one of the more difficult parts of being in a space with no other human there is filling it. if you live with no other humans, it is occasionally oppressively silent, even with the royal twins tearing through the house at break neck speed and getting yelled at for thinking that the ball of yarn that i'm working with, thankyouverymuch, is something to be hunted and carried off to the den under the bed. if you live with other humans and find yourself alone in the house for awhile, the silence can be a relief, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be filled with the personally chosen sounds of the individual.
i have always enjoyed a silent home, partly because there was always enough going on outside or in the house that adding noise to it just made no sense. there are the wonderful sounds of a house settling into the ground and all of the creaks and grinds and breaks associated with that motion. it takes time to sink a brick house, even in a swamp that has been filled with concrete pylons and dozens of layers of city that have sunk into the muck and built on over and over again for an hundred and fifty years, and the sounds spread out and go slowly or jerk for a few seconds, adjusting to some milimetric difference.
as a child, most winter evenings were spent in the living room, many involved a fire in the fireplace and listening to my father read to me/us from Laura Ingalls Wilder or Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. (thought - it sounds so much more impressive to speak of reading from an author than saying we read Little House on the Prairie and Tom Sawyer and A Christmas Carol. i wonder what trick of the language allows for that?)(yes, alright, idyllic childhood, without it, i would likely be a much more depressing combination of cliches without any hope of escape) it helps that my father has a pleasant reading voice and that he chose to read to us about young people who lived in places we knew of and had visited.
remember that Dream On guy? the one who was of the first generation of people raised in front of the television? yeah. I don't get that guy. i wasn't that guy. every now and then i go into cable addiction and Cannot Turn It Off! but then i move or get divorced or something like that (cable = husband or roommate(s), i never have it when i'm single.) as a child i hung out in the library upstairs, reading the spines of my parent's books. this is something i have written about almost ad nauseum.
part of the difficulty i have with sitting down to read a book is that it's one thing. i'm doing one thing, and only one thing. it is nice to read for information or for a class because then there is a notepad next to me and a pencil in my hand, and i can write things down, tease out bits of fun information, beginnings of theoretical underpinnings etc. it is my way of being actively involved with a text, there is a dialogue, not just parasitism for quotes or someone else's opinion or philosophy, but the recognition that there is something here that i find fascinating, that will be around for a while, that i will want to continue to engage with and in. i am allowed the illusion of multi-tasking, even though i'm sitting still only engaging two of my senses (unless i'm reading aloud, but we'll get there).
i finished reading Possession by AS Byatt. again. I read it about every year. and every year when i finish the book, i immediately turn to the front and begin it again. this year, i didn't do that. i wanted more than just a rehash. i wanted to find bits of it in my world and my home. i started writing - one of those dreaded book responses from college. and then i started looking for, and finding easily (because i've read the book so many damn times) discussions about certain themes - most notably the theme of what we call education, knowing, information having, can do to people - and i marked them with color coded post-it tabs. that is the reading that i truly enjoy doing, but rarely get the chance to - rarely does a book warrant that kind of attention. rarely do i have that attention to give.
i took a class in World Music at the end of last century and learned about this amazing thing: balinese shadow puppet shows accompanied by gamelan music (move my soul to heaven) that tell old and very well known stories, like the Ramadan. people crowd into these places. they smoke, they speak to each other, they watch the show, they eat. this goes on for near to 24 hours. gnungh! so want to do this. so want to.
i look at Trilogy Tuesday from years ago (lord of the rings - all three movies to herald the release of Return of the King. 12 hours in a movie theatre. Bad bad food. Smelled like a locker room by the time we were done. So. Much. Fucking. Fun. i was in tears for a week - just emotionally exhausted. it was wonderful) as a sort of test run. the culture of Bali and of Omaha are vastly different, though, so we'll see how much of a test run it really was.
part of my multi-tasking at home involves yarn work. more than a few years back, i discovered that commentaries are the most wonderful things ever, because they allowed me to watch a beloved movie, without having to watch it, while still being somewhat involved with it - thinking about the process of the end product. i tend to find commentaries sort of inspiring. sometimes they are awful, but that's for another blog. the point here, is that i enjoy listening to people speak about what they did, and why they did it, and what the thoughts were about it. but, i'm listening to it. (over and over and over again.)
yesterday, after i found that i could lift my head without unendurable pain (aftereffect of surgery - i recover okay, but when i get sick, i get sick right now and a lot and it sucks), i worked on a new project while listening to the new adventures of sherlock holmes - it's at the library, except for the ones that i have, they are the recordings (organized in someone's drunken notion of order) of the radio show from WWII and just after. it's taken some time and practice to pay attention the way that you would were this the only time you would hear it, and in fact, i'm sure that i don't, because i know that i can listen to them again.
in the last few weeks, i have listened to something like 4 or 5 books read aloud and recorded for my listening pleasure. i have wondered if listening to them counts as having read them. particularly in the case of non-fiction, although why that should be different simply leads us to a discussion of how i'm an elitist bitch, and we all know that already. i've answered the question for myself by deciding that it is just as easy to not pay attention to a book that is sitting in your lap, open, with your eyes fixed on it and moving over the words on the page, as it is to disregard the voice reading to you those words. the only real difficulty comes when you want to cite something or remember a specific line. when it is a machine controlling the reading (to some extent) and not a person sitting in the room with you, it is difficult to say "would you read that bit again" or "what chapter is that in" though not entirely impossible.
i enjoy sitting down to an entire day of a television show. one of these days i will own stargate sg-1 all 10 seasons box set, and i will have a television to hand with the necessary cords and i will do nothing but watch stargate. beginning with the movie. it will be wonderful and food-filled and i will have a headache and bad back for a week afterwards, because it will take me a while to get through it all, but i will - have no doubt or fear - it will happen.
the idea of 24 hours of entertainment, or storytelling or more specifically, story performance, seems so utterly appropriate to me, and i have no clue why. perhaps it's to do with the long nights of reading that i will indulge in on occasion. perhaps it's just the notion of being completely consumed by a thing - i tire of and find annoying the flighty entertainment that is available on a regular basis. i have now one show - two by proximity (one to the show i watch, one to my parents), and that is enough.
i get to go home and listen to someone read to me of war and love and honor and mystery and occasionally engage me in ridiculous conversation in Portuguese.
my home is filled with voices and story and i am not bound to one room or one chair or one attitude. i can do the dishes and move about, chasing the cats and blocking work. it is difficult to take notes, because i cannot look away from the book and now that everything will be in the same spot, but the discs end after very little time, so it is of no real consequence.
the only time it's really trying is when i know that i could have read the damn thing faster myself.
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