Being a blind listener/reader I found this piece very relational. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-audiobooks-and-the-return-of-storytelling.html?ref=opinion STANFORD, Calif. -- THE ferns under my oak trees evoke moments from "The Great Gatsby" for me. I read the book many years ago, but I listened to it last summer while planting 50 polypodium californicas and 50 festuca idahoensis in the dappled light beneath my oaks. Now, when I look at them, I think about that last awful accident, the yellow Rolls-Royce screaming past the repair shop, and what F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator called Gatsby's extraordinary gift for hope. The sale of audiobooks has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009. Publishers seem to be paying more attention to their production. When Simon and Schuster published Colm Toibin's "Testament of Mary" last autumn, the narrator was Meryl Streep. We tend to regard reading with our eyes as more serious, more highbrow, than hearing a book read out loud. Listening to a written text harkens back to childhood, when we couldn't read it ourselves, or a time when our parents left off reading the chapter out loud in the middle, a nudge that we'd use our school-taught skills to finish it off by ourselves. The great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure thought we treated writing as more important than speaking because writing is visual. Speech is ephemeral -- you hear a word, and then it is gone. The word written down remains, and so we attach more significance to it. Saussure wrote that when we imagined text as more important than speech, it was as if we thought we would learn more about someone from his photograph than from his face. But so it is. The ability to read has always been invested with more importance than mere speech. When only a small priestly elite could read, books were sacred mysteries. When more people could read, literacy became a means to move forward in the world. These days, the ability to read is a prerequisite for full participation in the social order. But for most of human history literature has been spoken out loud. The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung. We think that the Homeric singers of those tales mastered the prodigious mnemonic task presented by those thousands upon thousands of lines of text through an intricate combination of common phrases -- rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea -- and nested plots that could be expanded or shortened as the occasion demanded. Even after narratives were written down, they were more often heard than read. The Roman elites could read, but gatherings at which people recited their poetry were common. And before the modern era, when printing made books widely available and literacy became widespread, reading was an oral act. People read aloud not only to others but also to themselves, and books, as the historian William Graham puts it in "Beyond the Written Word," were meant for the ears as much, or more so, than for the eyes. In the early 17th century the Jesuit missionary to China Matteo Ricci captured the orality of writing in this letter to a Peking publisher: "The whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces." Mr. Graham writes that in Europe, silent private reading became widespread only in the second half of the 19th century. What happens when you hear a text rather than read it? The obvious thing is that you can do something else with your eyes. That is why I can listen to books when I garden. My hands and eyes can work. And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses -- my hands on the trowel, the scent of tansy in the breeze. The creation of this sensory richness was in fact an explicit goal of the oral reading of the Bible in the medieval European cloister, so that daily tasks would be infused with Scripture, and Scripture would be remembered through ordinary tasks. I find that when I listen to a story, instead of reading it on a page, my memory of the book does change. I remember more of the action and less of the language, although sometimes when I listen a sentence will drop into my mind and shock me into attention in a way that is less common when I read. (Mind you, it helps to have a good reader.) You don't check back on previous paragraphs or read the last page first when you listen. You move forward, and what you carry with you is person and event. I listen the way I read books as a child, as if I were there watching. The author becomes more transparent, the characters more real. Listening to "Bring Up the Bodies," I don't think, what is the author, Hilary Mantel, up to? I feel the threat of death damp on my skin. And when I have listened to a book in a particular place -- the ferns beneath the oak trees -- I remember the book when I come back to that place, as if my hands in the soil were digging up the words. T. M. Luhrmann is a contributing opinion writer and a professor of anthropology at Stanford.
-- Avinash Shahi M.Phil Research Scholar Centre for The Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
