audio vs radio

it's an artificial thing audio vs radio but there is a difference and here paolo pietropaolo explains it. if you're strating out in audio/radio/podcastery there's much here to think about. and even if you're not there still is. worthwhile having a peek at cbc's technical channel also

podcasts

it may be that i like a rant about the bbc but that doesn't mean to say i don't listen to a fair bit of it. radio 3's spoken word output is rarely less than fabulous and radio 4, despite often feeling like a middle class family has stopped their range rover long enough to beat you to death with their golden labrador, is well worth the effort despite all the wallpapered mindlessness of it. even if the sound of your demise will doubtless be played to the tune of the archers.

(should i mention the tv? i could but i shan't, not unless i wanted to conflate a sentence using the words smug, preening and flamethrower)

but should one be able to reach the escape velocity to turn away from the bbc behemoth there's much to be found in the world of podcast. i don't usually post about podcasts, mainly because i post enough on here already (and i'll be stopping soon so make the most of it), but also because those lovely guardian people have just gone and done a handy starter which i mention not least because i used to have some online banter with the don logan bunch.

is it a relentlessly anglophone list? why, of course it is (you did see the link was to the guardian?). does it appear that their choices maybe reflect some of the global population more than the rest. maybe...!! but, get into the world of internet radio and the only limits you need to set are those you set on yourself. listening to stories from people who don't look or sound like you is a great way of hearing the world.

i strongly suggest indulging....

so long, see you tomorrow

if there's one thing that gets me thru the ironing prior to returning to work it's having a listen to radio 4's a good read. sometimes it can be just too easy to take a septic turn towards radio 4, especially if you have to listen to a lot of it, but there are other times, times maybe when going back to work feels likes smacking myself in the face with a door again and again and again, when the sound of predominantly white middle class people jabbering on about books seems to hit the reset button just right.

today t was busying herself with some business type stuff, i was ironing, the fire was on and the neighbours cat had just departed after his afternoon visit/sleep. i had been amusing myself to arlene philips and harriet gilbert's response to jocelyn lee esien's choice of prisoner to the streets by robyn travis. kind of like your sparky granny or that aunt/neighbour of a certain age who drags you out to stuff when you're really too young to understand it but who becomes a model of a certain type of behaviour as you get older. something like that...

anyway that all goes on and the next thing harriet gilbert lays down her choice, william maxwell's so long, see you tomorrow which she's never read!!! while i've kind of got used to being in a club of one on the maxwell fandom thing (i know only one other person who's read him and she got him off my shelves) some where in my head i'd taken it as a given that the likes of gilbert would've read this.

sadly no. now, harriet, read all the rest, even the chateau. you won't be disappointed.

i've been thinking about maxwell recently, esp after treating to to a meandering monologue comparing him to richard yates whom i'm more or less at the end stage of reading everything. maybe it was disturbing the peace that did it or maybe it was blake bailey's wonderfully detailed biography but i found myself pining for the more lyrical qualities of maxwell. as i've said before i like this approach go getting all the books, the letters and the biographies and ploughing thru them. it's an effort, exercises the head no end, but totally worth it.

maxwell tho, should be more read. for certain.

as for yates, a good read did the easter parade away back in 2004 and, sadly, it's not on iplayer. in which case somebody choose disturbing the peace and get people having a look at that...

more radio, murder and identity

a few years ago now, my head full of critical theory, i had this idea that i might do a phd in which, rather than look at some literary text, i might look at stories closer to home, the stories people tell when they come in to hospital and from there the stories that professionals tell about them to each other and back to the patient. it was to do with that notion of the creation of a patient identity that could be and might necessarily be separate from the identity of the individual.

maybe medical humanities wasn't where it's at these days or maybe it's just the faculty at my university just weren't up to speed (oh no, they said, we don't understand this..!). i could blame me but nowadays i've seen bits and bobs of that same idea pop up here and there but equally not with anything like the emphasis i wanted to put on it. the idea remains, shelved, but allowing for some intellectual rustiness on my part, still ready to go.

i still talk about it in a roundabout way whether it's teaching ecgs or reflecting on a critical method. mostly it's about questioning heuristics, their facility and application, interrogating what you 'know' if you like. these days, it being junior doctor time (tho i do the same with nurses) i torment with simple looking questions like what's on this ecg (it being sinus rhythm). sinus rhythm they'll say and then we'll go way into why it's sinus rhythm and that's where it exposes both their lack of knowledge, assumptions and errors as well as my own.
because all of us, whether we like it or not, will make a judgement based on the assumption that if a thing looks like a thing then it is a thing and that information is based on all sorts of conscious or unconscious 'knowledge'.

there's all manner of nonsense that can occur with this sort of associative thinking and even more if you don't know you're doing it. you can see it at every level of organisation in all walks of life (and esp amongst those critical theory types who are so ready to apply their theory to everything except themselves) and, i would hazard a guess, it may be more prevalent among those who assume they are 'experienced'. i would never do that they'll exclaim (for more on this in a medical context read atul gawande's book on checklists).

i'm always on the lookout for good examples of well meaning but error prone thinking and i was listening to this week's episode of this american life today when i came across a particularly tragic example (it's the second part but the first is worth a listen as a preamble). be warned, it's upsetting. all the people here were, for whatever reason, trying to 'do the right thing' and yet the consequences were far reaching. true, at the end it may be that there's some sort of rapprochement but it shouldn't be forgotten there's still a dead guy.

this american life is well worth a listen and this episode for me in particular. radio, it seems to me, is ideal for this. you have to sit, you have to listen, there is no heavily made up presenter to distract you, no commentators droning on with their opinions, no music as  a backdrop to enhance 'the drama', just people's voices and time for consideration.

radio loveliness

if i can ever get this writey business behind me i'm going to settle down to some painting and do some serious listening. something i'll be definitely listening to more is sound transit

not so many years ago me and t were getting a bit tired of constant picture taking (yes, i blame digital!). there was something about being somewhere that didn't quite capture the hordes of people with cameras of all sorts in their hands - the sense that online everything can be pre-seen, seen and seen again. we started making sound recordings - street sounds, waterfalls, wind in the trees, all manner of stuff.

the file names have become something like list poetry - whereas a place might just be labelled with a name sound files become more evocative - durness, waves, tide coming in, 6am, waterfall with dragonflies, autumn, visby, botanic gardens, wind in the gorse, hill of mailer, ravens and the like.

plus you have to take time with the listening, not like flicking thru a thousand pictures.

and that's before the act of sound recording itself - picking your spot, standing with your arm outstretched, holding your breath, all the time waiting for that random element - the dog that barks, the man who wants to know what you're doing - before getting home and relistening and remembering that we were there in that moment.

which is all of what sound transit seems to be about. pick a place and listen. get immersed....

elizabeth bishop

seeing as i've been writing about adrienne rich recently it's a happy coincidence that i was browsing thru anne stevenson's five looks at elizabeth bishop, to then find that stevenson was speaking in paul farley's r4 programme on bishop in brazil. given that bishop didn't write a whole lot it's easy, if you have the material, to read along and, as i did, refer to some of her letters. true the programme is a wee bit biographically constrained but it is only half an hour and still well worth a listen.

i don't quite know why rich and bishop occupy much the same space in my mind. i used to much prefer bishop's poetry and certainly with a couple of examples, still do, but rich, in particular her essays, is a place i'm loving to come back to, as if i was visiting a challenging old aunt! certainly sufficient that when i've been hearing about a couple of women only commemorations of her while i can kind of see why they would do such a thing it seems, to me at least, to kind of miss the point. where bishop's poetry takes me to a place, to an atmosphere, rich demands things from me. bishop makes me a better human being, rich makes me a better man.

read both! of the two bishop is easier to get into a first glance. her letters are worth a read, funny, poignant and, in the case of the last one written on the day she died, a top quality rant. rich, on the other hand, is perhaps more opaque but once she's in your head it's a hard trick not to find yourself looking back at old underlined quotes or embarking on daft google odysseys in response to some discursive point. plus anyone who writes a poem about caroline herschel is doing okay by me!

so, it strikes me that if i ever get to have some dead female poets round for their tea i could do worse than bishop, rich with anne sexton coming in late. now that would be entertainment!

wireless nights part II

you have to love your lungs. as with all the organs i guess we take them for granted but the function of the lungs is so obvious it makes ignoring them feel just that bit odder. lovely pink functioning lungs are a beautiful thing - makes me wonder just what i was thinking when i was smoking. and now, when i'm proper lurgied up with what may very well be whooping cough (whooping cough!!!) i'm wishing for the day when breathlessness doesn't appear.

which brings me to the radio. i guess i belong to a generation where spoken word was more prevalent - listen with mother, jackanory etc, all those oliver postage classics starting off as if a story - and when i was sick i would get tucked up in bed and my mother would read to me. it seemed a time when spoken word was more alive - will, i wonder, people from today get the same feeling from their iPads?

which brings me neatly to wireless nights part II, ideal listening for lying on the couch in between bouts of coughing. maybe this one doesn't quite catch my imagination as much as the last one - the minister guy talking about evening prayer in part I, that was just lovely. unfortunately if you didn't listen to it, now you can't. bbc, there are some things you should be leaving available for more than seven days!

anyway, this time jarvis takes a wander down to al alvarez's house by way of listening to some late night poker and some badger watching, either of which activity is appealing. now it's true neither me nor t have actually been badger watching but we've been out and about for bats, comets, conjunctions, picnics (if you've never had a night picnic you so, so should), aurorae and everything in between. so badgers - we'll get to that. the poker thing - back in the day i used to go down to washington square to hang out with the chess and backgammon guys. now chess i can't play for toffee, indeed once got slapped in the face by my mate mike for being so bad at it, but backgammon is a while other kettle of coconuts. i never played any of these hustler guys for money - waaay too tempting and far too easy to lose a ton of money - but great for learning a certain technique. i did, at that time, play darts for beers with cops, which was more night time but another story.

i think this time, what got me was the contrived nature of the programme. while i kind of like the artificiality of it, the notion of 'night people' rankles just a bit. all over the course of the day you find interesting folk doing interesting, odd and fantastical stuff. it's not a night shift thing. the chess/backgammon guys were all day time, bright sunshine. i explored pool halls and slot car racing around the same time. i remember sitting in a park in macau listening to the old geezers blethering in the sun.

and it was that i found most interesting in this programme, the incidental sounds. i've been having a conversation with geo for some time that a sound recording is more evocative than a picture, that note taking is more effective for the memory than a photograph. so when i hear the poker players girding i'm hearing recordings i've made of street noise in vienna, listening to voices of people on the bus to croydon.

and i kind of like the notion that this, in my head at least, is what jarvis cocker is trying to get at, that there's a certain something about listening we should do more of. maybe the next time you're tempted to interfere with your view of the world by sticking your camera/iphone etc in between the pair of you, it might be an idea not to do that, but to utilise the sound recording function instead, sit yourself down, maybe take a few notes then wait for about a year - see then if you flick past it like you do with your images....

*i should admit that while i do sound recordings on my phone both my phone and i are too crap to actually get them up loaded - this situation i absolutely will address. recordings i currently have -

waves on the shore at durness

footsteps on ice and a gale at strathpuffer

breathless after a hill in sutherland

police sirens in vienna

t sleeping

wireless nights

as part of a conversation about things neolithic i came across the following quote form julian cope on his wikipedia page.
You could put me in a coracle and send me off to some rock somewhere to make art, but do that to any member of U2 and they wouldn't make art, you know, they'd find a way back to the mainland. It's like Joseph Campbell said, it's the difference between the celebrity and the hero. The celebrity will walk across tall buildings and dance on tightropes for his audience, but the hero will do exactly the same things and if the audience has all gone home, he'll still be doing it to please himself. And that's the thing..

i was thinking about this today while i was listening to the radio and doing the drawing thing, the radio being something that's doable while doing something else - tv on the other hand being an exclusive device, demanding attention only for itself. what i was listening to was jarvis cocker's wireless nights in which jarvis imagines himself on a night flight, interspersed with people talking about their lives in darkness. great for a night shift worker! it's the sort of thing that there's too little of on radio these days but is a form that's ideally suited to the medium. it's a quirky, strange wee programme, but brilliant and i can't wait to hear the next one.

where i diverge from julian cope above is that he goes on to say that the campbellesque hero is different from '99.9%' of the rest of humanity. i'm not so sure. i listen to the people on cocker's programme and, a wee bit like my work, find that the lives of day to day people are often far more interesting than anything that can be fictionalised or shown on tv.

what was i going to say? i get distracted. t hangs bits raw fleece in the tree at the bottom of the garden. the robins are squabbling over it for their nests..