self-help
thought walking by bookstore:
self-help books make more sense than self-help audiotapes because, with books, you are actively reading and attempting to parse language. The pages unitize/quantize progress: from cover to cover = start to finish. In reading and flipping, there is active engagement. 'Interacting' with audiotapes really consists of a passive listening. Reels indicate progress through the thickness of the tape left. You listen; time goes by; the reel thins imperceptibly, and before you know it, you're done, but nothing has changed, nothing has happened to you.
Really, all I want to do is to quote Zadie Smith:
"But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true."
-Zadie Smith
Comments
Laurence Sterne also believed in the active engagement of the reader--you had to work to really understand the richness of the layers in his enigmatic verbal tapestries. But I guess Smith is refering to a condition of the present and something that's been lost while Sterne was attempting to create the standard of how novels should be written and read.
Mm, good point.
Whenever I think about the connection between Shakespeare and popular entertainment I always think that it's an impossible one these days. That the process of medium/entertainment has so changed people that it's just not possible to have the same social interactions and interpretations of a piece of art/performance/literature that was possible then. We can't shout at operas anymore because of Wagner.. right?
And I guess in that way I feel like Sterne is working in his era, in a medium that is a period one alongside amateur music and plays and opera, while Smith is battling with movies and youtube videos and Wii games alike. I'm sure this 'battle between mediums' is not what Smith has in mind, and I so agree with her. But maybe in a way it's asking an audience to interact with the play, to shout at a Stravinsky concert rather than sitting back. Because the method of engaging with a creation has changed from then to now, to sitting back and enjoying it as a non-active non-effort, like the audiotape.
In other words, maybe for Zadie Smith to ask readers to read as if they were an amateur musician (and amateur in the original love-sense of the word) is asking readers to read her medium out of the general mediae-consumption style of the current time..?
Comparing media always becomes problematic, and even more so when you compare media across large leaps of time. So how exactly are we supposed to work at a piece of writing the way an amateur musician once did? I think you've mistaken active involvement with social, vocal, or corporeal involvement, because more than ever is the notion of interactivity prevalent: we can 'respond' to youtube videos with our own videos or have the Wii register even our clumsiest of motions.
Hains and Villegle's solution during the 60s was decollage in which they celebrated (and framed/sold) publicly lacerated posters of advertisements, but if you think about it, ends up as some capitalistic autophagic hypocrisy, so maybe that's not the best example. Decollage was also about active but silent rebeliion, the aggregation of chance moments of aggression, not so much about skill.
What Smith is referring to is the increased value of the work with the increased skill of the audience. Shouting at a Stravinsky concert is not very different from a youtube response because it does not make the piece any more fulfilling or worth more. Every Christmas a chorus of amateurs, the Oratorio Society of New York, congregate to practice and perform Handel's Messiah--this is what she is talking about. So how do we apply this to text? Perhaps what she is suggesting is to not read for plot or "the good bits" (because few musicians will jump to their favorite sections or play enough to simply get a rough idea of the piece) but to struggle with all of it, internalize it, ponder the multiplicity of the words, to have it become a part of your own discourse and dialog with existence, and the more we do so, the greater the pleasure and the value.
Thanks for the Hains and Villegle reference - I hadn't heard of them. I also completely agree with you about Zadie Smith, and what she says..
What I mean in terms of involvement in a medium is the navigatability of the medium -- the action I do to "play" the piece. The (physical, mental) action I take to play an artist's film is to sit back and watch, but the action I do to 'play' a sculptor's labyrinth is to physically walk through the piece, looking for an exit. I feel as if the difference between the action I take to involve myself with a book (versus a videotape, or a concert) is more of an active one, like Smith says. Not only is there a relationship between skill and value, there's also a sense of progress that is created by the self: the words won't create sentences unless you read through them, and the pages won't turn unless you turn them. A book is a series of static words/sentences, separated by spaces, in which the adventurer has to go forth and climb, jump across these textual and mental gaps in order to traverse it.
And in that sense, you're right on about the Wii (but less about the youtube videos -- the involvement of a video response is a contextual one, and not within the media). The intoxication of the videogame comes partially from the sense of power and influence created, as a direct result of action done onto the controller expressed in a reaction on the screen.
The Oratorio Society is a great example, but when they perform they become the performs of that medium, which was something different than what I was thinking. When we read books, we read them for ourselves, so the effect of interacting with the medium is that I struggle with it and internalize it, as you said. The Oratorio Society puts on a performance for others to enjoy. If they were all about singing for themselves in an enclosed room, with the motivation of truly enjoying the sheet music, that would be more akin to Smith's example, but by performing, they become creators as well.
In other words, I was thinking more about content that (traditionally) flows from creator -> appreciator: a creator creates the piece and gives it to the reader, who enjoys it. In some ways, music and film (and audiobooks!) are completed when they are given to the viewer, perhaps because of the dimension of time they contain. They flow and run, and the viewer's process of appreciating is partially about keeping up; the viewer is being engaged and (almost forcibly) progressed, and is the one being played. (An object, not an agent.) In contrast, books, sheet music, and video games are all played by the viewer; the creation comes semi-completed to the viewer, who takes part in the creation of literature, music, and interactivity by directly engaging and controlling the creation.
Having said this, I feel that interactivity -- content, experienced through co-creation -- has just been created very recently, in the last two decades or so. A while back, there was once a time when Smith's amateur musicians existed, before record players rendered them relatively obsolete. After that, there was a long in-between period in which economies of scale and yet-limited technology meant that content flowed one-way, from the creators to the audience. Smith talks about reading-as-amateur-musicianship, yet that sort of appreciation process is one that's sort of obsolete in a sense. It's akin to the idea of shouting at Shakespearean theatre, or the black church-going experience that many point to as the origin of call-and-response within jazz: a sort of community call-and-response with the creation. I don't mean to say that the former amateur-musician-era is necessarily a better method of appreciating media. What I really mean is that it's fitting that books are transmedialized into audiobooks: more than a technological conversion, it's almost a historical transition from the age of private chamber music to the age of professional recording.
The next step of interactivity applied to literature perhaps, is books as websites; with the equivalent of the promotional websites for movies. Maybe, an interconnected tangle of narratives without time, pointing to each other, mixed and uncomfortable and meant to be experienced simultaneously, like a piece of Trafalmadorian literature. Say, yeah, like Slaughterhouse Five, or Infinite Jest...