Interlude 3
Also This: No Title
I began the preceding chapter with the intent to write about recordings of modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. Drawing on my experiences editing both of their PennSound pages and the richness of scholarly discourse around their works suggested the possibility for a robust study of transformations introduced to their respective sound works by digitization. In lockstep with this approach, the relation of the digital object to the various poetics of objectivist writing seemed useful. However, the circuits of transmission were cut short: in each instance, primary recordings were relayed to the PennSound collection by a single process of transcoding. The ways in which bill bissett trafficked through a range of little databases, on the other hand, presented a method to navigate transmission narratives through a series of contextual modulations, which usefully inventoried a set of contingent effects. Thus, despite the wealth of resources devoted to the original two intended authors, the stories of their emplacement in the little databases paled in comparison to the chronicles of transmission shadowing the bissett files before and after their situation on PennSound.
The essay, bound within a codex, must make certain editorial decisions. The media poetics of digital creative scholarship, as MUPS demonstrates, afford a greater degree of freedom in the process of selection. My own work in processing the PennSound collection predates my enrollment in graduate study. I began editing PennSound from Tokyo in the fall of 2007, starting with the Williams page, and continuing through a diverse set of segmentations and arrangements over the next several years. In the spring of 2008, around the time I was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, I was invited to create a “selected” set of featured resources culled from the collection. Perhaps not by coincidence, the Johnson selection of tracks for MUPS heavily relies on this “featured resources archive,” which indexes a number of similar lists chosen by editors, poets, and scholars. Where previous iterations of the format suggested a type of “top ten” list more common to cassette mixes and listicle culture, I decided to make a sample-based compilation in addition to my selection of soundtracks. This compilation was named after some incidental lines of a Williams track, “Also this: no title.” The compilation—which I called an “Editorial Reprise Audio Essay”—samples from sixteen tracks to construct an argument about transcoded sound files woven within the selections themselves, clocking in at roughly thirteen minutes.1 As I have continued work on the little database project approximately fifteen years later, well beyond my time at Penn, I have come to discover that this old audio essay still performs arguments that the chapter could not. Not only in terms of the limitations of the chapter’s interpretive focus, but also along the many frequencies marking what sound can say that the page cannot.
Like MUPS, the compilation jumps among a range of poetry audio samples in what can seem, at times, the haphazard logic of an incidental conversation between readings in the collection. However, unlike the algorithmic leaps of MUPS, “Also this: no title” conducts a concerted set of editorial interventions aimed to produce an argument, just as these sentences do as I type them. From editorial decisions to interwoven transitions, the audio essay was plotted to produce a rhetorical effect. Like the compilation film discussed in the next chapter or the montage poetics featured in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, the aural poetics of this interlude perform a creative mode of scholarship through the arrangement of the media it addresses.
The opening lines of “Also this” signal my process in the voice of Jed Rasula articulating his re-edit of Henry James’s The Ambassadors: “i have not tampered with anything i have simply removed and reallocated the parts.” Between these “reallocations,” bursts of audio hiss and author in-breaths interrupt the poetic stream. Unlike a MUPS session, the stream of “Also this: no title” highlights the medial and incidental qualities of the recordings as significant sonic elements, beyond their threshold of silence. While producing the audio essay, my day job had me working as a director and sound engineer at a publishing house for audiobooks. Spending eight hours a day directing and editing literary readings between a set of headphones jacked into ProTools, I had learned how to use advanced audio engineering techniques to remove precisely the human noise and medial hiss from the telling of a narrative. In “Also this: no title,” I wanted to do just the opposite. Between every significant transition, an exaggerated array of breaths and skips interrupt the smoothly intoned flow that a listener might expect.
Figure 3i.1. Capture of the opening segment of my transcription of “Also this: no title” as featured on the PennSound page. Captured via PennSound, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Featured-2008.html.
Figure Description
Danny Snelson:
Editorial Reprise Audio Essay: Also this: No Title
also this: no title = wrong from the start / no hardly but seeing he had been born in a country out of date = he fished by obstinate isles = actually i should read this, um brief uh public service announcement here, it’s appropriate for, uh = uh, those, uh i have not tampered with anything i have simply removed and reallocated the parts = of what can it such as which sense can it not = uh, this is a selection from a rather uh unscrupulous raid that i uh made = blasted stochastically thought detectors tossed together with targeted segments of remorse the = the poet / takes too many messages = with the structural trends and the styles of folding defined by foliation, fold axis, bedding and sometimes by signifier anomalies = surreptitiously trips resolute tourniquet = case presents no adjunct to the muses diadem, the age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace, something for the modern stage not at any rate an attic = surely i can reduce this in its scope and size = exactly the position that they occupy in the text as we have it but = but i thot that i might be able to perform some kind of = killing whatever was there before = For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books. / These fought, in any case, / and some believing, pro domo, in any case / Some quick some venture = bleached to the point of subordination = some from weakness, some from censure, / some for love of slaughter in imagination, / learning Daring as never before / wastage as never before / frankness as never before, = no one listens to poetry, the ocean does not need to be listened to / a drop a crash of water it means nothing / it is bread and butter pepper and salt, the death that young men hope for = aimlessly it pounds ashore = white and aimless signals, no / one listens to poetry = and the minutes burn a hole in my socket the seconds scar a moment after gone but wayward knos no way then toils triumphalist deflation tailoring tokens to abutments = for him to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to build a house on to = disillusions as never told in the old days / laughter out of
Rather than attempt to rearticulate the movements of “Also this: no title,” I present the sound file in this interlude to speak for itself, as TXT EXE might speak for the Textz collection. While there is the temptation to discuss the relation of the radio and transmission art of Gregory Whitehead to the archival record of digital systems, or the digital presentation of Jackson Mac Low’s aleatoric cassette-based work entitled “The 8-Voice Stereo-Canon Realization of The Black Tarantula Crossword Gatha,” or the multilingual transformations of Caroline Bergvall’s etymological rewriting of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—each of which displays a unique relation to the MP3 file and the PennSound collection—I will instead limit my gesture to the reposting of “Also this: no title” in full as a media poetics parallel to the chapter.
On a final note, it bears remarking that my own poetry readings are also featured in MUPS, along with the full “Deformance” page I produced with Bernstein for PennSound. In my tracks on MUPS, I remix and interweave my voice with Rosmarie Waldrop’s rewriting of Ludwig Wittgenstein in her readings from The Reproduction of Profiles (1984). These “Feverish Propogations” complicate the (already complex) “you” and “I” in her reading, writing myself as an active listener into the exchange. In each of these works (MUPS, “Also this: no title,” or my own Waldrop deformance), the band narrows to a listener’s relation to the little database. Or rather, as “Also this: no title” concludes: “one big blooming confusion, or, the other side of language / where i am mute and the unsaid the unsaid weighs heavy . . . and or hurl it into the void and/or demonstrate the autonomy of the audience.”
See: “Also this: no title” (2008).