“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”

Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.

“‘The present age may be styled with great propriety, the Age of Authors; for perhaps the never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment were posting with ardour so general to the press.’

‘The province of writing was formerly left to those who, by study or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind.’

Dr. Johnson in the Adventurer, 1753, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957), p. 58

I am working on an article about epic poetry – well, epic poetry now, in the light of internet, new media. Hmm. Those kind of assignments (“those kind” – what does that mean?) for me are a reason to order books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. The occasion presents itself.

So today the postman brought Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Albert B. Lord’s the Singer of Tales.

I’ve read quite a bit of the shorter poetry of Olson (from the Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley) and I like his prose-essay Call Me Ishmael. Olson is a bit of a strange type, and he could be a total nuthead it seems. (Is it HC ten Berge who calls him a ‘warhoofd’ in a fairly recent piece? I don’t remember). His poetry is straight out of Pound’s Cantos in many senses, and well, I’m simply drawn toward these really long poems (that one hardly ever finishes reading completely, from first till last page).

The ideas of Lord are well-known to me, as they form the fundaments of much contemporary knowledge of oral poetry and performance – but I’ve never read the actual book. So now’s the time.

I did however recently reread Bauman’s 1970’s essay Verbal Art as Performance – it was requiered reading for Literary Theory back in 1988. Rediscovering in a sense where I’ve picked up ideas on literature…

Even een aankondiging tussendoor:

Vrijdag 15 juni, van 13.00 tot 17:00
Symposium Bundel, Boek, Blog

“Tijdens de middag zal een groep literatuurwetenschappers, bloggers, mediatheoretici, dichters en vormgevers discussieren over de implicaties van het feit dat literatuur, en met name poezie, vandaag de dag steeds minder in boekvorm tot ons komt, maar verspreid wordt via websites & blogs, of voorgedragen wordt op poetry-slams. Wat betekent dit voor onze omgang met gedichten? Hoe ziet de toekomst van het boek als fysiek object er uit?”

Sprekers:
Thomas Vaessens
Arie Altena
Cornelia Graebner
Chrétien Breukers
Samuel Vriezen
Frans Oosterhof

Gratis alhier: Letterenfaculteit Universiteit Leiden, gebouw 1162 (Van Wijkplaats 2) zaal 002.

(Georganiseerd door de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap en de Opleiding Literatuurwetenschap Universiteit Leiden.)

… the Arno Schmidt-reference library (see http://www.gasl.org) is an online collection of pdf’s of books that Arno Schmidt owned and to which he often referred in his novels. Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Tobias Smollett, Herodotos. Nice for the fans of Schmidt and the literature-professors.

But in the 3 years of its existence it has already send 400.000 texts into the world. Interestingly, from december 2006 on the downloads increased dramatically because China allowed province after province access to the reference library.

Says Günter Jürgensmeier of GASL, in an e-mail to the Schmidt-discussion list:

“Die Referenzbibliothek hat damit im zurückliegenden Jahr vermutlich erheblich mehr für die Bildung getan als die Bayrische Staatsregierung. “Jaja”, rufen da die Herren Goppel/Schneider unisono, “für die Bildung der Chinesen!” Naja, immerhin!)”

The Bayerischer Rundfunk does have a podcast for Hörspielen: http://www.br-online.de/download-podcast/mp3-download/bayern2radio/mp3-download-podcast-hoerspielartmix.xml. It now features many short re-makes of Ruttmann’s Weekend. Alas, very short bits.

I don’t really use podcasts as such. The main reason is my dislike of Itunes – that program has simply become too big and too slow to use. I prefer Cog. Podcasts I download as I download mp3’s. I also rarely use playlists since my music doesn’t fit on the harddisk of my laptop anyhow, certainly not on my ipod, and even at home I do not always have the external harddisks connected to the laptop. I only use playlists for ‘research’. Yesterday for instance I ‘lost’ 2 hours building a chronological playlist for all the Anthony Braxton I have collected, covering the first 10 years of his career as I’d like/hope to listen through all that in the next few days.

That said, podcast-functionality is perfect for keeping track of programmes that you forget about. I for instance forget that I am interested in audio art, radio art, German Hörspiel. I don’t encounter it in the places that I visit (places = websites, blogs, real places). Yes, I would subscribe immediately if the WDR and Deutschlandradio and Cafe Sonore would offer podcasts of their programs. There is a stream of course.

(Btw: yes, I saw that remark about no podcasts for audio art, during the discussions about Radio at the Balie running at the bottom of the screen).

So here, as a reminder, when the good stuff is on:

WDR 3: http://www.wdr.de/radio/
wednesday 22.00 Hörspiel; 23.00 Studio Elektronische Musik (yes, still wednesday, I am able to remember that!);
saturday 23.00 Studio Akustische Kunst;
sunday 23.00 Studio Neue Musik.

Deutschlandradio Kultur (well, that’s what I know as Deutschlandfunk) has a Hörspiel des Monats, and – that’s a coincedence – on the 13th of May that will be a piece by Raymond Federman: http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/hoerspiel/610766/. An overview of their Hörspiels is here: http://www.dradio.de/portale/hoerspiel/. I’m afraid I don’t see any podcasts.

Cafe Sonore is the only programme left on Dutch (national) public radio that covers the ars acustica. Here luckily we have audio on demand (but not for download): http://www.vpro.nl/programma/cafesonore/.

Just reminders to self.

Below are the quotes that I used in the 15 minutes-sketch of my dream of radio [2.0], yesterday at the Balie, at the Coolmediahottalk-show: http://www.coolmediahottalk.net/. I spoke about a few things more, but I guess/hope these ‘quotes’ conjure up my dream somehow.

Btw: it was a really nice event, not a large crowd, but a very good crowd, with an extensive knowledge of, well, alternative radio. Adam Hyde presented before me – talking about his idea of radio and his radio projects. Thanks to him and thanks to the issues and ideas raised by the public (a.o. Josephine Bosma, Federico Bonelli, Jaromil, Jo van der Spek, Eric Kluitenberg, Radio Patapoe and a radiomaker from Rotterdam) the night managed to give an overview of what makes ‘us’ dream about radio, do radio, why radio is still relevant, how radio is transforming and transforms (technically and culturally), why radio can be so exciting.

My talk was personal – but in the answering of questions and the discussion there was a chance to also adress political/cultural issues.

My quotes:

“Whyfor had they (…) donated him, (…) their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (…) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.”

“This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132, Thorpetersen and Synds, Jomsborg, Selverbergen) which was tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it) with a howdrocephalous enlargement, a gain control of circumcentric megacycles, ranging from the antidulibnium onto the serostaatarean.”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, 309.11-310.21

John Cage, Imaginary Landscape #4, (for 12 radio’s, 24 performers & 1 conductor), 1951

“wat was dat alweer, een radio, een nieuw wonder van de wetenschappelijke god – en zij vertelden haar, dat het eigenlijk aethergolven waren, een kunstmatig oor dat de wereld kon beluisteren (en ge moest de kleine louis boone zien, hoe hij de knop omdraaide, en wachtte tot de stroom was doorgekomen … hier radio brussel, ici radio paris, norddeutscher rundfunk … en gelijk hij dat alles opschreef, voelde hij zich gewichtig, maar liet het zich niet blijken: hij was een snotneuske, hij dacht dat de wereld nu aan zijn gat hing”

Louis Paul Boon, Zomer te Ter-Muren, ed. 1966, p. 320

“By tuning a radio, you control the amount of wind in your house and, to a lesser degree, the language spoken there. You dial in the wind and regulate which rooms it will enter; how hard it will blow, and the form it will take: shouting, singing, silence, breath, whispering, aroma.”

“Different radio stations collect different kinds of wind, then break it up and slow it down until it sounds like a song or a man talking.”

Ben Marcus, “The Least You Need to Know About Radio”, in Parkett 61, 2001, p.162.

John Cage, Roaratorio, 1979 [____,____ ____ circus on ____]

“The mixture is not a specialized genre dished up for a small group of fans. It is an expedition to the innermost recesses of radio. The penchant for mixing represents the transition from alternative media, which still try to fill a lacuna in the existing supply, to sovereign media, which have detached themselves from the potential listening audience. They do not see themselves as part of bourgeois (anti-)openness or the smorgasbord of media choices, which at most they observe from outside. Things broadcast by others are merely potential ingredients. News is one archive among many. Sovereign media are fallout from the “emancipation of the media”, and abandon the communication model.”

Geert Lovink, “The Theory of Mixing”, Mediamatic, 6#4, summer 1992.

In all the houses where I’ve lived in Amsterdam I could always buy a newspaper around the corner. Never more than a 250 meters walk. Now I live in a house from where I can see the big signs De Volkskrant, Het Parool and Trouw at the Wibautstraat, but where I cannot buy a newspaper closer than a 1 kilometer walk away (well, it seems the Amstel Station is the best place…). So I do not run out the door before breakfast to get a newspaper anymore.

I used to listen quite a bit to the radio. Mostly the Concertzender – through cable (http://www.concertzender.nl). I do not have cable in the new house. Radio now is internetradio, or comes in through an antenna. There’s nothing worthwhile listening coming in over the antenna. (Or not enough to even want me connect the wires a bit better). And when internetradio has to compete on my computer with downloading cd’s from blogs & listening to my own growing archive.

Already since years watching the television for me is reduced to watching cycling. I now have ‘Digitenne’, so no Arte, no ARD and ZDF, no BBC, and watching the television as a ‘leisure activity’ disappears even further from sight (though the reduction makes one remember better when that certain, very rare, programme is on that is worthwhile watching). No videotaping old German-subbed movies in the night anymore. Never anymore this rare occurence of a whole night watching the television.

And yes, I miss watching German television. But that said, I know that what I miss does not exist anymore. I miss the German television of 20 years ago. As F. – not having had television for long – misses a BBC2 that does not really exist anymore, except for a few pockets hidden away in the schedule.

There are alternatives.

Media disappear from sight because of very practical reasons.

Wednesday May 2nd I’ll be speaking at the Radio 2.0-event of the Cool Media Hot Talk Show at De Balie, Amsterdam. Here’s a copy of the text and statements that frame the event:

Questioning the relevance of radio in the internet age

Internet radio or net.radio is now so much part of the daily practice and experience of the internet that it has become alsmost ‘vernacular’, i.e it is almost impossible to perceive it for what it is (audio on-line), and more importantly to see it as something that could be imagined differently. The adoption of the metaphor in such mainstream software packages as iTunes strengthens the adherence to the old and accustomed model of ‘radio’ with a critical mass of internet users. In a sense, most befitting to a show about media hot and cool, it expresses beautifully the idea of McLuhan that “the content of any new medium is an old medium” and that we are thus “moving into the future looking backwards”…

We want to question what the relevance of radio is (as an artistic form and as a medium) in the internet age. Why stick to the notion of ‘radio’ when the ways of handling and experiencing audio in an on-line environment (on the internet) can be so much more versatile? Is not a concept like net.radio, popular in internet-art circles such as the xChange network, already a reactionary move towards the past?

If artists want to explore, continue or reinvigorate the legacy of ‘Radio Art’, why connect this with an internet related practice? Looking back at the history of radio as a medium and the artists involvement it is important to remember that already in the late 1920s Bertold Brecht famously explored the idea of radio as a distributed interactive communication space consciously as an artistic and a social / political tool. Technically also traditional radio has the capacity of transforming every receiver into a transmitter, thus enabling a communication structure pretty similar to the internet. However, it was not technology but regulation and legislation that killed this transformative potential of the radio medium.

Looking at this today two ideas present themselves: First that we need to be aware of this history in order not to make the same mistakes vis-à-vis the internet (allowing it to be closed down by regulation and legislation). Secondly, now that a mass of users has become accustomed to the open media of the internet, would it not be a more productive and interesting idea to take the internet to radio, rather than the other way around? Why not try to open up the traditional radio space in a way similar to the internet, taking the internet-attitude of the youtube generation to radio?

This is also important locally in Amsterdam, where after all this show is physically staged, which had a huge tradition in open media and free radio, but where the radio space has recently been forcefully closed down by new regulation, legislation ánd enforcement!

Statement of Adam Hyde

Radio is not as it seems. It has never been live. It has always been a rather fast method for delivering an archive. It is now time to confront the great pretender and investigate the nuances of the reigning principle of radio – delay.

Radio is the best archival media there is. Copy your digital files into sound, broadcast them into space, – they will exist forever. Retreiving them does require some work still as the speed of light remains a barrier for indexing and retrieving radio waves, but given time science cures even the most anxious archivists worries. Archive now, let science take care of the rest later.

But is radio really an archival medium? Or is it live? Are radio waves themselves a guarantee of liveness or do they simply deliver archival material really quickly? What does ‘live’ actually mean and does it even matter? Further, what role does the internet have in this debate, is it possible to say that a downloaded mp3 file is live radio?

Adam will talk about various projects he has worked on including r a d i o q u a l i a s Radio Astronomy (http://www.radio-astronomy.net) and Wifio ( by Simpel – http://www.simpel.cc). Radio Astronomy is a live online radio station broadcasting sounds from space. Wifio is a radio tuner that allows you to listen to the internet. It captures data traffic on open wireless connections and translates emails, webpages, voip and irc to speech. With wifio you too can listen to the internet in your neighbourhood….

Adam Hyde (.nz), is an artist, educator, tactical media practitioner, streaming media consultant, and sometime curator. He is involved in numerous projects that fuse (sound-) art, radio, and the internet, a.o. r a d i o q u a l i a, Radio Astronomy, and Polar Radio. http://www.radioqualia.net/, http://www.xs4all.nl/~adam/.

Statement of Arie Altena

What is radio? Maybe the only way of explaining what radio nowadays signifies, is by taking radio as a sort of mock-latin for “I am beaming”, or “I am sending”. In the West we are getting quite far removed from ‘radio’ as a specific way of transmitting signals through the air, or a format where someone in a studio makes a programme for us to listen to. The word radio is grifted upon many of our media-uses. We can even conceptualize of every carrier of an iPod or laptop with an open internet-connection and iTunes (or another sound-programme running) as radio-stations, stations that others can tune into. Radio then is – like the commercial channels – an operation upon an archive (selected play lists from a huge database of sound files), possibly remixed.

I like this re-use of the word radio – taking all those stations streaming sound as radio. Most of that is utterly uninteresting to most (even when I sit down in places like De Balie or V2_ and proceed to check on the shared iTunes-‘radio stations’ in my immediate environment, I hardly ever see anything I’d like to listen to, and I imagine the same will be true of people checking on my archive.) If we have something like radio, it is radically personalized (more personalized than Last.fm).

This is the perspective of the listener who in some sense, involuntary, becomes a radio station himself, by carrying around networked equipment. It’s a technology-effect, it has not much to do with a (conscious) decision to start sending.

What then does the same technological change signify for someone who takes the conscious decision to send? To become a disembodied voice? To represent – what?

I am always a bit disappointed when alternative radio – say artists taking up radio – uses the formats of classic, mainstream radio from the twentieth century, from the high times of ‘radio stations’, with talk shows, jingles, announcements, phone-ins, and a deejay who talks in between records that he spins. Of course, that was a strong genre.

A note: all the radio programmes that I have fond memories of were held together by a distinctive human voice (like that of Michiel de Ruyter).

http://www.coolmediahottalk.net