haven’t paid much attention to either academically or in terms of its literary culture, but one that ‘Grippes and Poche’ engages with did help me appreciate what exactly this story was doing.\n \n\n31:04\tKandice Sharren:\tI was struck by the sexual politics of the story, and particularly Gallant’s deadpan, imagining of a very capital P problematic male writer. Grippes regrets that in his American novel, he resorted to the stale male teacher, female student pattern. Could this failed attempt to write a novel about an academic romance be the reason for her choice?\n \n\n31:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t… female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Flaubert with his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. [Audience Laughs]\n \n\n31:48\tKandice Sharren:\tThis line elicits a knowing laugh from the audience. In fact, Gallant had been one of the first to write about a real life female teacher, male student affair between a 32 year old Gabriel Roussier and her 16 year old pupil for the New Yorker in 1971. It was a story that scandalized France, when it broke in 1967, as the parents of the boy brought legal proceedings against Roussier, that resulted her in her imprisonment, and that brought about her suicide in 1969. As Gallant dryly points out in her article about the affair, the story was an old one rife with the double standard, reflecting what Gallant calls “a prevailing belief that Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis.” ‘Grippes and Poche’ ends on a note of implicit violence as Gallant relates Grippes storytelling as a process of stocking and confining one of his female characters. In her reading, she slows down to relate his menacing attempt to invent a female character.\n \n\n32:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe had got the woman from church to dining room and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, and watched until she yielded to Grippe and told her name.\n \n\n33:08\tKandice Sharren:\tThus ending the story on a more ominous note than the gentle send-up with which it begins.\n \n\n33:14\tMichelle Levy:\tThe story is commentary on sexual politics in a campus environment, complimented her location and audience. In our conversation with Carolyn and ann, they speculated that the academic satire within Grippes and Poche, maybe one of the reasons why Gallant selected this story for her on-campus reading.\n \n\n33:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tDon’t you think she was a brilliant reader on campus?\n \n\n33:36\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI do. And I was thinking about the context of that story: 1984. And I kind of – I was thinking, what else was being published at the time? And it was interesting that she was sending up the campus drama, the campus romance, the professor who falls in love with the student – and remember he had written a failed novel. It wasn’t quite good enough in that genre. And so I was thinking who was writing in that genre that time? And I remember David Lodge’s trilogy – do you remember? And they were so good. They were so good. And so I think, she was sort of sending up professors and sort of commenting a little bit on David Lodge’s three books, which were Changing Places in 1975, Small World – an academic romance in 1984 – and Nice Work in 1988.\n34:33\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd the other thing too I found was – as Carolyn said earlier –just the vagaries of literary tastes. People going in and out of fashion and suddenly being reinvented as somebody who’s okay with women, at a time when, when suddenly we’re worrying about whether or not somebody has the right feminist credentials to be read by the students in women’s studies, et cetera. So I think that there was certainly a memory for me of literary tastes and fashions and so on that I found quite interesting hearing the story again. None of this occurred to me particularly at the time.\n \n\n35:19\tKandice Sharren:\tIt’s something that testament to these vagaries of literary trends that I had actually never heard of David Lodge before. Apparently this shocked Michelle who asked me if I was sure I wanted to admit to this publicly. When I think of campus novels, I think of on the one hand, Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night published before the outbreak of the Second World War, or on the other hand, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. But I haven’t really read any written between the Second World War and the early 2000s, perhaps because the sexual politics of novels written in that period speak to a very different historical moment, and one that isn’t the subject of nostalgia, the way something like Sayers book is.\n \n\n36:05\tMichelle Levy:\tThe literary context of this story are only part of it’s satire though. Grippes refashions the dull civil servant in an attempt to keep up with literary fashion, but also with the winds of political change. The beginning of the story is set in 1964 and ends in the early 1980s, thus tracking both the progress of Grippes writing career and that of the fifth Republic itself.\n \n\n36:29\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe other thing though, I thought that was interesting about the story was how she talked about the change in government and this story spans 20 years or something. And so you have those [French phrase] coloured folders and you have the Charles DeGaulle coloured folders and so on. And the poor old tax guy gets his baby face gets sterner, and he got some little bald spot in his curls and so on. And so there’s a sense of a time passing. To me that sort of Proustian, and maybe that was a kind of melange of that as well. I really haven’t thought too much about what she might’ve been trying to accomplish in terms of her own oeuvre, but she had published that some years before she read that story. So it certainly wasn’t new work she was reading. But I have a feeling she kind of hauled out something that she thought might appeal to an academic audience. And the question that you asked…\n \n\n37:34\tMichelle Levy:\tDespite the literary and political moments that Gallant’sstory is in conversation with, her language has a strikingly timeless quality, precisely descriptive, but with a wry restraint that ironically captures the rhythms of Grippes thoughts.\n \n\n37:47\tKandice Sharren:\tIn writing about a writer, Henri Grippes, Gallant celebrates his flights of imagination, but also wryly observes his limitations. The meta-fictional elements of the story are both profound and comic as we are treated to a description of Grippes entire oeuvre, and also to his inability to recognize himself in his characters. On contemplating the protagonists of his books, Gallant dryly explains that…\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe was like a father gazing around the breakfast table, suddenly realizing none of the children are his.\n \n\n38:18\tKandice Sharren:\tThis was something that Ann commented on too.\n \n\n38:21\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI thought she had some wonderful metaphors and some wonderful sentences. I mean she talks about the shoreline of the 80s at one point –and talking about the rise to acclaim as this man’s career is a little bit rejuvenated at the end of the 80s. And she had just lovely, lovely metaphors from time to time and quite extended – she’d spin it out in kind of interesting and droll ways. And so I really admired her as a wordsmith in this story. And– as I said earlier, I did feel it was a rather long story, but I felt that her language – I had forgotten what a fine craftsman she was. [Start Music: Piano] She really, she really does write in a very original and refreshing way\n \n\n39:26\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter six: Grippes and Poche in the archive, in which Ann remembers the reel-to-reel machine at the reading and a hunch is confirmed. [End Music: Piano] Listening to Gallant’s original and refreshing language in her own voice is only possible through the archival remains of the event, especially their high-quality. In the March 2021 episode we talked about how these archival materials –in this case, the tape that holds Gallants reading – reveals the hands that manipulated it. The clean break between sides one and two had us convinced that despite the fact that the tape said “master” on it, it was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n40:11\tKate Moffat:\tWe were delighted to hear Ann confirm some of what we questioned and hypothesized in the first episode surrounding Curtis Vanel’s involvement. In a subsequent email, she shared with us that “the sound technician was set up on the right side, facing the stage and had a desk with reel-to-reel recorder. I always paid to have the technician there. Otherwise someone else had to make sure the record button was pushed and that the thing was at the right level. The technician also made sure the audio levels were good. I have a vision of Curtis walking up to the mic, turning it on and checking, and then adjusting the height for Mavis, and then sitting down. He would have done the same for Grazia.” She even recalled that Vanel was particularly interested in generations of recordings. His master tape was the one that other generations were created from.\n \n\n40:55\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI remember having many conversations with Doug about first and second generations. I mean, this is before things were digitized. So, he used to make a master cassette that would come from the reel-to-reel stuff that he did. And it would be very clean, whereas the reels would not be – I mean, he was a master at fixing things, getting rid of all the ums and ahs and whatever. And so he probably then had a master cassette from which copies would be made, but he would always hold onto the master because every copy was another generation. So that was the way he thought about it.\n \n\n41:40\tKate Moffat:\tAs far as we, and the folks in the SFU archives have been able to determine, we no longer have the original reel to reel for this reading evidence of its existence lies only in evidence of editing hands on the cassette tape, recording. [Start Music: Accordion]\n \n\n42:01\tKandice Sharren:\tOur interview with Ann and Carolyn, and Michelle’s conversation with Grazia Merla was a reminder that while the archives can provide records and a certain amount of contextual information, particularly when you pay sustained attention to your materials, they cannot capture everything. Ann’s recollection that Images Theater was three quarters full for the reading is information we would never have been able to track down otherwise, as it wasn’t recorded anywhere. Gallant’s fussing over the microphone at her reading in Images Theater is informed by the technical difficulties the day before. And that day before the event downtown uncaptured on audio doesn’t seem to exist in the archive at all, only in fickle human memory.\n \n\n42:56\tMichelle Levy:\tWe want to end by connecting our conversations about the reading with the larger paratextual paper record, including the label on the cassette, the poster used to advertise the event, and the proofs Gallant was reading from. In addition to these materials, we were also fortunate to obtain a copy of proofs of photos, taken of Gallant by Bruno Schlumberger on November 1st, 1990, during another visit to Canada. These photos taken near the Rideau canal in Ottawa offer a wonderful glimpse of Gallant, charming, exuberant, but still well-dressed and put together. Kate, Kandice and I were not fortunate enough to have met Gallant or heard her read in person, but with these photos and the recording and our interviews with Ann, Carolyn, and Grazia, yet we are able to conjure a distinct portrait of this most entrancing and provocative writer. [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n44:06\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada., Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini-stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.6474447},{"id":"9579","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E5, Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal, 3 February 2020, Moffatt and Levy"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-5-revisiting-feminist-noise_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:02:45\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,250,664 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-5-revisiting-feminist-noise_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-02-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708#map=19/49.282403/-123.108552\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\" 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada. V6B 5K3.\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":[" 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada. V6B 5K3."],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The program for the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 can be found HERE.\\n\\nThe program for the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound can be found HERE.\\n\\nArchival audio from the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 and the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019, Simon Fraser University.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549521170432,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, student contributor Kate Moffatt revisits “Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal” – a live panel from the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. With presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec (moderated by Hannah McGregor) the panel explores how we understand sound, noise, voice, silence, and voiceless-ness when they intersect with gender, feminism, and the expected, mandated, or performative aspects of speech. Including a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation, project and sonification, Episode 5: “Revisiting ‘Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal’” returns to the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium as Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\nTo find out more about our next SpokenWeb Symposium in 2020 here. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. Now this month we’re bringing you something a little bit different. In this episode of the Spoken Web Podcast student contributor, Kate Moffatt is revisiting a live panel from the 2019 Spoken Web symposium called Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. That panel happened right here at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and it featured presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec and it was moderated by me.\nYou hear me introduce the panel and also laugh a little bit too loudly, a little bit too close to the microphone a couple of times. The panel was exploring how we understand sound and silence, voice and voicelessness where they intersect with gender, feminism and the expected mandated or performative aspects of speech. This episode also includes a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation as well as the larger project that it touched on and the project of sonification in general. And what I’d particularly like you to listen for in this episode is the way that it expands on the way we’ve been talking about archival sound in the Spoken Web Podcast so far. The reflections on noise and silence that you hear in these presentations as well as in Kate Moffatt’s discussion challenges us to ask how certain sounds end up in the archive and what gets left out or ends up being unarchivable. A project like this one, the Spoken Web project is in some ways limited by what’s there, by what’s been recorded by what we can find by what we’ve already found. But of course there’s a lot of power and politics that goes into what ends up in the archive in the first place. We tend to archive things that are remarkable that we mark as important, but that leaves out all kinds of banal background noise. What Brady Marks refers to as the acoustic weather. And when it comes to the challenge of archiving, how would we begin to think about archiving silence?\n\nIt’s particularly interesting hearing all of these different speakers on these ideas in the form of an episode where Kate has essentially created an archive of an event that might have otherwise passed by unremarked. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this episode grapples with the challenges of thinking about the relationship between feminism and noise. So without any further ado, here’s episode five Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Taking us back to the 2019 Spoken Web Symposium. As Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\n03:42\tKate Moffatt:\tIn May of 2019 two inaugural Spoken Web events took place in Burnaby and Vancouver, British Columbia, the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound. This episode of the Spoken Web Podcast will be revisiting a particular panel from that symposium and talking to one of its presenters, Dr. Milena Droumeva. But first, let me introduce you to these two exciting events.\nThe Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 was a Spoken Web members’ event that took place at the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus over May 28th and 29th. The Institute questions how we work with sound and with literary recordings in particular, recognizing the impact that Spoken Web, as a large scale and widespread project, can have on the future of literary sound studies. How do we interact with sound in the archive? How do we curate it? How do we manage mass amounts of files in ways that make them accessible? How do we name them? How do we store them? How do we make them archivable and resilient in the face of technological advancements?\n\nHow do we share what we’re learning, the scholarship that we’re creating, with a broader audience? With individuals both inside and outside of universities? The Institute not only endeavored to begin answering these questions by sharing current research projects and scholarship, putting on workshops on podcasting, copyright, oral history and data management, but it also brought together the geographically widespread members of the project to celebrate the first year of Spoken Web. The Institute was followed by the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound, which took place over May 30th and 31st at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.\n\nMany of the themes and topics taken up by the Institute were represented, questioned, illuminated and challenged by the Symposium, which was open to all scholars and creators and brought together students, teachers, authors, artists and scholars to share their work in the field of sound studies. The wide ranging presentations, which included everything from recreations of old radio broadcasts to analyses of the use of accent and audio books, took up the themes of performance, space, gender, politics and technology to name just a few. Today we will be revisiting one of the symposium panels, Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec made up this particular panel and their presentations explored how we understand sound, voice, silence and voicelessness when they intersect with gender, gender, politics and mandated expected or performative speech. First we have Dr. Lucia Lorenzi Introduced by Dr. Hannah McGregor, Dr. Lorenzi’s presentation questions, the rising expectations of speech from survivors of sexual violence and assault in an age of social media and reality and the potential effects that mandating that speech can have on our understanding of voice and silence and noise from activists and survivors.\n\n06:47\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome everyone to Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. I am Hannah McGregor. I’m an assistant professor of publishing here at SFU. Dr Lucia Lorenzi is an ambivalent scholar, but an excited thinker finishing up a postdoc and cultural studies at McMaster university.\n07:08\tLucia Lorenzi:\tMy dissertation was about silence and representations of sexualized and gendered violence in literature and the kinds of readings that I was doing felt very literary to me. I was looking for omissions or nonlinear forms of storytelling or particular types of narrative voice. But when I got into performance, namely theater, it became really impossible to avoid thinking through sound as a material experience. So for instance, when I was writing about Colleen Wagner’s play, The Monument, in the stage directions, there are silences and long silences and long, long, long silences.\nSo trying to think about reading a text and writing about a text that also exists in another world as a performance and as a sonic experience. But as I’ve done this work over the past decade or so, in addition to my work as an activist and an advocate around these issues, one of the main questions that I keep coming back to is this isn’t necessary to speak out about sexualized and gender violence? And to what extent has a particular configuration or understanding of sound, and not just voice, created, yes, feminist communities, but also pressures and expectations around the category or the identity of survivor. So perhaps more simply, what I’m trying to think through is how we challenge the binary of speech and silence that characterizes a lot of understandings and representations of violence.\n\nSo put another way, is there a third option to this formulation proposed by Arundhati Roy who in their now famous remarks at the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize stated, “We know there’s no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” I wonder if there is such a thing ,and here I’m going to invoke Sara Ahmed’s ideas around willfulness, could there be something like the willfully silent? And what might those silences, or what I’m calling sonic refusals, look like in an era of digital mediation? The performances I’m looking at are several, but I want to talk about one in particular that stands out to me that I’m still really trying to understand from a sound studies perspective.\n\nEmma Sulkowicz is a queer nonbinary Asian American artist who’s best known for their 2014/2015 endurance performance piece entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) And they carry around this standard size dorm room mattress everywhere they went on the campus of Columbia University until either they graduated or their rapist was expelled. They graduated and you see them carrying it with friends across the stage. Their art went viral in part because this work emerged at the height of the student activist movement around campus sexual assault in the United States. Sulkowicz was featured on the cover of New York Magazine and their work was really seen as I think emblematic of the campus movement, antiviolence movement more generally. Much of their work in the intervening years has not received the same level of public attention, but it’s received a great deal of positive critical attention in the art world, and several of their pieces have worked to think through the experience with being a very public survivor of sexual assault including the kinds of discursive pressures, ways of speaking that have been placed on them. Their 2016 performance, Self Portrait (Performance with Object) takes place on two, I guess technically four, pedestals in a gallery space. So on the one pedestal Sulkowicz stands ready to engage in conversation with audience members who are free to ask them about anything.\n\nNow if they want to know about stuff that, Sulkowicz has frequently asked very invasive questions, they are directed to address Emmatron. And Emmatron is a likeness of Sulkowicz who speaks via an iPad that is loaded with preset questions and answers you can scroll through. As Matt Stromberg describes in review for Artbound quote “Answers recorded by Sulkowicz play from Emmatron’s unmoving lips. On the afternoon I visited these responses were barely audible, unintentionally highlighting the primacy of the interaction with the living breathing artist in the room.” So in the next few minutes, I want to think through how Sulkowicz selective speech and this digital mediation of sound pose both material and discursive or philosophical challenges to how sound and speech have of course been used by survivors, but they’ve also been weaponized against them. I think that their art provides a departure point thinking about the antiviolence movement as a sonic community and an archive, but to unpack how the production of ‘survivor’ as a political identity is deeply bound up in particular kinds of sonic production in public space. In his essay collection, Silence: Lectures and Writings, American avant-garde composer, John Cage stated, all caps, “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT.” So Cage, obviously his broader arguments work to destabilize the binaries around sound and silence, but I think what he says when he says, I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it, is talking about one of the most difficult things I think about silence. Because it’s so often risks being misunderstood, it often still requires a narrative apparatus that circles it. Cage speaks in order to give his reasons for not speaking, which is that he has nothing to say, and I’ve been thinking about Cage’s having nothing to say and saying it just because voice, literal voice and mouths are so important to the imagery of antiviolence movements. The importance of breaking the silence, which suggests a sort of sonic power that is powerful enough to really deliberately destabilize objects perhaps, also exist in relationships to other political movements.\nWhile broadly used across antiviolence work of all kinds, the slogan of ‘breaking the silence’ and imagery such as a person with a hand or tape over their mouth, has to become also iconic and representative of the ways in which voice, a particular kind of voice, a particular use of that voice, perhaps a particular intonation has been linked to a particular kind of identity politics. Because a survivor as opposed to a victim isn’t just someone who speaks but they break or shatter silences, which calls up this very material instantiation of sound, so shouting or chanting at rallies using a megaphone. And these forms of sonic production are deeply related to feminist practice, we amplify voices, we pass the mic.\n\nNow I’m still struggling with the ways that silence seems to be a kind of counter intuitive mechanism, because I’m aware of the deep history and the weight politics and oppression that mean that people are silenced or that they are unheard. But I’m also trying to connect this to rich traditions of silence as a means of political disruption. In describing the political strategies employed by American suffragists in the early 20th century, Mary Chapman notes that a key strategy of the suffrage movement was the use of voiceless speech. So obviously that the historical context surrounding these activists, and I’m thinking particularly about, queer, trans, racialized activists in the 21st century, could not be in some ways more different, but I think that contemporary activists are still grappling with some of the same difficulties. So to what extent can survivors participate in public spheres of discourse? Where can they use their voice? What are the political risks, including risks to physical safety? Knowing the myriad ways in which survivors continue to be silenced, how can survivors, and I’m going to quote Chapman here, quote, “creatively rework the cultural significance of their political silence, changing it from a sign of powerless citizenship to an example of creative forms of participation in the modern public sphere.”\n\nSo Sulkowicz’s piece helped me think about these creative forms and participation, and I want to make a few suggestions, however preliminary, about how I’m reading how it uses sound and silence. So the first thing that I think of is this divide in terms of, this sort of divide, this little physical divide in terms of how audience members can interact. So Emmatron I had is still voiced by Sulkowicz, but the voice is predefined and limited. And I wonder if that also then resists manipulation, it has boundaries around it, it cannot be altered. I’m thinking about the use of audio recording and the ubiquity of access to voice recording technology, and also the alleging democratization. Listening to Sulkowicz’s recorded voice isn’t a private experience, which sort of seems, you know, my experience of gallery spaces often with sound art, unless it’s an exhibition that’s sort of, you know, is curated in particular ways, is that you listened to it in headphones, you’re listening to it privately. But as audience members have observed, there’s this sort of dual listening where you’re trying to listen to the iPad and you’re also trying to listen in on what’s going on with the fact that you don’t get to have that private experience. Sulkowicz’s voice is, this is really interesting to me, described by many reviewers as pleasant and joyful and warm like as if it’s a surprise. And I think that comments on the ways in which survivors literal voice is also a point of suspicion. A comment on a YouTube video which provides a little bit of documentation of this piece, one of the commenters says “She laughs a lot. Not sure what’s so funny.”\n\nI’ve been thinking about reading this laughter alongside the laughter of other performance regarding sexual assault, namely survivors who use stand up comedy to talk about their experiences and who in that interaction is able to laugh and why, who is laughing at who. And then scrolling through the iPad and thinking about where it is that we now most frequently encounter the voices of survivors and where that archive lives. Cause I’m trying to think about the archiving of, you know, the Women’s March or other kinds of marches and then the ways that that’s hard to access, versus you can go through and you can literally pick any hashtag that you want. And it’s really easy to be able to sort of go through that archive and sort of make notes of the kinds of stories that are being told there.\n\nSo in an article from the early nineties, maybe 1994 perhaps, or ’91, I can’t remember, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, they sort of read Foucault talk about, you know, is survivor speech transgressive, right? So it’s almost 30 years ago and I feel like those questions are coming up, but they’re coming up differently because of the technologies and the types of public assembly and the way that public assembly is archived or not archived have changed. They say, quote, “when breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery as or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess, to recount their assaults, to give details, and even to do so publicly.” This is justly deserving of the critique Foucault offers of the way in which the demand to speak involves dominating power. So freedom through speech or voice then is no longer one of a series of possibilities, I worry about the way in which it becomes mandated. And Tarana Burke echoed this recently in an interview with the Washington Post where she mentioned her frustrations with the goals of the MeToo movement. She says, “culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation and it doesn’t happen in the disclosure, culture shift happens in the public grappling with these questions because nobody has firm, definitive, or perfect answers.” What I wonder, then, is if we’re shifting away from disclosure or ‘the speaking,’ maybe what we’re trying to articulate is a different politics or a different strategies for eliciting that seems to be what Burke is calling for. And I also think that’s what Sulkowicz’s piece asks of audience members.\n\n19:56\nKate Moffatt:\tDr. Lorenzi’s presentation recognizes the complicated history around silence, speech and activists’ sonic actions. And her suggestions that sound can exist both as a material experience and a sonic one, and that it can change or impact our understanding of the identity of survivors and the identity of those who do or do not choose to speak, is a theme that can be traced through the following two presentations of this panel, Dr. Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation questions how social media data, such as tweetsm can exist as a soundscape. In particular, what do the hashtag MeToo movement tweets sound like when reinterpreted as sound and what effect emotional or otherwise does sonifying those tweets have on the listener?\n20:39\tHannah McGregor:\tOur next speakers are Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks. Dr. Milena Droumeva is a sound studies professor here at SFU in the school of communication. She does work in critical approaches to urban soundscapes and gender and the game sound. And Brady Ciel Marks is a computational artist who is concerned with our technological entanglement and so creates soundscapes that demystify, transgress, and reinterpret our potentially free relationship to tech and framing. What a beautiful bio. And other things, it says and other things.\n21:17\tBrady Marks:\tSo we’re going to talk a little bit about a sonification that we’ve created together, and do a demonstration. So what does is a sonficiation? Let’s start there. For me, a sonification is a reinterpretation of a dataset into sound. And the dataset that we are interested in exploring is the MeToo phenomenon as represented through tweets. Turning this into sound has a number of different ways to do that, it’s very flexible cause obviously those tweets don’t make sound in and of themselves.\n22:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust to refresh everyone’s memory just in case you don’t remember what #MeToo is all about or what happened because our social media memories, you know, are three seconds long.\n22:13\tBrady Marks:\tThis is the virtual phenomenon, global phenomenon, reacting to sexual intimidation and sexual violence that happened at the end of 2017 and we’ll be seeing today how it’s still happening online through sonification after the live demo.\n22:37\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe want to ask you some questions about, you know, what this type of, representation of information, I don’t want to call it data because it’s so cold, it’s not really data, but it also is, it’s accessible as data. But whether, you know, we can think of it as an archive or memorial or other things.\n23:03\tBrady Marks:\tI was very inspired by soundscapes as this idea of something that we listen to and we sort of embody or incorporate into our everyday activities. I always come back to the same example, which is like, you hear the wet tires of a car on the streets in the morning and you know Oh, I should get my umbrella. It’s like it’s background, this thing that becomes foreground because it’s relevant to you. But something that you live with and that becomes sort of acoustic, whether the you react to it.\n23:41\tMilena Droumeva:\tI love that. Wait wait, I just wanted to say about the choice of sonification because I do realize that that is new for a lot of folks and unfamiliar. I’ve been doing work in sonification for a long time. But typically when you go to, especially an audio conference or a sonification conference, sonification sounds something like woo woooo. That is what they sound like. They’re literally a kind of a pitch shifting, following a line graph. So a lot of them don’t go like a lot further than that, and we wanted to go like a lot further than that with this kind of sonification because I really got to the point where I wanted to explore what would it mean to create a sonification not only sonifying something boring in an interesting way, but sonifying something really interesting in an interesting way. And what would it mean to sonify social data? It’s tweets, you can download a dataset, but it really, it’s people’s lives and people’s truths that are being shared, it’s kind of a voice, but it’s silent. So there’s a soundscape of that silence in there and we want to give it voice in a way. Now, what voice would you ask that we give it? Well, here’s where, just to have fun, because another part of my work has to do with, that I’ve been chipping away at, has to do with the rather sexist sonic representation of women in video games. If you play any video games or if you’ve heard about video games, you probably see fighting ladies like these and you’ve heard about, you know, the conversations around well maybe they should be wearing some more clothes or, you know, they shouldn’t be fighting in a bikini, that kind of thing. Not a lot of talk really about how they sound, but it is very interesting.\n25:55\tVideo Game Audio:\tPlease stop! Please don’t! What? No! Help! This is wrong!\n26:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo these are actual, battle cries, these are actual clips from actual characters from actual games. So I’ve been doing that other work and I really wanted to bring it in and somehow co-opt it and subvert it and see how it can actually, because what it does is it makes one feel really uncomfortable. It’s pornographic, it’s sort of really fragile, it’s excessive, it’s hyper feminized in a negative way. But I wanted to kind of bring in that discomfort that it creates and use it to sonify the phenomenon of #MeToo and see what that would sound like.\n26:58\tBrady Marks:\tWe took these battle cries and we mapped them one to one where each tweet becomes one simple sound. And so with the soundscape paradigm we’re not trying to make music, we’re not trying to make notes, we don’t, we’re not using pitch relationships. Every tweet you’ll hear is a battle cry. Retweets then become these echoes of that same battle cry, so those are those splurging out. And they’re the same cry echoed at slightly lower volumes. So again, we wanted to do the counterpoint. We were like these tweets, we don’t want to say that every single one represents someone declaring an event of sexual abuse, which they often are. There was also a strong backlash, right? We wanted to get this counterpoint. We wanted to get the trolls voice and we failed at that point. We looked into sentiment analysis, I did try, I looked into a few different methodologies, haven’t got that part sorted yet. Another aspect of MeToo that we wanted to represent the society of the zeitgeist of a reach. The fact that all tweets are not exactly equal. There are movers and shakers, people with large followings, and we thought that would correspond to the reach. If someone retweets or tweets and they have a large following.\n28:31\tMilena Droumeva:\tLike Alyssa Milano, if you remember, there was a big spike in October because Alyssa Milano came forward with her story about Harvey Weinstein and she has, I mean anytime she tweets something she’s got millions of people, right? So that was a big event. And that will be different than, you know, me tweeting something, and I know you’re now dying to hear what this thing sounds like. So, drumroll.\n28:56\tBrady Marks:\tI’m going to just hit our live one, which is real time tweets, so they’re tweets that are happening right now, they’re delayed by 15 seconds just so I can get the timing so they don’t bunch up too much. And then our person with the historical data sets, we’ve got one day at 60 times speed and then we can maybe try the one month, which should get 1500 times a week. So this is the site. So there were four, so that’s a week’s reach. It was busier during lunch, it was very quiet last night. Silence is loud. Silence is…\n30:13\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe’ve been reflecting a lot on the silences\n30:18\tBrady Marks:\tIt’s particularly quiet, actually.\n30:32\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I’ve never heard it so quiet. But it’s one of the, one of the things that we did want to create, and I, and I want to connect this with your talks, is the, to experience like the folding of this in time, and just the kind of like, we’re literally waiting for a tweet right now, of somebody sharing, possibly sharing a story, responding, commenting.\n31:11\tBrady Marks:\tThis is January 10th.\n31:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo this is, you know, when you compress time. This is just one day. [sonification starts in background]\n32:21\tBrady Marks:\tSo that’s one day of tweets during that intense time. And so every single sound you hear is a tweet, using those vocalizations is a tweet or retweet. Let’s slow it down. That was 150 times speed.\n32:44\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust 30 seconds and we’ll be done with this. Just to conclude, I wanted to see, this is obviously and somewhat deliberately under-theorized at the moment, because it’s, well I really wanted to prioritize this experiential engagement and see like what it sounds like, how we feel, what happens. And it’s very much a ongoing work in progress and I’m very interested in everybody’s thoughts and suggestions both in terms of practical and reactions but also like ways of theorizing that would seem intuitive or natural, synergies and so on. So thank you\n34:12\tKate Moffatt:\tMilena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation indicates in an uncomfortable, discomforting, thought provoking manner, the facelessness of social media data and the fact that reinterpretations as Dr. Droumeva pointed out, tell a story. This particular re-interpretation reminds us all that each contributor to that mass amount of data for the #MeToo movement is an individual, is their experiences, or a contribution to their story because others are engaging with it. Both Dr. Lorenzi’s questions about silence and sonic refusal and Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks’ questions about how silence, noise, and performance can affect our perception or emotional understanding is found, also, in the last presentation of this panel. Blake Nemec’s presentation questions how the voices of unprotected workers, and even the sounds pitches and intonations that these voices make rather than simply their words, differ from protected workers. Nemec questions, how sonic performances, how silence, noise, and unexpected disruption, can communicate the emotional and political circumstances of these individuals.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tAll right. Our third speaker is Blake Nemec. Blake Nemec is obsessed with language justice as it intersects with sonic intimacies. He teaches ESL film and creative writing in Chicago. It’s all yours.\n35:32\tBlake Nemec:\tI feel like my heart is racing a little bit. Sorry. No, it’s interesting, you’ll see that I do similar things with noise, so. Okay. Sonic Intimacies of Unprotected Dialogues: the MolyBDenim Project as Syncopation, Noise, or Silence. This analysis, queers missive United States and informal trade worker dialogues and their syncopation noise or silence by reflecting on the MolyBDenim sound project that I created. Even as this discussion hones in on sex worker conversations and intentionally troubles the boundaries of this trade to include how other care industry workers who are criminalized, such as domestic workers, talk to each other or do not, or how their sonic interactions differ from those of protected workers. This analysis understands informal trade, unprotected, system D workers as labourers who do not have legal protections while at work. Syncopations and heats, massage workers. I’d like to start with how I experienced sonic intimacies with unprotected worker dialogues. Like this clip, beats and rhythms from phonemes and truncated dialogue easily form into song. After I began doing sex work, I found myself repeating clip phrases that I shared with my coworkers. There were regular intonations and I liked cycling the sound parts in my mouth, whether it was a little hot or juicy, didn’t matter, the content did not hold my connection to the sounds. It was the kind of rhythms, repetitions or intonations of the phrases that I liked repeating. What enliven me and what was animate. In Foucauldian in terms, a deeper relationship to the elements of the language can occur below the level of identities and differences, where the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions and natural criss-crossings are found.\nThe MolyBDenim sound project’s creative process was also often syncopated. In 2016, after finishing a manuscript that would become my hybrid book Sharing Plastic, I reached out to sound artist friends of mine, who had also done informal trade work, to create a collaborative sound project named MolyBDenim. As the collaborators were spread across the United States, we met online to rehearse and created a lot of video conference chatter about the music we could manifest, how our collaborations could grow, or how to make our performances interactive. Then the video conference would pixelate, or drop one of us from the call. Our online rehearsals, uncontrollable and truncated, mirrored elements of the informal trade work we were using as source material. The rhythms had feedback or echo, the beats from one piece of equipment would eclipse another, truncating words allows for rapid dialog and fast talk creates energy.\n\nYugoslavian born experimental fiction writer Dubravka Ugrešić speaks about the verbal steam of the communal bath in her book Lend Me Your Character. This postmodern book of short stories portrays dialogue as heat by including everyday conversations between women as communal bath and verbal steam. Listeners don’t need to imagine steam or water particles to consider dialogue as animate. Musicology shows us how sentient beings hold emotional connections to sound waves. The idea of language as steam simply assists us in acknowledging and sound wave particles as matter. The difference between the verbal scene of protected chatter and unprotected worker conversations, however, exists in the underlying temporality of unprotected worker positions, while making observations when starting during or departing work, cognisance about safety, the time, the customer, or the work landscape can be signaled by the intonations within ‘hello,’ within the tone of ‘okay,’ within the pitches of ‘oh, I see.’ Workers who have no job security do not speak to each other like nine to five workers. In my experiences with other unprotected labor, informal work may only have predictable tools their job uses and coworkers may converse about those tools while sonically implying other information. We may be ‘uh-huh’ or ‘mhm’. We can only vocalize interests or critiques through volume, intonation, or tone because more explicitly it could cost us arrest, incarceration, or deportation. Coworker chatter in United States secure employment, however, is centered on and validated by what coworkers think of each other’s lives in a shared understanding that they will see each other again. The unprotected worker is legally and socially accepted as toxic because the voices are not consistently heard.\n\nMutable is deemed suspicious. The utterances as unprotected workers are less centered on a person’s past as I know it and a person’s future as I can predict it today. I or we may only have the sound of their voice, their accent, or the intonation as an element of who they are. I may only have their volume as a sense of their opinions. This is further reason for poetry and music to amplify such dialogues and the elements of them. These art forms can portray the energy or volition of the conversations. They can portray heat, vibration, pulses, and auditory sensations. MolyBDenim tracks start with dialogue. The songs or tracks are different every time because they’re created live, surrendering control. Utterances between temporary workers are also unpredictable. Mechanical, geographical and scheduling challenges, parallel stylistic and contextual elements in the MolyBDenim sound project.\nOur equipment compelled us to be ready to change a track mid performance because the loop pedal, if not press softly, would erase all our layered songs. This loop pedal and the unlimited amount of repetitions of dialogue sounds temporarily recording to two beats was the core of our sound art. As you heard, we would start with truncated dialogues, then loop phonemes into rhythms or melodies. We knew the looping pedal could erase all the loops during the performance, so prepared for that switch. When it happened during our performances, we had to shift, start over, going to accidental openings, re-imagine the track or recenter our sound. Unprotected workers are similarly ready for change, reframing and recentering their identities, thus their voices. Every system D worker voice has a frequency, a speed pattern of which they move through the world, and MolyB’s speed also had a great range that moved from brilliant to chesty in short amounts of time. Silence. Within MolyBDenim syncopations and delicious switches are equally paralleled by deafening silences. The loop pedal switch could be started after it cut out. First, however, was the silence. Disenfranchised workers talk to each other, they also consistently do not. Silence between workers reflects the reality of the many workers cannot communicate because of their worker residency or criminal status. Therefore, some of the poems or tracks have negative spaces or silence to reflect the losses.\n\nThe lofty idea that workers in conversation are energized is met with portrayals where worker dynamics are iced. Is in these tense worker moments, the vulnerable truths of cyclical violence, for example, can emerge. Marginalized or oppressed groups of people, in this case informal trade workers, don’t have access to the right privileges. In MolyBDenim we simply allowed the pedal cuts to be. To give silence before starting up again. Mel Chen discusses toxic animosities, environmental sensitivity and how a person articulates how vulnerable bodies navigate pollutants, able bodied people, and syntax. They ask which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and un-interuptability. Noise. I began this discussion with my personal one-on-one dialogues with other workers.\n\nA further impetus for excavating sonic intimacies or animosities of informal trade worker dialogues in MolyBDenim came from Days in April, a 2008 grassroots response to the depoliticization of United States mayday. Several meetings were organized for informal workers to gather and speak about their experiences, and these conversations between and among sex workers, domestic workers, farm workers, and hotel workers resulted in alliance building and a room full of transformative noise. This discussion troubles the idea of good worker versus bad worker. It amplifies, remixes, unprotected worker dialogues to extremes. It requests listeners to hear cacophony screams, loud sirens as sonic landscapes the informal worker navigates partly to explore ideas of toxicity. Conditions informal trade workers experience are toxic and my sound projects use metaphoric toxicities such as uttered frustrations then loop and layer such emotionally angry phrases until they evolve into noise. Sound art and poetry remain a vehicle to amplify syncopations, transport and silent volitions of vulnerable workers to validate and demand respect by the unprotected. Languages and semantic innovations are occurring amid neofascist efforts of language and sound solemnisation, both working to silence the unprotected. But sound is more than this.\n\n48:11\tKate Moffatt:\tThis panel took place almost eight months ago, but I was able to catch up with Dr. Milena Droumeva recently to talk with her about her symposium presentation. Our discussion, which revisited both the making of the project itself and the presentation of it at the panel that day with Brady Marks, evolved into a discussion about how the impact of sound projects such as hers, particularly because it is based on social media data, can be affected by the means or the frames in which we encounter them. The #MeToo movement happened more than two years ago, but by using sonification and using the battle cries of female video game characters to represent tweets, Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks both troubled and explored the affective or emotional capabilities that interpretations of data sets can carry, even when the term data itself tends to suggest affective or emotional distance. When asked if she had done any further work with the project Dr. Droumeva answered with a simple\n49:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tNo.\n49:01\tKate Moffatt:\tBut as our conversation continued, she shared,\n49:04\tMilena Droumeva:\tI want to think through it. I don’t want to just push it out somehow in somewhere. I don’t want it to be an art installation project, I haven’t pursued that avenue. How exactly, like how to put it out there in what form and how to reach a wider audience? I would need partnership for that. I would need funding. And this is not particularly recognized as a form of publication, as you know, the whole project of Spoken Web and podcasting as academic publishing is something that Hannah McGregor is working on, but it’s pretty new.\n49:41\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as it turns out, the technology currently available does not really support projects like the #MeToo project that Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks presented at the symposium.\n49:49\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo part of the idea was to, I hate to bore you with this technical details, but the program that we use, which is Max MSP, does not have, does not integrate with any browsers. And browsers typically do not do a great job of embedding audio and of embedding audio software of any kind. So we simply don’t have a way of doing that, like technologically, so it’s not, it wasn’t, that part wasn’t even a matter of funding. It’s like we don’t, we can’t. The very technological framework of web browsers does not invite these kinds of audio forms, these kinds of interactive audio forms. So that’s something to consider about technology that it doesn’t really allow this kind of sonic exploration\n50:40\tKatie Moffatt:\tThat web browsers and applications are so well suited to written work, but not to live or exploratory audio work, is particularly interesting to me, especially given the different impacts that can be had via different forms of interacting with something like the #MeToo movement. Dr. Droumeva mentioned during her presentation that our social media memories can be about three seconds long. So I asked her if she thought that projects like this one could help create a more lasting impact for movements such as #MeToo.\n51:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tMy answer is no, I don’t think it can contribute to anything more lasting. I think that’s just the nature of social media it’s just growing, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, clicking, clicking, moving onto the next thing. And this could be another thing in somebody’s feed. Now what I think it can do is I think it can create a different sort of affective relationship, like a different emotional connection to the data because it’s a really different form than the one that we’re used to seeing.\n51:39\tKate Moffatt:\tDr. Droumeva’s response was surprising to me as I’ve been thinking about the project and the presentation since I first heard the recording of it. The female battle cries are discomforting to listen to on their own, and the combination of those battle cries with #MeToo tweets was very intriguing and very powerful. And I told Dr. Droumeva so.\n51:58\tMilena Droumeva:\tI’m honestly surprised to hear that it’s kind of lasting in your mind. So maybe I was wrong and this can be something a little bit more longer-lasting. I hope I’m wrong, I just, yeah, you’re catching me on a day when I feel very bleak about social media culture an, the kinds of engagement and disengagement that it produces and the kind of numbing to impact, the numbing effect that it has on anything emotional. So I think one of the reasons why I haven’t, I mean, in addition to things like funding, one of the reasons why I haven’t moved forward with it is because it’s not very clear to me how to intercept that. Like how to interrupt that social media situation and how to most effectively put it out there. So that’s honestly, again, still not clear to me in full honesty.\n52:59\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva if hearing the tweets, if listening to the #MeToo movement has the potential to change our perception of it.\n53:07\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I mean that’s the idea. Does it, is it more impactful? I don’t know. That was the idea, I mean, I’ve been doing sonification work for a really long time and only more recently I’ve been thinking about it as a, in terms of its emotional impact. Let me tell you about the very first time that I felt emotionally impacted by a sonification. It was a sonification that I heard many years ago at a conference and it was, it was pretty simple, kind of abstract tones, not melodic tones more like almost stochastic kind of rhythmic tones. But it was a sonification of brain EKGs and this was a researcher who was working to sonify brainwaves and particularly working with epilepsy patients. So he played like the sound of a healthy brain and then he played the sound of somebody having like going into a seizure. And it was really like minimalist and abstract, but it was all of a sudden I had goosebumps because it was like hearing somebody going into an epileptic seizure. And it was very simple but very, like the lack of it, the lack of other things, the lack of pictures, the lack of texts, the lack of anything else, just kind of sitting alone with the sound, even though we were in an audience, was really, really emotionally impactful.\nAnd so years later when I started thinking about the emotional impact of sound or the possibility of emotional impact of sound, a lot of people have written, a lot of sound scholars write about the, you know, sound being a special modality and having a special relationship to our interior world and creating a special kind of intimacy, so I don’t know though, there’s a lot of factors, right? There’s, there’s that and, but there’s also the fact that you heard it as part of a conference podcast as opposed to came across it in your Facebook feed. Would it have been different if you came across this in your social media feed as opposed to in a conference? And people had a big reaction in the conference, but again they were there as captive audience, they were there for a certain, with a certain intentionality, you know? And a certain open mind. So I’m really fascinated by this idea of what can create impact, especially about things as important as the NeToo movement and any other subsequent movements that are unfolding on social media. But really they’re not about the virality of social media, they’re about real people having experienced harassment and assault and making that public and joining their stories together into a big weave of, you know, evidence.\n\n56:19\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva to speak further about her use of the female battlecries to each tweet, each experience as that’s something that I’ve been trying to theorize since first hearing her presentation,\n56:29\tMilena Droumeva:\tIf I’m understanding correctly, and I, that’s what it makes me think of is that it kind of individuates each tweet and makes you remember that each tweet is an individual who is kinda crying out into the void in whatever way. Because when we think about the #MeToo movement, we even call it a movement, and as soon as you call it a movement, it’s like this faceless mass of, you know, it’s a event, you know, in the world. It’s not individual people with individual stories. Now this is also not really fair to say that each tweet is an individual with an individual story. That was true in the very beginning of MeToo. But so much of the subsequent activity, at least on social media, is actually a lot of retweets and a lot of meta communication, it’s a lot of meta conversations right now, it’s a lot of people saying something about the MeToo movement, not necessarily sharing a story, but it’s still part of the conversation. And I mean any sort of data visualization is a story. And I think what, I wasn’t thinking about this, but now that I heard you describe it in that way, I think what sound helps to do is kind of disentangle individuals and pull them apart from the, you know, the big mass of representation of data.\n57:59\tKate Moffatt:\tThat was an element of the sheer overwhelm that one feels when they hear the highest period of activity for the #MeToo tweets. Instead of hearing a singular movement, we hear more voices than we can perceive at once. It’s an incredibly powerful experience and it gives context to Brady Marks’ comment that at first the sonification sounded too pretty, which I mentioned to Dr. Droumeva.\n58:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tHuh, yeah, I do remember that. I mean Brady is a sound artist and I’m more of a social scientist really, so it was really interesting working together because we had slight, I mean we had different conceptions of aesthetics through our conversations. I think she, she started feeling like a different aesthetic, like an anti-aesthetic that was important. You know, we wanted a certain kind of assault on the ear, but not to such a degree that it was in comprehensible and mutually conflicting. And I think we’re different, we were definitely pushing the envelope a little bit in terms of sound density because we had, obviously every battle cry, every like battle cry file was triggered by the instance of the hashtag. But then we have echoes on it, which were the number of retweets. And then we had a kind of swelling and receding background drone which represented the reach, the reach of each tweet judged by the number of followers that that particular person has. And that’s, you know, really the maximum that I think I wanted to cram into, in terms of information, and it still wouldn’t be perceivable on the first listen, right? On the first listen you just kind of get hit with this emotional reaction and you get it on a very holistic sort of way. Like, wow, that’s a lot of MeToo tweets, like you get that there’s a lot.\n59:57\tKate Moffatt:\tHearing the #MeToo tweets is a very different experience than seeing it represented in visualizations of other kinds such as line or bar graphs, which amalgamate data in very particular ways. It was an important element of the project for Dr. Droumeva that the data she used be interpreted not as numbers, as data and its traditional connotations, but as individuals.\n1:00:17\tMilena Droumeva:\tEvery visualization, every transformation of data from numbers to something else is a form of storytelling. Even when we don’t want to believe so, and oftentimes visualizations don’t say, you know, they say this is data. They don’t say this is a story about data, but what it is, it’s a story about data because it always is missing certain elements and it’s highlighting other elements. And with more new media forms and more unconventional forms of data representation such as sound, it’s more, you can’t really get away with saying this is data. You’re kind of more on the spot to acknowledge that this is a story about data. But I really, I don’t want it to shy away from that at all. The idea was not at all to create some sort of dry scientific representation, right? The whole point was like, yes, this is a story about data, like all the stories about data that are out there. And, you know, let’s make this a really interesting story. A really impactful one.\n1:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Kate Moffatt and Michelle Levy of Simon Fraser University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. Thanks to Milena Droumeva, Lucia Lorenzi, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec for their candid discussions presented here. This episode features archival audio from the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019 at Simon Fraser University. Special thanks. Go out to Michelle Levy and the entire SFU Spoken Web team. To find out more about Spoken Web and our next symposium in 2020 visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the Spoken Web Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @spokenwebcanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web Podcast. Stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.6474447},{"id":"9598","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E7, Audiobooks in the Classroom, 1 May 2023, Levy and Schwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/58cbf262-da12-45e9-9dd7-822f98fa2de2/audio/819beef1-71ae-494f-8194-25b545bae90c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,667,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-05-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Baron, Naomi S. How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. Oxford University Press, 2021, https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/book/41098.\\n\\nCarrigan, Mark. “An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/12/17/an-audible-university-the-emerging-role-of-podcasts-audiobooks-and-text-to-speech-technology-in-research-should-be-taken-seriously/.\\n\\nHarrison, K. C. “Talking books, Toni Morrison, and the Transformation of Narrative Authority.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011, p. 143.\\n\\nSarah Kozloff, “Audio Books in a Visual Culture.” Journal of American Culture, vo. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 83–95, 92.\\n\\nMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.\\n\\nPergadia, Samantha. “Finding Your ‘Voice’: Author-Read Audiobooks.” Public Books, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/finding-your-voice-author-read-audiobooks/.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. “Introduction: Talking Books.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011.\\n\\n–––. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1890, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/cabinet_kiosk_16_march_2021_rubery_matthew_audio_002.mp3.\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549542141952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does it mean to “read” an audiobook? What happens when we teach literary audio in the university classroom? How can we prepare our students for success in reading and listening to audio literature?\n\nFeaturing a round-table conversation with graduate students Ghislaine Comeau, Andy Perluzzo, Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris at Concordia University and an interview with Dr. Jentery Sayers from the University of Victoria, this episode, hosted by Dr. Michelle Levy and SFU graduate student Maya Schwartz, thinks through the challenges and opportunities of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music fades] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Imagine sitting down to read a book for your literature class. When I said that, you probably pictured yourself opening a book, maybe a Toni Morrison novel, or a poetry anthology. But what if reading a book for your class looked like putting on headphones and pressing play? What happens if we consider the audio book pedagogically? What does the medium of the audiobook allow for in the classroom? How do students respond to listening to books?\n\nIn this episode, styled like an audio essay, producers Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz ask these very questions, putting current scholarship and personal reflection in conversation with interviews with professors and students alike in order to think through how literature sounds when it comes to audiobooks. Put on those headphones and turn up those speakers. Here is episode 7 of season 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Audiobooks in the Classroom. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins to play and quickly fades]\n\n(02:01)\tVoices Overlapping\tIt’s like, listen, ear skimming-\nYou kind of just like-\n\nBlank Out listening-\n\nIs attention by treating-\n\n-artifact myself-\n\n-Oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the books, so it must be a quarter of—–\n\nThe way the author enters the room. And I often, uh, when I’m teaching…\n\n(02:17)\tAI Generated Voice\tYou’re listening to “Audiobooks in the Classroom” by Michelle Levy, narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz.\n(02:28)\tMichelle\tThis podcast asks a seemingly simple question; how are we harnessing new audio forms to teach literature in the university classroom? According to Casey Harrison writing in 2011, “there is a dearth of scholarly literature on the medium of the audiobook.”\nFrom this, she concludes that this widely popular form is not being taken seriously by the academic establishment. With some important exceptions, the lack of research on the audiobook persists, even though as Harrison writes, “academics and avid readers happily avow their enjoyment and appreciation of recorded books.”\n\n[Light electronic music begins to play]\n\nAs you will hear throughout this episode, we are getting a lot of dishes washed with all of our listening. But are we taking advantage of the pedagogical potential of literary audio? This episode addresses the challenges both real and imagined that are shaping both the use of and the resistance to the incorporation of literary audio in teaching. [Electronic music ends]\n\nIt explores some of the ways in which college instructors are taking advantage of the wealth of literary audio now available to us.\n\nIt also offers reflections from students about how they are experiencing these experiments with literary audio. Ultimately, this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast seeks to offer some practical guidance to instructors and to elucidate how the use of literary audio can enhance connection, understanding, and enjoyment for our students. [Quiet string music begins to play]\n\nTo address these issues from the perspective of both the instructor and the student.\n\nThis podcast will interweave my own commentary with that of Professor Jentery Sayers of the University of Victoria, an expert in sound media and literary history, who Maya interviewed for this podcast. You will also hear an interview conducted with four graduate students from Concordia University who have recently taken a course with Professor Jason Camlot, that centered audio literature PhD students, Ghislaine Comeau and Andy Perluzzo, and MA students Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris were asked to set up questions similar to the ones I asked Jentery, and I’m delighted to include their responses to provide a range of student perspectives on the use of audio literature.\n\nI’m also joined by Maya Schwartz, an MA student at SFU, who helped to produce this podcast episode and who joins me in voicing some of the narrative commentary in this episode. [String music ends]\n\nAs an avid listener of literary audiobooks and podcasts for over a decade, it was the pandemic that finally prompted me to teach audiobooks. Jentery had decided to take the plunge before Covid.\n\n(05:07)\tJentery\tIf I recall correctly, I think I proposed it prior to the shift online for the pandemic. We shifted in March, 2020. But what I did as I was preparing it is I took advantage of some aspects of that dynamic. The fact that, I think, increasingly people were listening to podcasts, people were listening to literature, and, you know, a lot of people were inside for [Jentery laughs] doing a lot of their work.\nSo I taught, I ended up teaching the seminar online, and doing what I can or doing what I could to integrate audio into the teaching, into the dynamic that way. And I think on the whole, it worked out quite well. It was a joy to teach.\n\n(05:45)\tMichelle\t[Low string music begins to play]\nAs Jentery says, the shift to online teaching during the pandemic meant that students were receiving their instruction through audio and video, and apart from others in their home, which seemed to support the incorporation of literary audio into our courses. When teaching audiobooks and literary audio as instructors, we face a number of practical considerations.\n\nShould we require students to buy both the audiobook and a print copy of the book? Assuming the audiobook is not freely available, will they need a print copy of the book for their assignments? And if we require them to purchase both, can we justify the cost, particularly given that audible.ca unaccountably fails to offer a student membership? Could we assume that every student had a device from which they could access an audiobook or a podcast?\n\nThere were also questions about which audiobook or podcast to select and how much performance and accessibility should drive our selection. In some cases, such as canonical novels like those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, there may be dozens of audiobook versions to choose from, and much like the decision about which print edition to ask our students to purchase, selecting an audiobook requires thoughtful deliberation of the various options. Accessibility also plays a role. Most of our students have spent their academic careers silently reading. How do we prepare them to listen? [String music ends]\n\nOne of the audiobooks I have assigned, Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, is narrated by a character known only as “middle sister”. It is performed by Belfast actor Brid Brennan in a thick northern Irish accent. For me, the voicing brought the novel vividly to life. It also helped me to make sense of the stream of consciousness narration and the disorientation that comes from none of the characters being assigned proper names. [Quiet electronic music begins to play]\n\nBut some of my students struggled to hear the words and the story through the accent. Thus, a feature of the voicing that enhanced the story for me was a barrier to some. I begin, however, with one of the most fundamental questions that has vexed the use of audiobooks for teaching and research; whether listening is reading.\n\n(08:01)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter One: Is listening reading? [Electronic music ends]\n(08:07)\tMichelle\tThere is an entrenched suspicion that listening to an audiobook or a podcast is a passive activity, and hence not really reading. Jentery describes how this issue arose in a contemporary American fiction class he taught about a decade ago. One of his students kept referencing, having listened to a novel assigned for the course.\n(08:28)\tJentery\tThere was one student in particular that talked about listening the whole time when answering questions and just having class discussion. And I was fascinated by this. So I just said, do you mean just to be honest, do you mean this literally? Are you, are you listening to the book? Are you using this as a way to talk about the novel as a living text, as language, as discourse? And he’s like, no, no, I’ve listened to audiobook versions. And then, and he is like, is that okay?\nAnd so it became this discussion around the popular student perception, I think, that listening was cheating, right? And so I was like, oh, this is, this is a fascinating topic, but also more important, like it is not, and I want to think through why, for a number of reasons, including accessibility, we might want to, for good reason, debunk the that listening is cheating or that books are not meant to be listened to.\n\n(09:19)\tMichelle\tIn our conversation, this question of whether listening is reading and more pointedly and judgmentally, whether listening is cheating, resonated with Jentery who began to think about how these ingrained biases impacted his scholarly approach to and valuation of literary audio.\n(09:38)\tJentery\tI’ve always been interested in the kind of cultural dimensions of listening, the cultural dimensions of sound, but only recently, like in the last eight years or so, started to think about that in literature. And I think partly because I too had inherited this idea that if I started to do that work in literary studies, I’d be cheating my discipline.\nSo it kind of brushed against the grain of how I had been taught literary studies, how to read text with a capital T as a methodological field, but also, yeah, just plainly the sensory work I was doing and why I was parsing it. Like why was it that when I was listening I was like, oh, this is my media studies work. And why when I was reading, I was like, oh, this is media studies and or literary studies depending on the content.\n\n(10:16)\tMichelle\t[Quiet string music begins to play]\nIn his introduction to the essay collection, Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, Matthew Rubery, an historian of talking books, examines some of the assumptions that feed into assertions that listening as opposed to reading on the page, offers a compromised cognitive experience. According to Rubery, there is a belief that audiobooks do not require the same level of concentration as printed books, or that one can be inattentive while listening to an audiobook. He explains how the very features promoted by audiobook vendors as selling points; their convenience, portability, and supplementary status to other activities are the same ones used by critics to denigrate the format as a diluted version of the printed book.\n\nAudiobooks are chiefly marketed as or conceived to be entertainment, and this is another reason why they’re considered derivative of or subordinate to the printed book. What, however, other than marketing pitches underlies the belief that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading, and why is it considered even more punitively a form of cheating?\n\nOne possibility relates to what is called, and this is a quotation from Rubery, “the reader’s vocalization of the printed page, which has been taken by many to be a fundamental part of the imaginative apprehension of literature. When we read on the page, it is thought that we voice what we are reading in our head, and thus are more actively involved in meaning making than when a text is read to us.” The implication again is one of listening being passive, that instead of voicing in our minds, we are merely receptors when we listen.\n\n[String music ends]\n\nA similar objection is often made to watching a film version of a book before reading the book. The belief, again, is that it robs us of our imaginative reconstruction of the world the author creates through words alone. Reading on the page, so the theory goes, demands one’s undivided attention and imaginative powers, whereas listening does not because it allows and even invites us to perform other activities. And the fact is that many of us do turn to audiobooks in the hopes that we can accomplish other tasks while listening, but what in fact happens when we listen in order to or because we think we can multitask?\n\n(12:43)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter two: Listening As Overwork\n(12:49)\tMaya\tAs you will hear in the conversations throughout this podcast, many of us turn to audiobooks and podcasts as an attempt to maximize productivity, to fill intellectually the downtime of commuting or driving across the country, of doing chores or other forms of physical labor. Here is Jentery speaking about why he began to listen.\n(13:09)\tJentery\tAnd at first I took this as just basically a way of multitasking. Maybe it was like a form of overwork. If I’m being more reflective about it, I’m like, okay, so I might be going for a walk or I might be gardening or I might be doing the dishes, so I’m gonna put on a podcast that’s about, you know, literary criticism, literary culture or games culture, or I might listen to an audio book.\n(13:29)\tMaya\tMaia, an MA student from Concordia similarly explained that her desire to listen while doing other things was a coping mechanism meant to address overwork.\n(13:39)\tMaia\tI also have a similar experience. It was during my undergrad and I was really overworked, so I thought I’d get, I think it’s called scribd, an account on there. And I downloaded Milton’s Paradise Lost and I thought, this is great, I can do this while I work out. Two birds, one stone, and I, I think I missed about half the novel that way and it was a really unpleasant time.\n(14:00)\tMaya\tPhD students, Andy and Ghislaine also spoke about their experience with audiobooks before the course and how they attempted to listen while working and driving, cleaning and crafting. They also found that they could not concentrate on what they were listening to when doing these other activities and mostly gave up on audio books.\n(14:21)\tAndy\tI started listening to audio books. I got an audible membership to trial because I was working in a warehouse and so I had a lot of time moving my hands, but my brain was idle. So I remember I bought The Brothers Karamazov and I thought that that was gonna be the book and then honestly totally just distracted me. I never listened to audiobooks after that. I found it pretty unpleasant and I couldn’t focus. It was really hard for me to focus. Yeah, otherwise maybe driving. I drove cross country twice last year, so I definitely listened to some audio books, but, same thing, totally zoned out most of the time.\n(15:01)\tGhislaine\tYeah, I have kind of a similar audible trial experience where it’s like, yeah, I’ll try this out. And I downloaded the entire works of Poe and I’m like, yeah, I can listen to this at night or whatever. And after maybe 5, 10 minutes, I couldn’t focus on it, I just fell asleep. So I [Ghislaine laughs] since then, didn’t try to listen to other audiobooks cuz it just didn’t hold my attention.\n(15:29)\tMaya\t[Quite electronic music begins to play]\nEven after the course, the students reported that their ability to multitask while listening almost entirely depended on the content of the audiobook and the nature of the task at hand.\n\n(15:40)\tGhislaine\t[Electronic music ends]\nOn your note, Ella, of listening to non-serious books after the class ended, and it was like winter break and I still had this Audible subscription that I had to renew [laughs] because of the class and I forgot to cancel it. So I’m like, you have one credit. So I got this very unserious book called The Housemaid and all through the break, well not all through because it just took me a couple of days, I listened to it nonstop and I had a really good time listening to it, doing menial tasks, like dishes and, you know, little crafts.\n\nSo not for sleep and not for any serious work and not serious books, I could see myself maybe getting into audio books now, but yeah, I don’t know.\n\n(16:26)\tElla\tYeah, I mean I mostly listen to audio books if I’m walking or doing the dishes, like nothing that takes any more brain power than walking or doing the dishes. There’s a very fine line, like the harder the book, the more specific the task has to be to be like the right task to listen to an audiobook.\n(16:42)\tMaya\tThese conversations challenged the belief that listening is passive. Maia likewise spoke to her surprise at how much attention listening required and how this challenged her assumption about the primacy of the written.\n(16:55)\tMaia\tI wasn’t anticipating, as you’ve said as well, the amount of attention or even treating the audio as an artifact in and of itself. I didn’t realize coming into this class that I thought about it as a secondary modality to like a written form, especially from my past experience of really struggling with the audiobook and more complex wordplay that didn’t really amplify the porosity of what I was reading at all.\n(17:21)\tMaya\tAnd Jentery related that when he attempted to listen while doing chores, those chores often took a very long time.\n(17:28)\tJentery\tTo use one of my everyday examples, I often listen to a podcast while I’m doing the dishes in the evening and it’s always striking to me that there’s something said or something I heard that I will stop and go take a note. I’ll write that down on my phone or I’ll have a notebook next to me and I’ll make a note of it to return to later cuz I’m worried I might forget it, perhaps, just due to age at this point, but I go and I make a note and then I go back and then all of a sudden I’ve been doing dishes for two hours. It’s such a…it’s almost ritual at this point.\n(17:55)\tMaya\tFor Jentery, careful listening did not necessarily lend itself to multitasking, or at least to efficient multitasking. Ella described how even though she had been listening to readings in other courses and thought she was prepared, the reality was very different when confronted with the kind of listening she was asked to do in her Concordia class with Jason.\n(18:16)\tElla\tI was sort of primed for the class. I was like, great, now it’s just official, I’m going to be listening instead of reading. But I guess some of the things that we ended up having to listen to for the course required a lot more attention than I usually gave to my listening. And so I’d have to sit and listen rather than walk or do the dishes and listen, which I find a lot more difficult. I don’t know, I lose track, I lose focus if I’m just sitting and listening.\n(18:42)\tMaya\tAlthough we sometimes turn to an audio version of a book as a time-saving mechanism, thinking we can do chores when listening or as Maia says, “two birds, one stone”. It is not always possible. Often the listening or the chore or both are compromised. Further, we should bear in mind what Mark Kerrigan calls auditory fatigue; the analog to screen fatigue. Which he describes as experiencing a limit to listening, which is increasingly familiar, a sense of being oversaturated and unable to hear myself think.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nIn the conversation with Jentery, he talked about the challenges of asking people to take listening seriously and understanding the obstacles to attentive listening are part of that conversation. But to bring listening more fully into the classroom, we also need a better understanding of the processes of reading on the page. If listening is relentlessly and usually negatively compared to reading, we should first make sure we know what we mean by reading in the first place.\n\n(19:46)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter three, what is reading anyway?\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(19:52)\tMichelle\tI asked Jentery about how dismissals of listening are often informed by idealized notions of reading, particularly reading in print what you read.\n[Audio from interview with Jentery begins]\n\nBut I wanna go back to what you said earlier about often listening while multitasking, and I guess that just strikes me as so interesting and important and I think it is one of the reasons why lots of us do listen to a lot of different things, but I guess what I’m wondering is can we again maybe muddy that and say listening doesn’t just have to be deep or intense or close, that sometimes we don’t listen with that kind of intensity and that’s okay.\n\nSo one thing that has come up with my students and I’ve heard this in the interview with Jason Camlot’s students, is that they kind of go in and out of attention. Certain audio texts are much easier to listen to, some are harder, but I also think that’s what we do when we read.\n\nWe just have this fantasy that when we read, we’re just wrapped and we’re reading every word, and we’re taking it all in. I think that waning of attention is common to both acts.\n\n[Quiet string music begins to play]\n\n[Interview audio ends]\n\nEven though we often treat reading as if it is one thing, it is in fact a multitude of practices and cognitive experiences. Sometimes we read every word, but very often we scan or skim or surf when reading or simply fail to take in the words in front of us due to incomprehension or boredom or fatigue. And the same thing happens to us when we listen. Andy coined the phrase “ear skimming” to describe a similar experience that happens when listening.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(21:22)\tAndy\tYeah. That makes me think of skimming. When you skim readings that you’re not interested in, it’s like, listen, ear skimming [laughs], you kind of just blank out or, you know, distract yourself and then tune in when something picks up your interest.\n(21:38)\tMichelle\tThe contemporary neuroscience of reading as popularized by writers, including Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene has shown us the complexity and variety of the neural processes that we designate by the single term reading.\n[String music begins to play]\n\nAnd notwithstanding the strong opinions about listening as compared to reading, there is a surprising lack of empirical research that directly evaluates how modality of presentation impacts comprehension and what little research there is has yielded conflicting results.\n\nNaomi Baron’s 2021 book, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio, surveys current research and reports that although some studies suggest that comprehension may be improved when texts are read on the page as opposed to heard, these studies are limited and other empirical evidence suggests no difference. Some research, for example, shows that with listening, multitasking and mind wandering may be more prevalent.\n\nHowever, these effects appear to be lessened when what is being listened to is a narrative as opposed to an expository text. Some of the experiments involve listening to textbooks where depending on the subject matter, mind wandering is perhaps not surprising. My takeaway from her book is that the difficulties that are detected with oral comprehension and retention in some of the studies are more likely to be learned rather than innate. This interpretation aligns with research that shows that younger children are more effective listeners and that they lose these skills over time, becoming better readers than listeners.\n\nPerhaps this is because younger children are rewarded for and taught to value listening and this capacity wanes as emphasis on reading written materials intensifies. At the college level, we need to ask whether students put the same mental investment and time into their listening as they do into their reading. Baron helpfully points out some of the specific ways in which audio texts, including podcast and audiobooks, can prove challenging in terms of comprehension and recall.\n\nShe notes that audiobooks often lack certain elements that appear in or are endemic to print and that have been proven to aid learning when reading written texts. Podcasts, she points out, usually present undifferentiated sound and emit what are called signalizing devices such as bold or metallics that emphasize what is particularly important, as well as other visual landmarks such as headings and page breaks that can help readers chunk material into more comprehensible pieces.\n\nAudio texts also do not provide visual aids such as charts or graphs or images, all of which can enhance learning. Finally, annotation of written materials is a practice that has been proven to help readers understand and retain material, but annotation of audio can be more challenging. One of the reasons why the physical book has been such an enduring medium is because it enables annotation, whether in the form of handwritten notes, underlining or highlighting or adding sticky notes.\n\nBut performing any of these tasks with audio is, if not impossible, then less familiar, as our students are usually asked to speak or write about what they have read or heard. And as that is our work as scholars, we need mechanisms for marking audio to help us emphasize and find those passages we wish to return to. When listening to an audiobook or a podcast, we are often compelled to keep notes in a separate medium as Jentery did while listening by taking notes on his phone or notebook. This is one of the challenges we discussed.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(25:12)\tJentery\tYeah, so the only audiobook I taught in that particular class was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I recommended getting it in print as well, and I gathered probably somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the students did. So I did not, however, I demonstrated the use of annotation in the online class, like by showing how I annotate my own audio, you know, sharing a screen essentially, but I did not, and I should have, but I did not teach annotating audiobooks or annotating sound more generally.\nIn hindsight, if I had done it again, I would probably do something like that or figure out a way to integrate some kind of software or a mechanism to make it more approachable to students. But it kind of sparks my imagination here and I’m wondering how it is that when students were listening, how it is that they took notes and how that might correspond with and differ from how helped students take notes, say in the print novels that I teach, that would be a fascinating question. I’m sure people have studied this, but it’s not in my wheelhouse.\n\n(26:06)\tMichelle\tFortunately, annotation tools for audio do exist. Audible has a bookmark function that saves your place with a timestamp and in the digital file and allows you to enter notes. Tanya Clement, a scholar from the University of Texas, Austin, who is part of the SpokenWeb network, has been working with her team to create Audi Annotate: a web-based open source tool that supports audio and video markup.\nThese tools are needed to enable us to engage with audio in ways that are analogous to how we mark up text and print and now digitally audio annotation tools therefore seek to provide us with a set of options to approximate what we do with a printed book, such as turning down the corner of a page or adding a handwritten note.\n\nAnnotation can also support our spatial sense of where we are in a digital audio file, an aspect of reading that is normalized when we read a physical book, even if we don’t mark it up as we read, we tend to have a sense of what comes where, but this recall can be harder to replicate in an audio file. [Light electronic music begins]\n\nElla similarly reported needing to reference a print edition in order to anchor herself when listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(27:16)\tElla\tSo I ended up having to look at a print version just to anchor myself, you know, I’d look, oh, oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the book, so it must be a quarter of the way through the audiobook. I mean, that was difficult, taking a long form audio piece and being like, somewhere in here I remember listening to a fun thing, now I gotta find where it is. So I would use the print for that, but then I was, again, just using like the free Gutenberg version of that.\n(27:39)\tMichelle\tThe printed book offers us navigational tools and opportunities for annotation that support the comprehension and retention of written texts, but they are not reading per se. As Ella points out, books can also provide images and other formatting and formal features that help us to make sense of the words on the page.\nAudio is in need of tools that help us to anchor ourselves for the reasons mentioned and also because listening almost always takes longer than reading. I noticed that on the syllabus Jentery quantified the length of time students were expected to listen to the material he had assigned. [Light string music begins]\n\nThat was one of the aspects of teaching audiobooks that I struggled with as the audiobook of the novel, Milkman comes in at 14 hours, 11 minutes, and the two other audiobooks I assigned, Cersi by Madeline Miller and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evarist clock in at just over 12 and 11 hours, respectfully.\n\nAs we do not want to encourage our students to listen at faster speeds, and as we must acknowledge that re-listening may be needed, we must factor in the time it takes to listen, which is almost certainly longer than it takes to read on the page. Jentery explained that he had been quantifying expectations for how much prep time students would need to listen since the pandemic. [Electronic music ends]\n\n(28:56)\tJentery\tSince the pandemic, issues related like when, you know, your sense of place and your sense of campus changes, and the campus is kind of in your house now or in your domestic space. I think time management is affected pretty deeply and I gather research supports that assumption. So that was part of it, just making clear and or transparent labor expectations, while noting that mileage may vary.\nBut it also comes actually out of doing a lot of work with digital media and just more generally in digital studies, where in my own training and in my own education, I had gleaned a pretty concrete sense of how long it would take me to read a 200 page novel and I could assign that accordingly and we could talk about that in terms of time.\n\n(29:38)\tMichelle\tWhat I hope these conversations have illuminated are the ways in which we as instructors can help our students. By recognizing that effectively reading written text encompasses a range of practices, we can think about how best to provide a set of comparable supports to enable our students to succeed in listening.\nIn the pedagogical audio we create, such as this very podcast episode, we can enact some of the signalizing devices that readers of printed material are accustomed to and rely on to make sense of what they’re reading, by adding section breaks, as I’ve endeavored to do in this podcast.\n\nAlthough a podcast is in oral media, we can enhance it with visual aids and transcriptions as again is attempted in the blog post that accompanies this podcast. [Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nOne of the other immediate demands of teaching literary audio is providing students with a framework for understanding what they are hearing.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nWhat is an audio book or a podcast anyway? A genre? A medium? According to Jentery, the critical conceptual category is format, and a podcast or an audiobook are both formats within the medium of audio.\n\n(30:52)\tAI Generated Voice\t[Electronic music begins to play]\nChapter four: Format matters.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(30:58)\tMaya\tOne of the most riveting exchanges with Jentery was about the conceptual categories he offered to his students to describe and distinguish between different forms of literary audio, from audiobooks to podcasts to radio dramas. Format occupies the zone between the more abstract category of media, on the one hand, and the more content specific category of genre, on the other. To break down the three conceptual categories, a familiar example may be useful.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nLet’s take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was first published in London in 1813 in three volumes. We begin with the most abstract category, that of media, which is usually divided into text, audio, video, and image. The medium of the novel’s first public appearance was text, but before its publication it lived in audio form as Austen is said to have read the novel aloud to her family in advance of publication. After its publication, it would’ve continued to be read aloud in countless homes across Britain and abroad, especially after its publication in Philadelphia In 1832.\n\nIn 1833, an illustrated version of the novel was first published, bringing the novel into a visual medium in 1940, just over 100 years later, it entered another medium; video. As we can see, a work like Pride and Prejudice exists in multiple media at the same time, and simply because it was first presented to the public as a text does not mean that that medium should necessarily have primacy.\n\nThe next conceptual layer is that of format, for example, within video there are different formats such as feature length film adaptations and mini-series, as well as many, many others. With the concept of format referring to how our particular media is structured and delivered. We may also create a typology of audio formats in which the novel has been presented, from the handful of amateur readings on Librivox to audiobooks narrated by celebrities.\n\nThe final conceptual category is that of genre, which describes content. Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, a novel, and we could historize it further by calling it a domestic novel or a comedy of manners.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nIn discussions with Jentery, he explained that with his students, he lent heavily into the concept of format, asking students to listen to a variety of audio formats, radio plays, serialized drama, voiceover narration, and first person video games. Using the concept of format to ground their understanding of what they were hearing, historically and technologically.\n\n(33:35)\tJentery\tI think one of the really useful aspects of that approach was that we could, in very kind of concrete ways and in palpable terms, talk about the ways in which audio achieves a context, if you will, and brings material together, brings together, for example, aspects of narrative and story with art and design. And since it’s so much about situation and context, you know, not taking for instance the kind of formalist approach to media where we kind of unmoor it from time and space and talk about it abstractly.\nI think one of the consequences of that was we were also able to look at moments when this work was made and this work was produced. Actually look at the specificity of context in each case and talk about how format, genre, and audio production, just writ large is always kind of grounded in particular situations.\n\n(34:28)\tMaya\tThroughout this podcast episode, we will return to one of Jentery’s key insights that thinking about literary audio through the lens of format helps us to situate it in place and time and allows, as he puts it, for audio to achieve a context.\n[Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nWith all of these efforts needed to support listeners, it might reasonably be asked whether listening is worth it? If we need to provide new media frameworks for students, if listening requires as much, if not more attention than reading on the page, if it takes longer than reading a physical book, if it can induce auditory fatigue, and if in order to write about it, you still need special tools to annotate or a print version anyway, why bother?\n\nAvid listeners of audio books, however, answer this question by noting that they often listen to books that they have already read in physical form, and yet always they hear something that they didn’t see. What are some of the ways in which listening enhances comprehension and enjoyment? What do we hear that we did not see and what questions or insights does listening give rise to that we would not otherwise have from reading the book in written form?\n\n(35:40)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter five: Hearing What We Cannot See.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(35:45)\tMichelle\tMatthew Rubery, author of the foundational history of audio literature, The Untold Story of the Talking Book speaks to the different perceptions that come from listening and reading on the page. [String music begins to play]\nNearly all readers, he writes, report understanding identical texts differently in spoken and silent formats as various elements stand out depending on the mode of reception. He notes that the narrator who performs the story can be especially useful in giving voice to unfamiliar accents, dialects or languages. The vocalization of such distinctively oral text would otherwise be impoverished for many readers poorly equipped to sound out the linguistic effects for themselves.\n\nAn audiobook is a performance, an interpretation of the original text, often accentuated with the narrator adopting different voices for different characters and enhanced with sound effects and music, all of which bring the audiobook closer to theater or film even when it offers absolute fidelity to the written text, as is the case with most unabridged audiobooks. Jentery and I explored the performative aspects of the audiobook he assigned, Toni Morrison’s reading of The Bluest Eye. I asked him whether he attempted with his students to disambiguate the text as written from the text as performed by Morrison.\n\n(37:07)\tJentery\tAnd that, so we tried just that and actually I think it was a bit of a setup because when we went through and listened to it, and in many cases read alongside what we were listening, we did our best to think about the various roles, if you will, that Toni Morrison is playing in that audiobook of The Bluest Eye. So Morrison as author, Morrison as narrator, as reader, as voice actress, even as character voices.\nAnd we went through and tried to mark how we would understand that differently. So I remember this exercise and yeah, and ultimately probably without a shock, we determined it was very obviously difficult to make a clean demarcation between one and the other when it would happen in a sentence and whatnot.\n\n(37:48)\tMichelle\tAs Jentery explains, there are many different rules that Morrison takes on in reading her novel aloud. Rubery distinguishes between different models of audiobook performances. The narration may be read by the author, by a professional voice actor, by a celebrity, or even by an amateur. Characters may be voiced by the narrator, sometimes in different voices or different actors may be cast to play different roles.\nAn extreme example of this is the audiobook version of George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is performed by over 160 actors. Toni Morrison reads The Bluest Eye herself, performing the third person narration and also giving voice to different characters in the novel. Morrison also narrates another book that is embedded in the novel, one of the Dick and Jane Reading Primers, a series intended to help new readers first published in America in the 1930s.\n\nThese primers, with their idealized characters living seemingly problem-free lives, are white and middle class, setting up a potent contrast with the character’s Morrison depicts in her novel. Morrison’s novel begins with a Dick and Jane story of about 150 words. The Dick and Jane story is reprinted at the very beginning of the novel and it appears in its entirety three times, each time with different typographical features.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe first time the story is printed, there are spaces between the lines and the words, and the story takes up most of a page. The second time the spacing between lines and words is reduced, shrinking the presentation of the story to half a page with all punctuation removed. The third time the story is printed, all spaces between the words have disappeared with each word bleeding into the next.\n\nTo help you visualize this, please refer to the blog post for this episode on the SpokenWeb website, which includes images taken from these two first pages of the novel. Morrison’s repetition of the story three times in printed form seems to mimic a young child becoming proficient in reading, from one who slowly sounds out each word to one who becomes so fluent that she can run each word into the next, but the blurring of words into one undifferentiated mass has other implications.\n\nAs Morrison reads the three versions of the story in the audiobook, she speeds up the pace of her reading as might be expected, but a more sinister element also presents itself. Here is Morrison reading the first part of the story at three different speeds.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(40:22)\tToni Morrison reading from The Bluest Eye\t[Morrison reads the text slowly]\nHere’s the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They’re very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text again, faster this time] Here is the house, it is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text even faster]\n\nHere’s the house. Green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane.\n\n(41:46)\tMichelle\t[String music begins to play]\nWhat Morrison’s voicing brings to life is both how the child learns to read, but also how through the rote rehearsal of the story at a speed that renders it mostly unintelligible the white family living in the green and white House becomes internalized as the norm and the ideal.\n\nIn the forward to the printed version, which interestingly becomes an author’s note at the end of the audiobook, Morrison reports that the story originated in a conversation with a friend from elementary school who confided in Morrison that she wished for blue eyes. [Electronic music ends]\n\nWithin the first four minutes of the audiobook, Morrison’s pointed reading of the Dick and Jane story at three different tempos draws out the menace lurking within these stories for Black children; the Dick and Jane stories provide just one potential explanation for a central question the novel poses: How does Morrison’s childhood friend and the character in the novel who asks for the same thing, learn to wish for the bluest eye? What Morrison describes as racial self-loathing.\n\nFor me, the meaning of Morrison’s rendering of the Dick and Jane story in the print novel is enhanced by her performance of them. I might have had an inkling of her meaning by reading it on the page, but it is amplified by her reading as seeing and hearing her translation of the embedded story intensifies and crystallizes her meaning.\n\nAt the same time, any attempt to read authorial intention into the audiobook performance must be interrogated. To return to Jentery’s suggestion that by listening and situating the audio recording within the time and place of its production, audio achieves a context. We might want to ask students to reflect on the fact that Morrison is reading the novel in 2011, more than 40 years after its first publication in 1970. Morrison also makes changes to the presentation of her peratext, moving, as I said, the forward from its position prefacing the printed novel to the end when she reads the novel for the audiobook.\n\nThe reason for this shift seems likely to do with the difference in media and format. Readers can and often do skip preparatory material in print, but this action of skipping ahead is perhaps less natural with an audiobook. Beyond these changes, what does seem consistent over this 40 year period is Morrison’s belief that her books were meant to be heard.\n\nThus, she describes the language she uses in the novel as speakerly, oral, colloquial. And it is perhaps for this reason that her audiobooks are so powerful. Indeed, Morrison performed all of her books as audiobooks, demonstrating her investment in aurality. Sarah Kozloff has argued that audiobooks create a stronger bond than printed books between storyteller and listener by invoicing the narrator, and many listeners in particular enjoy hearing authors perform their own works.\n\nAudiobooks, particularly when read by the author, seem to bring us closer to the source of the words and the story, much in the same way a handwritten manuscript seems to bring us in proximity to the hand and body that inscribed it. Jentery related to me how he found it effective, as he put it, to bring the author into the room in assigning an audiobook read by the author like Morrison’s Bluest Eye and by playing interviews with or speeches by authors.\n\n(45:03)\tJentery\tWell in American fiction courses, I love including videos of James Baldwin’s speeches in a lot of material. I think that’s fascinating to bring the author into the room and I often when I’m teaching primary source, a novel for example, love to include and play in the class podcast interviews with those authors, in a way that allows students to think about the kind of context around the book, but also just kind of what went into the book and some of the motivations for it.\n(45:29)\tMichelle\tJentery and I discussed how changes in digital technology make it much easier too, as he put it, bring the author into our classrooms. We have a wealth of freely available audio and video such as the New Yorker Fiction podcast, which makes hundreds of stories from the magazine’s archive and current issues available to listen to, some enhanced by extended conversations about the stories.\nIn addition to improved access to primary source audio material, Jentery also points to how changes in accessibility to technology and equipment for playing and recording audio are transforming what is now pedagogically possible.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe final section of this episode considers how technological developments have changed both what we and our students can do with audio.\n\n(46:22)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter Six: Teaching with Audio Now.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(46:28)\tMaya\tIn the conversation with Jentery, he reflected on how much has changed in just the past decade of teaching audio.\n(46:35)\tJentery\tWhen I was teaching sound studies at the University of Washington and the University of Victoria between like 2010 and 2012, the accessibility of material there, like what I could circulate and what I couldn’t, what I had just to play, say, on a desktop computer in the classroom, but also what students could record and what with, I’m always careful not to assume that students have access to technologies and computers.\nBut I can say just matter of factly, the degree to which they would need to, say, rent or go to the library to acquire an audio recorder has dramatically changed, just given the ubiquity of mobile phones at this point. So there’s that angle, which recording is, I think, on the whole, it’s not universally accessible, but it’s more accessible to students now than it was then. I think just being able to hit “record” is more ready to hand.\n\n(47:17)\tMaya\tRecording equipment and podcasting software also open new forms of assessments. As Jentery explains, when working with sound, it often makes sense to sample the sounds being analyzed and hence an audio essay is often the best way for a student to fully engage with the material.\n(47:35)\tJentery\tA thing that really struck me as compelling and did gain traction among students in the seminar was the idea of composing in such a way, composing an essay, an audio essay if you prefer a podcast, in such a way that makes room for your primary sources to speak and to be dialogic in that sense. So, the inclusion of samples of authors reading their work, of hearing the author’s voice in a way that I think, again, you don’t need to adhere to a metaphysics of presence to find this interesting.\nYou can just think of it in terms of honoring other people’s work and what it means for you to hear other people’s work in your writing and your composition in the production of space and time. And so I liked that too, the threading through other people’s work into your material in a way that might be a little different than reading a block quote or seeing an image on the page.\n\n(48:22)\tMaya\tJason Camlot’s student Ella explained that she chose the podcast format for her final assessment because it seemed more natural and easier than writing and attempting to describe her object of study, which were recordings of poetry readings.\n(48:37)\tElla\tI chose to do the long form. I mean, I simplified in my head the long form. I told myself I’m not gonna do interviews or anything, I’m just going to essentially record myself reading this essay and then insert the sounds I’m talking about because I think this might actually be easier than trying to transcribe those sounds in a way that I can then analyze them in writing.\nIn this case, I could just play the sound for you and you can hear it and then I can talk about my thoughts on it. That seemed like an easier process, actually, because I was going to be working with a bunch of different old recordings and newer recordings and poetry readings and stuff and, it just, I don’t even know how I would’ve approached describing some of this, especially cuz I was working, for instance, with experimental poetry from the eighties and I was working with really old recordings on wax cylinder of Tennyson and like, how do you describe those kinds of experimental or super old degraded sounds to people in order to then really get into a conversation about it? So it just made sense to have people hear them.\n\n(49:36)\tMaya\t[Soft electronic music begins to pla]\nElla’s observations about the need to incorporate the different sounds she was working with,once again return us to Jentery’s idea of audio achieving a context.\n\nIn order to describe and situate 19th century wax cylinder recordings within their particular historical and technological moment, it is necessary to hear them in the same way that we say a picture is worth a thousand words. A short audio clip, here, the Tennyson recording on wax cylinder that Ella refers to is likewise easier to understand when heard.\n\n[An audio clip of Tennyson reading poetry plays]\n\nIn addition, Ella explained her preference for the audio essay format by echoing Jentery’s sense that there might be something more dialogic and open about it.\n\n(50:32)\tElla\tI do think it was faster for me to write for this podcast than it was for me to write what could have been a conference paper because I don’t like the structure of the academic paper where you say your thesis statement in the beginning, prove your thesis statement, and then restate your thesis statement. I prefer a structure where you sort of go from a starting point, like essentially more of like a thought process, like, here’s my starting point and by the end of it you’re like, here’s where I got from that starting point.\nI had the option to do that with the podcast. Whereas usually when you’re writing an academic paper for a class, they don’t give you the option to just run with things. So it just went a lot faster cuz it was a form that made more sense to me.\n\n(51:11)\tMaya\tJentery also spoke about how crafting an audio essay is different than writing for the page and reading it aloud, or even reading a conference paper, which might be designed for oral delivery. An audio essay perhaps because it is modeled on the podcast may be more audience oriented. Maia reflected that having the opportunity to listen to each other’s podcast or audio essay assignment distinguished the course from others she had taken where a student’s writing is primarily directed towards the professor.\n(51:38)\tMaia (51:38)\tIt was also interesting to hear everyone else’s podcasts because in a normal normal class in, a more traditionally like written assignment based class, you don’t read everyone’s essays and get to interact with your classmates like that. And I think, for me, it was a really interesting atmosphere that I don’t know that I’ll ever have again. It was really, really special in the way that we all interacted and I don’t know to what part of that was the sharing in a medium that is more shared, listening of togetherness rather than kind of an individualized personalized reading.\n(52:13)\tMaya\tFor Andy and Ghislaine, the audio essay felt different than in-class presentations, which are to a great extent formalized. By contrast, the audio assignments were diverse, fresh, and engaging.\n(52:27)\tAndy\tEveryone took it in such a different direction. So it was like when you have a presentation, I feel often they follow a similar format and structure, but with this it was completely different in every kind of way. Genres across the board, like kind of there were no limits of what you could really do and I think that’s what for me made it different than just a typical class presentation. [String music begins to play]\n(52:51)\tGhislaine\tRight, that makes sense. So it’s like with regular normal class presentations, it would have been as if, you know, someone came in singing and dancing versus, you know, just with their PowerPoint. [laughs]\n(53:03)\tMaya\tWe will end with Ghislaine’s words, as her comments should inspire both instructors and students to turn to literary audio, both as a source of teaching material and as a form for student work. We believe she speaks to what we all could use in our classrooms. A little more singing and dancing and a little less PowerPoint.\nYou have been listening to “Audiobooks In the Classroom”, a SpokenWeb podcast episode by Michelle Levy and narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(53:54)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\nOur producers this month are Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz, both based at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music ends]"],"score":5.6474447},{"id":"9638","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E4, “Two girls recording literature”: Re-listening to Caedmon recordings, 4 March 2024, Levy and Shwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"url: http://viaf.org/viaf/5331160310460458300001\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/21077709-c3ab-4c7d-967f-cfb748bd1868/audio/140742fe-4320-4020-89fd-d0e6e88378a0/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"two-girls-final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:02:57\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,447,255 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"two-girls-final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan Harrington\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nOnion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers,\\n\\nJune 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002,\\n\\nhttps://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration.\\n\\nAccessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14\\n\\nNov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings,\\n\\nMarianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.\\n\\n“Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by\\n\\nsongbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB.\\n\\nEtude 8 Dimitri by <a href=”https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/227639″>Blue Dot Sessions</a>\\n\\nFrost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation,\\n\\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.\\n\\n“File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia,\\n\\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nHarrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a\\n\\nwheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.\\n\\n“How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.”\\n\\nWriters and Company. CBC, July, 2023.\\n\\nhttps://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“January 20, 1961 – Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration.” Youtube,\\n\\nuploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021,\\n\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.\\n\\n“Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30\\n\\nJanuary 2024.\\n\\n“The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless\\n\\nGoodz,\\n\\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&has\\n\\nh=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCK\\n\\nd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJ\\n\\nKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJ\\n\\nIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IK\\n\\nkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrS\\n\\nnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwqHh1\\n\\nLRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nWilliams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington,\\n\\nhttp://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549744517120,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU’s Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU’s English department, about William Carlos Williams’ reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music fades]\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and –\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. Each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n(00:50)\tKatherine McLeod\tCaedmon Records. Did you know that Caedmon Records was the first label to sell recordings of poetry? Well, you might have known that, but did you know that it was started by two women? I didn’t know that before listening to this episode.\nIn this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon by listening to an interview with its founders, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, an interview that was conducted by Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio.\nIn listening to this episode, I was struck by how we are hearing the history of this formative record label for recording spoken word, hearing it as a story being told out loud on the radio.\n(00:01:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tMichelle and Maya then pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell’s legacy by listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957. They listen to two experts and talk about what they heard.\nMichelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis of SFU‘s English department about William Carlos Williams’s reading of the “Seafarer.”\nAll of the archival audio in this episode is held in SFU‘s archives and special collections. But this Caedman record that these poems were recorded on, Caedman Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, was a popular one. And as I listened, I went over to my bookshelf and pulled it out. Yes, I happened to have a copy of this very same record. I take it out of its cover, I put it on, lowering the needle –\n(00:02:35)\tAudio\t[Static audio starts playing]\n(00:02:42)\tUnknown\tIf I told him, would he like it? Would he like it if I told him? Would he –\n(00:02:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tHere is episode four of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast. “Two Girls recording literature: Re-listening to Caedmon Recordings.”\n(00:02:56)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n(00:03:06)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you have ever rummaged through a box of cassettes in a library, or secondhand bookshop, or flipped through LPs in a thrift store, you will probably stumble across a Caedmon recording. These feature poets, playwrights, and fiction writers reading from the work originally released on vinyl and later on cassette.\nCaedmon is a record label founded by two women, Barbara Cohen Holdridge and Marianne Roney Mantell, in 1952. Recent graduates of Hunter College, Holdridge was working in book publishing, Mantell in the music recording industry when they heard that Dylan Thomas was reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. They attended this reading and finally prevailed upon him to record with them. And the rest, as they say, is history. The creation of the first business to capture audio literature for a mass audience.\n[Soft piano begins to play in the background] In this episode, we want to bring to the surface the critical role that Holdridge and Mantell played in this early history of spoken word recordings.\n(00:04:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThis episode begins with a brief overview of Holdridge and Mantell’s founding of Caedmon. The women told their story in a marvellous interview with Eleanor Wachtel. Given now over 20 years ago, in 2002, to celebrate Caedmon’s 50th anniversary and recently rereleased to celebrate Wachtel’s incredible 33-year run as host of the CBC’s Writers and Company.\nWe draw from this interview to allow us to hear Holdridge and Mantell telling their story in their own voices.\n(00:04:46)\tMichelle Levy\tIn the second and longest part of this episode, we pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from one of their recordings, held in SFU’s special collections, The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, an anthology first released in 1957.\nMaya and I each selected a few poems from this collection that we enjoyed listening to and asked two colleagues, both of whom were scholars of poetry, as well as poets themselves, to share their thoughts on the recordings. I discussed Robert Frost’s reading of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University. Maya chatted with Steve Collis of our English department at SFU about William Carlos Williams’ reading of the “Seafarer.”\nWe talked about what it meant to listen as opposed to reading these poems on the page. What elements of the poet’s performance surprised us, as well as a range of other details, from the pronunciation of certain words to the speed at which they read? We notice, for example, how Frost ignores line breaks in his reading, whereas Williams gives great emphasis to them. These elements of the poem’s delivery provide what Barbara Holdridge described to Wachtel as third-dimensional depth.\n(00:06:04)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth that a two-dimensional book lacked.\n(00:06:19)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you look at a Caedmon recording, you’ll find little contextual information. In the treasury held at SFU, we no longer have the original LP or cassette. It apparently has been discarded and re-copied onto a new cassette. Further, we have only half of the treasury, the third and fourth sides of the LP, as it was first released. The first and second sides, which included Dylan Thomas’ “Christmas in Wales,” do not make it into our collection.\nIn the Writers & Company interview with Holdridge and Mantell, however, we learn crucial details about their motivations for recording poets.\n(00:06:55)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI came to this concept as a result of attending too many classes in literary criticism. I had a strong sense that what I was hearing and what I was reading had to do with the critic and not with the poet or the author. And here was an opportunity to create, or to find another original firsthand source: what the poet or author heard in his or her mind.\n(00:07:26)\tMichelle Levy\tHere, Mantell explains how they’ve worked with authors prior to recording.\n(00:07:32)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think also we didn’t just take them and sit them in front of a microphone. We spent a lot of time beforehand with the author in an effort to shake off that sense of tightness, uptightness, and fear that one gets in front of a microphone, particularly an author who says, “Oh, I’m not a performer. I’m…” It’s okay, we’re here. Just talk to us.\n(00:08:01)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn addition to meeting and recording authors, Holdridge and Mantell were also running a business. Here’s what they had to say about that experience.\n(00:08:11)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tIt was wonderful. Men were not hostile. They were very accepting. We found a young banker, a vice president, who eventually lent us money. We used to trundle our little cart named “MattiWilda” from our offices on 31st Street to the RCA plant on 24th Street and bring it back, loaded with heavy boxes of records, long-playing records, and along the way, dozens of men would spring to our sides to help us up the curb and down –\n(00:08:47)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Overlapping] We couldn’t have done it by ourselves.\n(00:08:49)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tYou named your cart?\n(00:08:49)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tMattiwilda.\n(00:08:51)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tWell, why not? Why not?\n(00:08:52)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\t[Laughs]\n(00:08:53)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tShe was named after Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was a reigning soprano of the time.\n(00:08:58)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tI see.\n(00:08:59)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Inaudible: I would go that woman, but one better.] I think we probably succeeded where men would’ve failed because we were women. On the one hand, men were chivalrous. On the other hand, when they attempted to put us down because we were two girls, etcetera, etcetera, we outwitted them, we outsmarted them, and, occasionally, we drank them onto the table. [Interviewer laughs] So I think, in a major way, we were successful precisely because we were women.\n(00:09:32)\tMichelle Levy\tIn their recordings. Mantell and Holdridge create a rich archive that survives for our exploration today. Maya and I listened to the recordings. I found a few poems that intrigued me, including Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” a poem that seems so deceptively prosaic, like a lot of Frost’s poetry. I settled on it, however, after finding that Susan Wolfson, a fellow Romanticist, had recently written an article on Frost, including a discussion of this poem and agreed to discuss it with me.\n(00:10:03)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah. I’m Susan Wolfson. I teach at Princeton University in the Department of English.\n(00:10:10)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you for coming. A question for you just before we get to this specific recording: Do you recall if you had heard Frost reciting his poems before in other recordings?\n(00:10:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tNo. I mean, Frost gave readings his entire life. I remember his reading at Kennedy’s inauguration with great difficulty ’cause the sun was in his face,\n(00:10:37)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping, Robert Frost at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy]\nThe no order of the [inaudible] –\n(00:10:38)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo he couldn’t read the poem that he wrote for the occasion but just sort of pulled-\n(00:10:42)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] I can’t stand the sun.\n(00:10:45)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe problem gift outright.\n(00:10:45)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] New Order of the ages that got –\n(00:10:49)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut I was in high school when that happened.\n(00:10:53)\tMichelle Levy\tWe begin with listening to Frost reading “After Apple-Picking.”\n(00:10:58)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tMy long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round.\n(00:12:01)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tI feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, / Or just some human sleep.\n(00:12:51)\tMichelle Levy\tSo there we go. What comes to mind listening to that for you?\n(00:12:56)\tSusan Wolfson\tYou know, one surprise to me was his reading against every edition of the poem that I found to say, “cherish in hand, let down, and not let fall.” I’m wondering if in reading it, whether he, I don’t know, whether he was, he had this in memory, but in memory, he may have just decided to revise that line, or he may have misremembered it on the cue of the repetition.\nAs I said, I was a little struck by the monotone and the rapidity with which he read. And for a formalist such as Frost, who famously said things like “poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net” or that “you have to have a metrical pattern for the rhythm to ruffle against.” I mean, he’s not a formalist, but he’s certainly very form conscious and form attentive.\n(00:13:54)\tSusan Wolfson\tI was struck by how often he didn’t pause at the end of lines. In some cases, the enjambment was quite dramatic, “a load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much,” I mean makes that almost continuous, goes past the period. But this is a poem that is remarkable for varying its line lengths between 12 syllables and two syllables, with all being the shortest, one and the longest, one being the first. And that kind of wavering and the way that interplays with the surreal temporalities where you think you’re in a past tense, then you’re in a kind of present tense of remembering a past moment, and then you’re in a kind of dreamscape where those temporalities overlay, it would seem that poetic form is very much involved in those evocations too.\n(00:15:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut Frost reads this at such a pace that it almost sounds like prose. I know that he is committed to the kind of vernacular of poetry rather than poetic diction, which is fine. I mean, it makes his poetry sound authentic, genuine, and accessible. But I didn’t expect it to sound like prose. So that was my take.\nBut that sense that words still have a kind of constitutive magic [Music starts playing in the background] they create and produce an experience; they don’t just refer to it or represent it. And the presence of Frost is just a kind of magical enactment of that.\n(00:15:49)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then discussed how Frost recorded his poem in a studio, and we wondered whether the lack of an audience contributed to the monotone, with the result, when listening, that you lose the line breaks as well as the rhymes.\n(00:16:02)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, those are lost. And the rhymes that really are the kind of line-end punctuation, whether this is not like the verse, it is metrically various.\nAnd, that’s part of its astonishment, that the way in which these lines seem organic with thinking and yet, use, avail themselves of the resources of poetic form to give a kind of pulse and poetic charge to the language. That is part of its sensuous appeal.\n(00:16:45)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then address the deceptive simplicity and accessibility of Frost’s poems, how they contain elements of recognition but also surprising depth.\n(00:16:55)\tSusan Wolfson\tIt’s a kind of ruffling of the surface that you can take these poems on. That’s why they’re so teachable: there’s immediate access to it. And then, you kind of show the students that the ground they think they’re standing on is less stable than they’d like. The joke about the road not taken is that it’s identical to the road taken. So this epic portentousness has made all the difference. It is sort of Frost’s own joke about wanting to have those allegorical moments landmarked, signposted, in your life. He’s got a great comment that what’s in front of you brings up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew. Putting this and that together, that click, that’s the poetry. And sort of almost against these sort of portentous alls that almost is just a really interesting Frost mode. That it teases, it tiptoes, it borders on, but it doesn’t insist.\n(00:18:04)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music begins to play.]\n(00:18:10)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd there’s that line that you quoted in your essay from Frost as a teacher who said that “the role of poetry is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize.” And I love that idea; it’s very Emersonian, too, but what do you think about this poem that we recognize, and is there something in particular that we recognize when listening that we don’t necessarily when reading, although that’s another layer we don’t have to get to, but in terms of this poem, what do you think some of those deeper truths are that the reader or the listener might recognize?\n(00:18:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe meditation is part of the every day. It’s not just something that poets do, and poets do in extraordinary moments, but that there there is a way in which this poem, which is really just about something as quotidian as apple-picking, is already possessed with a kind of mental landscape, or mental landscaping of it that takes possession, that you can find yourself thinking about just quotidian events that stay with you. That wonderful sort of memory as he’s drowsing off, before he is imagining the source of sorcerers apprentice explosion of apple after apple that I am drowsing off. I mean, there’s another present tense, right, that he is – “I didn’t fill” and then suddenly, “but I am done with apple picking now.”\n(00:20:00)\tSusan Wolfson\t“Now” is so weird because it just means that he’s not done. It’s just this moment. So does that “now” mean existentially, now I am never gonna pick another apple again, I’ve had it with apples? Or is it just for the day? And as he’s thinking about that, and the scent of apples, which is so immediate, “I am drowsing off.” So you think, okay, well, that’s a departure from apple picking. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take.” Has nothing to do with apple picking.\n(00:20:58)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe is on his way to the orchard, and it’s a moment of whimsy and optical illusion that he indulges in, a different way of looking at the world just for a moment. And that’s what he’s dreaming of. And as he’s sort of recollecting that, it dissolves back into his dream, “what form my dreaming was about to take.” And then the form that his dream is about to take is apple-picking with a vengeance. I mean, this is partly a Wordsworthian spot of time that is captured in poetry and reproduced in the composition of the poetry itself. It comes back as an event of apple-picking in the poetry. Keats is interesting because it’s hard not to think about autumn without thinking of Keats, but Keats is not a labourer; he’s an observer.\n(00:21:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo when he’s looking at the boughs that load and bless, you know, they’re loaded, blessed with fruit. I mean, he’s real; his work is poetic labour, but he’s not on a ladder. Doing apple picking. Frost has a different relationship with that. This is much more Wordsworthian say in which the kind of physical events of stealing eggs from a nest high on the crags where the wind is blowing you sideways or feeling the oars tremble in your hands as your joyride in a boosted boat suddenly possesses you with a certain kind of tremor, of guilt or possible punishment if you’re busted. That’s a kind of visceral memory that Wordsworth has that he turns to poetry to reproduce because it’s so thrilling in just that, even to remember it, that he feels it all over again as he’s writing about it.\n(00:22:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd this is a kind of immersive, at the moment, but the moment is everywhere in Frost. It is both the day’s labour, but then after apple-picking and trying to go to sleep and not yet being asleep, but the day replaying and in surreal dimensions, in that kind of half space of mind between sleeping and waking, which, of course,, is a space of poetry. That’s what the poetic composition fills up and overfills. Even that funny little thing about the woodchuck at the end, “one can see what will trouble the sleep of mine.” That “what will trouble” whatever sleep it is, which is to say that maybe it’s not sleep at all, but it’s gonna be this sort of possession of one’s mind by the day’s labour. “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Were he not gone,”\n(00:23:49)\tSusan Wolfson\t“The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.” Of all the animals to pick, I mean, woodchuck, a creature defined by its labour, right? I mean, that’s the eponym. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? I mean, that’s, you know, he knows that he knows that riddle. And yet, even the woodchuck gets to hibernate. I mean, really, to get as close to death as you can. And just as a way of getting through the winter. Whether it’s like his “long sleep,” and that plays against “my long two-pointed ladder,” right? That brings that word back, but now it’s sleep rather than labour. His “long sleep, as I describe it coming on,” and what a great piece of ambiguous syntax.\nWilliam Emison would chew on this line, right? Because the “as” is both comparative and temporal at the same time, in that his long sleep at the moment that I am describing it is coming on, and as a comparison that I can’t quite make, or just some human sleep. And human sleep, the joke of this poem, is not quite sleep. It’s, you know, psychic rehearsal over and over again.\n(00:25:19)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd, to go back to that idea of recognition, there is something about the physical exhaustion that launches him into this more mystical semi-sleep, un-sleep space, which I find interesting too because it’s almost like he’s, you know, I think about like an over-exhausted to toddler, right? Who can’t settle for themselves?\n(00:25:43)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe’s done it all day, and of course, this is every day. You don’t just have one day when you pick apples, right? This is a seasonal chore.\n“And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now.”\nThat does sound like an existential proclamation. And yet there’s this sense that there is just too much and that he is in default, that he has broken a contract to get every damn apple. Even those prepositions, “after apple-picking,” that it almost, by the time you’re at the end of the poem, “after” has this sense of going after, I mean, of, in other words, of pursuing almost as a poetic subject. It’s the poetic sequel as well as the temporal sequel. But after apple-picking, with apple-picking, I’ve had too much of apple-picking. When a phrase gets repeated three times, it’s, it’s not done with, it’s –\n(00:27:02)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd I’m thinking through your discussion and listening to you recite some lines that are very different from Keatsian’s wonder at the kind of bounty of the harvest, right? There’s a kind of exhaustion. He’s overwhelmed.\n(00:27:19)\tSusan Wolfson\tKeats is not labouring. He’s not part of the labour. Yeah. He’s not part of the harvest force. So until then until, what is it? I don’t have it. Oh, I should have it memorized. This is sort of a moment that just is for Keats; the joke is you think it’s gonna go on forever.\nSo, “To bend with apples the moss cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; / To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”\nIt’s Keats’ joke about this moment that seems infinite but isn’t. He’s looking at a world that is just still burgeoning and producing life. That’s a very different kind of autumn genre from the labour genre. The other thing about companies being fruitful and multiply is that you have now entered into a world of hard daily labour, which will never be over. That’s the penalty of having lost Eden because of an apple. So, that sort of patched into this too. Not with the world of sin but this is the world of labour.\n(00:28:41)\tMusic\t[Intrumental music begins to play in the background.]\n(00:28:59)\tMichelle Levy\tSo I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to end with you asking you to read the poem, and then maybe we can just pick up any threads that come out of that reading. Anything that we haven’t discussed. But it would be lovely to hear your recitation.\n(00:29:17)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, part of it is that the slow time of reading and of immersion in the labour is something I would kind of want to bring to this, in comparison to, say, Frost’s seeming interest to get from the beginning to the end as efficiently as he can. So I’ll read it and see what you think.\n(00:29:44)\tSusan Wolfson, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tAfter Apple-Picking.\n“My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass.”\n(00:30:31)\tSusan Wolfson\t“It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round. / I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.”\n(00:32:11)\tMichelle Levy\tI heard the rhymes [laughs] in a way that I didn’t hear before. “Bough,” “now,” “all in all,” I mean, they really are punctuated.\n(00:32:21)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd the repetitions that roll up with the rhymes, too. Yeah, I think that those are part of it. That’s the kind of pulsing or rhythm of the mind of a poet in composition, is that you are picking up words as words for their sensuous value, as words.\nAnd rhyme and meter are one way to bring that value to language. That’s even the sort of the particular local knowledge of knowing the difference between stem end and blossom end. Now that’s a good case of something. If you think about it, you realize that’s exactly why you can tell that difference. It’s a stem, oh yeah, therefore the flower was there, and the fruit grows up behind the flower.\nBut that’s a sort of casual local speak that may not be the literacy of every reader, and you kind of have to meet Frost halfway just to have the mind of Frost, that you know that difference. So that’s the sort almost, that’s one of those cases where you almost know, and then, you know, as soon as someone says it to you,\n(00:33:41)\tMichelle Levy\tYeah, it’s a beautiful description, and you get that repetition within the line that echoes. There are so many apples, but yet there’s this particularity about each apple. Each apple has this pattern of the two different ends, but each apple is different.\n(00:34:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd “every fleck of russet showing clear.” That’s the language of someone who’s looking at the apple, the way he looked at that pane of glass. Each apple is a sort of event for him.\n(00:34:13)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd you did a lovely job of slowing, really slowing down at the end, to really linger over those last couple of lines.\n(00:34:22)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah,\n(00:34:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, there’s a sort of point of sleep where language begins to come minimal. But I still think that comparison to the woodchuck is just a hilarious piece of wit. It’s almost tonally inappropriate that he could have just said the woodland bear or something like that. There’s something he could fit in two other syllables of the brown bear. But, the idea that this creature of labour, whose very name comes from his labour is, I just think, hilarious, that he gets to sleep,\n(00:35:05)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd as you said, there’s a slight touch that even though we have the ladder pointing towards heaven, and you have this invocation of the fall, as you say, he doesn’t quite take us there. It’s, he’s –\n(00:35:20)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah [overlapping]\n(00:35:20)\tMichelle Lee-ve\tHe’s provoking us. He’s suggesting it, but ultimately, is that what the poem’s about? Or is it –\n(00:35:26)\tSusan Wolfson\tKicking an apple, a ladder pointing towards heaven, which means the sky. But there’s a whiff of the metaphysical there. That is part of the kind of dream world, too, that the one thing the ladder isn’t doing is it’s not Jacob’s ladder. You’re not going up that ladder to heaven. So it’s almost like a joke that this ladder is part of the instruments, part of the tool shed of labour.\nAnd you know, it does come with a slight default or transgression, a barrel I didn’t fill. But that’s not on the level of sin. If anything, if you’re trying to work this out on the map of Eden, you’re in trouble of picking more apples as your salvation. It’s almost a joke about that too.\n(00:36:18)\tSusan Wolfson\tI just kind of like this poem for the way in which ordinary language becomes a kind of record of memory, of dreaming, of labour, of self-ironizing and existential self-reckoning in relation to poetry that is embedded in multiple traditions from Genesis to Keats, to romanticism, to poems of labour, and yet doesn’t insist that you do the math. When you add this up, all those aspects of human language and human poetic tradition kind of impinge or press on your sense of how to read this poem, how to understand this poem. And then part of reading a poem like this, that’s loaded with temp, station for you to do that kind of work, is to feel the temptation and then feel that that’s not really what’s going on. That this isn’t an allegory of a fall of man.\n(00:37:29)\tSusan Wolfson\tI mean, the New England word for autumn, Keat’s poem is too autumn, not too full, but the New England word, the American word for that is fall. And so that also sort of comes in as a kind of tacit understanding that we don’t have a fall without the fall. But it’s not about that. It’s just about the kind of every day, kind of mulling that can make magnified apples appear and disappear. It can be magnified. It takes possession of your mind. It’s surreal, it’s real. It’s a dream; it’s waking. It’s just great. It’s just a great sort of experience going from word to word and line to line.\n(00:38:13)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you so much. It’s been a wonderful conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time to work through the poem so thoughtfully with me.\n(00:38:25)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, it was so much fun.\n(00:38:25)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing]\n(00:38:41)\tMaya Schwartz\tHi there. It’s Maya, your co-host for today’s episode. For part two, I interviewed my professor, Stephen Collis.\n(00:38:49)\tStephen Collis\tI’m Stephen Collis, a poet, and I teach poetry at Simon Fraser University.\n(00:38:53)\tMaya Schwartz\tWe sat down in his office at SFU to chat about the poem “Seafarer” by William Carlos Williams. I began our conversation by asking Steve why he chose this poem. But first, here’s the Caedmon recording of Williams reading the “Seafarer.”\n(00:39:12)\tWilliam Carlos, recording for Caedmon, part of the “The Poets of Anglo-Saxon England” collection, 1955\t“The sea will wash in / but the rocks – jagged ribs / riding the cloth of foam / or a knob or pinnacles / with gannets- / are the stubborn man. / He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / instinct with fears that are not fears / but prickles of ecstasy, / a secret liquor, a fire / that inflames his blood to / coldness so that the rocks / seem rather to leap / at the sea than the sea / to envelope them. They strain / forward to grasp ships / or even the sky itself that / bends down to be torn / upon them. To which he says, / It is I! I am the rocks! / Without me, nothing laughs.”\n(00:40:15)\tMaya Schwartz\tWhy did you choose this poem? I sort of gave you two to choose from. Have you read it before? What, sort of initially struck you?\n(00:40:23)\tStephen Collis\tI don’t remember having read it before. So that may be part of the attraction. Again, that a poet I’m reasonably familiar with, if not, have studied exhaustively. So it was just one I don’t really know of. And, but it’s everything that attracted me to it is in the reading of it. In the way he reads it, which is extraordinary. I don’t know. Should I just jump right into why that is because that’s for the next question? Because it’s the quality of his voice, which I knew it had that quality from maybe other recordings, I guess, and it’s kind of a known thing, if people know about that kind of poetry, they know that he had a funny voice, i.e. it’s relatively high pitched. It’s kind of fragmented and rough and ragged, and we have recordings of him as an old man, right?\n(00:41:08)\tStephen Collis\tBecause this is the 1940s or fifties or something like that, so he’s probably in his seventies. But I think he always sounded that way, [laughs]. He, as a younger person, kind of sounds like some sort of grandmother or, I mean, doesn’t he? So I kinda like that. I like that there’s a contrast in it between the kind of vaguely male-ish sexuality that’s in it, which he’s sort of known for, too, I guess. And this crackly grandma voice, which is kind of funny, [laughs].\nSo one, that’s one thing, the quality of his voice being so fragile and kind of unattractive, right? You don’t wanna listen. So, nonetheless, in that kind of ugliness of his voice, seeming fragility and vulnerability, I’m kind of attracted to that aspect of it.\nThen the other thing is the excessive pausing, which is, I love when a poet reads their line breaks or leans into their line breaks in such a way that he really does here. That first line, you just, you get the first line, you feel like you wait forever for the second line. Hang in there [inaudible], and I know there’s more, buddy. What’s it gonna be? What’s, what’s coming here? That’s fascinating to me, too.\n(00:42:18)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe pauses line up with the line breaks.\n(00:42:20)\tStephen Collis\tFor the most part. They don’t completely, and I think poets, there are poets who never read their line breaks, right? That’s not the point. They scoot right through them. Maybe that’s because there’s a narrative element, or whatever, or it’s just the lines aren’t enjambed. There isn’t a natural kind of pausing, a phrase that the line breaks.\nThen there are poets who, whether or not it’s enjambed, they like to hang on the line break. And I tend to like that. I tend to like the kind of pressure it puts on the voice and the reading when you have that tension there; it kind of goes back to that thing like what T.S. Eliot said about, was it T.S. Eliot? No. Who was it? Robert Frost says that writing poetry without rhymes is like playing tennis without a net or something like that.\n(00:43:08)\tStephen Collis\tA rhyme meter is like playing tennis without a net. And there’s just some, I get what he means. Like, I think it’s, I definitely don’t write rhyme and metered poetry myself, but, and I tend to prefer poetry that isn’t rhymed and metered, but unless I get what he’s saying, he’s saying is, you need this sort of abstract tension framework to work against.\nAnd that’s what line breaks are providing here. Just there’s this frame of the short lines going down the page, and the poet is pushing against them every time. So, a couple of times, he does push right through them and runs under the next line or two pretty quickly, but it’s rare in this poem. And he mostly pushes right up hard against those line breaks, and you really feel him pushing them.\n(00:43:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tDid you notice anything else about the way that Williams read this poem? Like his accent or inflection tone, speed, or emphasis?\n(00:43:56)\tStephen Collis\tTotally. There’s something in the accent, too, which, for us sitting here in Canada, maybe is just generically American about it. But then there’s a wonderful emphasis on certain words. There are the words he just draws out, right?\nLike he, obviously the first line, but individual words like “instinct,” right? “He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / Instinct,” and he kinda says it like that; he just pulls on that word, which is fascinating. And no real reason for it, I don’t think. It’s not like, it’s like a heavy syllable, a weirdly metered kind of word. But he really leans in; he does that a couple of times, “ecstasy,” maybe a little bit, and “liquor,” right? “A secret liquor,” basically really getting the “K” sounds. So he’s playing to the score he’s written for himself.\nHe’s really leaning into those notes you can really play hard and draw out in the reading of it, and it does build toward the ends, right? You get that exclamation mark near there, the end, but he’s, or get too near the end. But his voice does start to rise in volume, released at the end as he tries to bring it to this dramatic moment where the rocks speak. You know? “It is I!” [Laughs]\n(00:45:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThat’s a hilarious reading.\n(00:45:16)\tStephen Collis\t[Laughs] I know. It really is.\n(00:45:17)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd then it settles back down again, “Nothing laughs.”\n(00:45:20)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Which is such a weird last line in the poem, right? Like, “nothing laughs,” I don’t get the, I walk by thinking I don’t get the joke. Was I supposed to laugh?\n(00:45:29)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah.\n(00:45:29)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:45:35)\tMaya Schwartz\tDo these sorts of different emphases change the way that you interpret the poem?\n(00:45:40)\tStephen Collis\tYeah, that’s a good question. To some extent, I think they do. And a lot of that, to me, rides on those two words at the end of a line. It’s probably the longest line on the page, but it’s, they strain, are the words, I would say.\nAnd, this definitely draws our attention to the straining, the tension in the poem, like literally physical tension that he’s playing with, really heavily emphasizing those line breaks, really drawing out the pauses at the end of his lines, or leaning into a word like “instinct,” which just draws out into this much larger space than it should be on the page. That those words they strain really leap out at me as marking this, or reminding me that this is a poem about this kind of tensions that the writer seems to be really interested in. I mean, they’re elemental, you know, it’s sea and land, but they’re encapsulated in his voice and how he reads the poem.\n(00:46:40)\tStephen Collis\tDo you think that listening to the voice of the poet brings us closer to Williams himself?\n(00:46:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tWell, that is pretty wonderful. I love poetry readings. I know a lot of people will say this, it still feels like it’s a necessary part of poetry, that it’s being read aloud by the author. And you always notice something. If you’re familiar with a poem on a page and you have not yet heard the author read it, then you hear them read it. There’s always something revelatory to that. Sometimes disappointing, ii’s like “really? You’d read it like that?” And I don’t, I wouldn’t do that, or that interests me less now that you’ve done that to it.\nBut it is, there’s a quality of, well, it’s got to do with body, embodiment, I think. And poetry to me is very embodied language. And you need to be in the body that felt, heard, breezed, spoke it the way they felt they should or needed to, or would on that occasion. I think that’s significant. So there is, you’re getting a sense of William’s body there, of his breath and his attention and his voice. And, again, that’s what all those heavy line breaks do too. They reemphasize that straining of the voice to get outta the body and take up that oral space of the room around it.\n(00:48:00)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe founders of Caedmon have said that their goal was to capture as much as possible what the poets heard in their heads as they wrote.\n(00:48:08)\tStephen Collis\tNice.\n(00:48:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd I think that, yeah, you did a good job of signing up what we gained from knowing what it sounded like to them. And there’s also sort of a challenge, or like a, there’s also a benefit to not knowing, I think so, too. Is there anything that you think is particular to this poem that makes it well suited for that recording? And it might explain why Williams would choose to read it and have it be recorded?\n(00:48:36)\tStephen Collis\tSo it might have been a poem that, he just liked how this one played when he read it a lot. He is like, I like how I get to play with the tensions and line breaks here, but he works in his ear or in his body, and, then there’s the, does this poem ring or chime off of, or evoke those other seafarer poems in some way? And then maybe he was enjoying that.\n(00:48:58)\tMaya Schwartz\tI asked Steve to say more about how he thought Williams might be evoking earlier seafarer poems.\n(00:49:05)\tStephen Collis\tWell, there’s such an interesting tradition there, because there’s the old English, Anglo-Saxon, really early poem, “The Seafarer” that is anonymous. We don’t know who composed it, but we have it.\nAnd Ezra Pound did a translation of it in the very early 20th century at some point there. And Pound’s translation is interesting for a couple of reasons. Like he sort of trimmed off any Christian references in it and sort of made it more of a, I don’t know, kinda like a pagan poem, I guess.\nBut he really, really did work so hard to get that kind of Anglo-Saxon field poem via word choice and via alliteration, and really making sure it was like a chewy, deep resonant poem in the mouth as it were. But I was thinking that the Williams poem maybe has more to do with H.D. than Pound. The three of those people, they knew each other since they were children, right?\n(00:49:58)\tStephen Collis\tThose three poets, they all went to school in Pennsylvania together, and maybe vaguely, they all – Pound dated H.D. for a tiny while. Maybe Williams dated her for a tiny bit too. So it’s, this whole kind of weird sort of high school romance thing behind their poetries’ love triangle. I know, it’s pretty hilarious. And they remain kind of frenemies their whole lives, right? And were very aware of each other their whole lives. So H.D. becomes famous as the quintessential imagist in that era, the poems are these really paired down small, compressed, refined visual entities.\nBut, so if, can I read you H.D.’s, like five or six lines long? This is the one I think of when I think of Williams’ “Seafairer”, I don’t hear Pound’s so much. I hear this poem, called “Oread,” which is like a sea nymph or a sea spirit of some kind. “Whirl up, sea— / whirl your pointed pines, / splash your great pines / on our rocks, / hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir.” This exact same scene as it were, where Williams poems is set where the sea and the land meet. But they’re also similarly kind of interpenetrating and taking on each other’s qualities. So in the H.D. poem, it’s really clear that the sea has land-like qualities. The sea has pines, the sea has rocks, right? So there’s this really kind of meshing of those, these supposed opposites. They do a bit of that in the Williams’ poem too.\n(00:51:33)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey both seem to have this, almost like they’re talking to the other thing in the poem, like a conversational —\n(00:51:38)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, , I think, I love that word, “ganet.” [Laughs]\nWilliam asking there, he kind of sounds like a ganet. I don’t know what a ganet sounds like for sure. But Williams kind sounds like a seabird. So there’s a little bit of that, but I think they’re both interested in this kind of, dare I say, kinda like a dialectical tension between these opposites sea and land. I think Williams is keyed more into a gendered opposition too.\nHe, in the “Seafairer,” he doesn’t refer to the sea as feminine, although that’s a, maybe, a traditional trope. But he definitely refers to the rocks as masculine. The rocks are a “he,” and they are given his voice to pronounce things at the end. And that feels to me kind of like, a Rejoinder Williams would have for H.D. I’m responding to your sea-ish poems and picking up that same imagery and tropes, but I’m kind of reasserting a kind of maleness. He’s less interested in, let’s say.\n(00:52:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. Let’s talk about the, the last line. Yeah. how do you interpret that? “Without me nothing laughs.”\n(00:52:56)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, there’s this a this is where I was, I guess I’m getting with the gendered thing. There’s this kind of authority the rocks are claiming over the sea.\nThere it is. I, I who I’m the rocks without me, nothing laughs, you know, laughing is such an instinctual and again, embodied thing that we often don’t have a lot of control over. [Laughs] [Maya agrees]\nIt’s something that just ripples and bubbles up like the sea perhaps might be going too far here [laughs]\nBut the voice, the speaker of this poem is asserting this control. But it’s a weird thing to focus on, you know, to go from this, the awesome power of the sea to like, you know, no giggling. Yeah, you dare giggle in front of me until I tell you it’s okay to giggle here. Yeah. It’s, it’s, yeah. I don’t know. It’s, do, do you have a sense, do you have a take on that last line?\n(00:53:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tI don’t know. I feel like especially listening to him say it, but it sort of seems like it knows that things laugh without him.\n(00:53:58)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Right behind his back.\n(00:53:59)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. It’s sort of like a –\n(00:54:02)\tStephen Collis\tYeah.\n(00:54:02)\tMaya Schwartz\tLike he has to say it, but it is still got this sort of like awareness.\n(00:54:07)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, it’s not a punchline as a word. But  I wonder if there is just a tiny little wink and nudge and irony there.\nJust laughter, you know? We’re talking about here. It’s not, it’s not this huge elemental, godsend storms and powers that are being invoked. Just a little self-control. Because it does have a nice book ending to the poem in general. Like, so you, especially the way he reads it, right. The sea will wash in and you get this infinite seeming pause before you get, but the rocks is a, there’s a real hard turn in the poem there to rocks. And we come back to it is, I  own the rocks at the end, but again, laughter’s not what you’re expecting at this point. No, it isn’t. It’s either a super assertion of power, but like, I even demand control of your you know, inadvertent muscle reflexes, or is it just, and maybe it’s both probably often in poetry, it’s a little bit of both.\n(00:55:10)\tStephen Collis\tThis sort of pathetic drop into just, eh, it’s just, you know, just don’t laugh at this. Just don’t take this as a joke. Right. Even though we all know it’s kind of a joke that I’m, that I’m striking a big pose here. Yeah. And my outrageous exaggerated pauses and jam is all part of that, you know, weirdness. That’s nothing about reading line breaks. What’s weird about leading rhyme breaks is, you know, sure, we hesitate and stumble when we speak, but to do it in this kind of almost rigid sense to always be pausing in your speech is drawing us an incredible attention to the performance of speaking words.\nSo there is a little bit of laughing at that, at the end, isn’t this ridiculous? And I wonder what that relationship would’ve been like in terms of like, did they just go, “oh, William Carl Williams is gonna read at nine/six, let’s go ask, see if we can record it”.\n[Soft music starts playing in the background]\nIs that, or I wonder what’s going on there? What are the relationships?\n(00:56:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey had both just graduated from Hunter College. And they had degrees in Greek Uhhuh, and they heard that Dylan Thomas was going to read Of course. And they were like, “it’d be sick to record ’em.”\nI don’t know where they got that idea from. And they went to, they didn’t record him at the “Y,” they tried to get in contact with him, and it was like a series of passing notes.\nAnd then they tracked him down to the Chelsea Hotel, [Stephen says “Oh my God.”] and they sort of used his drinking to, I think one of them called, they couldn’t get in touch with him, and one of them called him at like 4:30 in the morning when he was just coming back from [Stephen: Get out] a night out and, and [Stephen: drunk as hell] he agreed. And then he missed all there.\n(00:56:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tFinally he showed up and he was, they were drinking “madame” in a bar. And he agreed to, for them to record some of his poems, and he gave them a list and it wasn’t enough. They wanted something for the B-side. And he was like, “oh, I have this story: child’s Christmas in Wales.”\n(00:57:07)\tStephen Collis\tOh, that’s what it is.\n(00:57:08)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd it was the popularity of that story. [Overlapping, Stephen: Yeah.] Which never would’ve been what it is without them recording it. And I guess it was a selling factor, and they were from having him able to get other people. I think they got Lawrence Olivier to read.\n(00:57:22)\tStephen Collis\tCool. It’s got a great history of that project, doesn’t it?\n(00:57:26)\tMaya Schwartz\tMm-Hmm.\n(00:57:26)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:57:31)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn the interview with Wachtel, Mantelle and Holdridge strongly resist the notion that they discovered spoken word poetry. But they do acknowledge the role that Ceadmon played in not only creating an industry for recorded literature, but also in changing the way that poetry is written.\n(00:57:48)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think that when we began in February of 1952 with Dylan Thomas, we were not creating the notion of spoken poetry, obviously poetry, and its, its reading anate the discovery of writing, or the invention of writing, I should say, by a long time.\nIt was poetry that people used to remember their history or to recreate their history as it were. Homer wasn’t written, Homer was spoken or sung. But I think that over the generations, with the particularly, with the invention of type, and the profusion of published books, the kind of disappearance of the sound began to take over.\nAnd although there was a movement towards poetry readings, which Dylan was part of, it was perhaps a symbiotic relationship. The market was there for our records, and the records created the market. And I do believe that once Caedmon became part of the mainstream, certainly of literary life, I think the writing of poetry changed.\nI don’t think that poets from the late fifties wrote in the same way they were too much aware of the prevalence of, of recorded, or at least of spoken poetry.\n(00:59:21)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tReally, at least two generations have grown up knowing Caedmon records. They, strangers come up to me all the time and tell me what an impact those recordings made in their lives. And this was really the beginning of the spoken word revolution. This multimillion-dollar audio industry that we have now, owes its inception to two girls recording literature who felt that it was a contribution to understanding.\n(00:59:52)\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n(01:01:50)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThis month’s episode was produced by Maya Schwartz and Michelle Levy. The SpokenWeb podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber,Yara Ajeeb, and Co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine MacLeod.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n \n\n \n"],"score":5.6474447},{"id":"10055","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Sounding Signs and Broadcasting Temporalities and Sounding Together, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 16 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page "],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors_names_search":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Aubrey Grant\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristen Smith\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kiera Obbard\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Joseph Shea-Carter \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Gilboa\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristin Franseen\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter ","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-16 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day One.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"03:57:39\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,269,521,511 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2022-05-16 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day One\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-16\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549988835329,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["The SpokenWeb Research Network (www.spokenweb.ca) is excited to host an in-person and virtual graduate student symposium (academic conference) at Concordia University in Montreal, 16-17 May 2022, on the theme of “The Sound of Literature in Time.”\n\nIntroduction to Theme:  The concepts of sound, time and literature evoke a wide range of research questions when considered in relation to each other. Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nSounding Signs\n\nChair: Jason Camlot\n\nAubrey Grant [IP] (Concordia), “Resounding the Hollow: Repetition and Onomatopoeia in Poe’s ‘The Bells’”\n\nKristen Smith [IP] (York), “Diagrammatic  Codes, Lines, Crosshatchings: Finding Sound in Non-Linguistic Poetry”\n\nKiera Obbard [IP] (U of Guelph), “Close Reading the Sonic Topology of Instagram Poetry with Poemage”\n\nBroadcasting Temporalities\n\nChair: Katherine McLeod\n\nJoseph Shea-Carter [IP] (U of Guelph), “(Re)sounding Text: Time is Away and Sonic Re-Presentations of Literature”\n\nNick Beauchesne [IP], Ariel Kroon [IP], and Chelsea Miya [IP] (U of Alberta), “‘’A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio”\n\nSounding Together\n\nChair: Michelle Levy\n\nCarlos Pittella [IP] (Concordia), “’We’ the People: Collective Lyric Self in 21st-Century Poetry”\n\nLee Gilboa [V] (Brown), “Sound Together: The Chorus as a Possible Framework for Collectivity”\n\nKristin Franseen [IP] (Concordia), “Gossip, Musical Meaning, and (Im)possible Queer Pasts in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Short Fiction”\n\n"],"score":5.6474447}]