Wireless Words

SMS Poetry

2009-03-28T10:41:00.002-06:00

A friend sends beautiful text messages. At least, it seems so to me. I don't have a cell-phone plan that gives me unlimited texts, so I don't use the feature very much. Therefore, it may be commonplace for texts to contain a level of beauty that I find in this particular friend's messages. But I doubt it. Like the rare poet who writes sonnets or vilanelles whose profundity belie the narrow constraints of the form, this man has found ingenious and elegant ways to express his thoughts in the space of a small screen.

I have saved the ones that seem particularly poetic. As I near the limits of my phone's small capacity for storing data, I wonder about anthologizing the texts. This raises some questions. What would be the proper form for publishing them? Would it be best to take a photograph of my cell phone's screen (I'm sure there is also some more technologically complex way of doing this)? Would text messages translate well to the page with their abundance of white space and old-fashioned typography? And would readers appreciate what I see as poetry when they don't receive the message in the same context as I do? Text messages can say a lot in a confined space because they are part of a larger conversation, which may include earlier messages or the long history of a friendship that allows for a certain shorthand made of up inside jokes and other references.

Well, for now I am storing the messages on my phone, until a full inbox makes this project more urgent.

I, Cyborg

2009-02-11T21:19:00.002-07:00

Lisa Maruca is coming from Wayne State University to speak tomorrow on cyborgs and technologies of writing and writing instruction. It is a timely talk for me in a number of ways.

First, I've just started reading Seth Lerer, who tells me (in his Chaucer and His Readers) that Stephen Hawes had the rather novel idea near the end of the fifteenth century that the new technology of print would help him achieve the poetic fame that eluded him during his life. In contrast, Hawes's contemporary, John Skelton, never really got into print. He continued to write in an oracular manner and identified with the manuscript tradition rather than embracing the new technologies offered by print. Skelton was the more famous in his time, winning the title of poet laureate, a classical Roman honor that had recently been revived in England. One might expect this story to end with Hawes's revenge on Skelton. Alas, Hawes today is no more known than Skelton (who is, himself, not exactly a household name). But maybe scholars of textual studies will revive his fame, at least among people like me who are interested in the history and cultural significance of books.

Also, a couple nights ago, John Stewart had on a Time reporter whose current cover story involves a plan for saving The Newspaper. Stewart's own plan involves capitalizing on the pleasant feeling one gets from fingering the page and getting newsprint on the fingers. Newspapers need, he says, to make the ink an addictive substance so that people will need to buy more and more papers. This is Maruca's print cyborg-ism in reverse. Instead of a coupling of man and machine whose spawn is the text ("Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers' Manuals"), man and text join (I've hit a wall on this metaphor, not knowing what results in this except bliss).

I do miss feeling the paper in the morning. I've been picking up the Daily Texan recently, for bus rides. It has a very unsatisfactory lightness, but the pages are still nice. Having free online access is nice, but the ritual of picking the paper off the doorstep and putting it down on the table in front of the bowl of cereal might be worth the subscription.

Audio Lawrence

2009-02-10T20:42:00.004-07:00

Attempting to diminish my never-to-be-exhausted store of free credits with audible.com, I've recently downloaded an excellent audiobook version of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. This may not have been the best choice for quickly getting rid of credits. I've finally made it nearly through part one of two, after over eight hours of listening. At least I'm getting my money's worth.

This particular version is read by Paul Slack, and I would certainly seek out other books read by him. He reads the narration brilliantly, making it easy to follow, and with a nicely Laurentian muscularity, almost spitting out the words intended to emphasize the primal forces of nature and the human body that shape events in the story. And he differentiates the characters' voices very well and effortlessly renders the regional accents.

Since I haven't had many other experiences with Lawrence, I'm trying to listen for what characterizes his writing as "modernist." He is clearly not as experimental with narrative or language as Joyce or Woolf. The story and setting seem to be pure Hardy. But there is a very careful attention to characters' psychology (and unconscious) that you only see taking form but not being fully realized in Hardy. Here it is fully realized, to say the least. Clearly there is the influence of Freud, particularly in the relationships between mother and sons. At times I feel a little uncomfortably transported back into my 18-year-old psyche as I hear about Paul Morel's awkward passion around Miriam. Lawrence's memory of what it is like to be a teenage boy is impressive, and he expresses those mental sensations brilliantly.

The mother also strikes me as a very strong character. The book really seems to be her story, and Lawrence presents it as such, at least at times. After all, the sons are really extensions of her, fulfillments (or not) of the ambitions she once held but had to put aside due to her disappointing marriage. Slack is best as a reader of the audiobook when he is spitting out Mrs. Morel's contempt for her husband or expressing it with barely contained restraint for William's fiance. The passion in these instances suggests very forcefully that Lawrence must have admired or at least been fascinated by this character.

Blindness, lack, deprivation, radio

2008-05-25T10:10:00.003-06:00

Anyone interested in radio drama and other appearances of literature on radio must be at least a little resistant of the idea that radio is most noteworthy for what it withholds. This idea seems to come, on the one hand, from a retrospective comparison with younger media like television and film (in comparison with which, radio seems deprived of one half of the natural package of sound and sight) and, on the other, from the comparison with print, which has a visual bias (in McLuhan's view) that radio dispenses with. We also have the comparison to the stage, which results in the view of radio plays being performed before a "blind" audience.

People counter this idea in a few ways. One is to argue that the medium is not blind; listeners' imaginations are filled with profusions, abundances (even, perhaps, excesses) of visual information inspired by what they hear. Another is to contend that the lack of vision creates its own excess; without the distraction of the written word observed by the eye or without the vision of actors on the stage, the pure beauty and connotative force of words can shine through. A third response is that, yes, there is a certain deprivation inherent in radio drama and related genres; this, however, is a merit of the medium. Unlike the second response, this third line of argument does not necessarily see other positive features emerging from the lack (as in the second response's contention that the sound of words emerges from the lack of sight). Rather, the very lack itself is the focus, the feature that leads to radio's particular force.

It is this third argument that I am interested in now, and it is one that Porter Abbott made recently at the narrative conference in Austin. His argument, briefly, is that the best radio drama succeeds in frustrating listeners' desire to visualize scenes that are presented mimetically. The listener cannot see what is happening, tries to fill this gap imaginatively, but will ultimately be frustrated.

In a future post, very soon, I will attempt to connect this to my thoughts about Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett and their work for radio, which often seems to thrive on this lack. One thing I wonder is how much we can say that this lack is real (many would make the first rebuttal that I cite above--that actually radio is not blind), and how much we should look at an alternative: that the idea of radio's deprivations is what is most important when looking at authors who write for the medium. That is, one key to interpreting their radio writing may be to look at how their notion of what radio withholds functions in their approaches to the medium. In Beckett's writing for radio, the lack of sight is often thematically central. Also in Thomas's writings about Wales--the place is slippery, hard to pin down, hard to visualize. And I would argue that both writers see this lack in something of the way that I have represented the third response above: the lack is radio's greatest merit in allowing writers to address subject matters that are difficult to treat if met head on. Wales, in Thomas's writing, is a non-place that can suddenly be approached as a place in this non-visual medium where the place simultaneously recedes and shows forth in extreme vividness. Similarly Beckett with Foxrock or with the text in Embers or the body in Rough for Radio II.

The Halls of Congress

2008-05-15T16:15:00.002-06:00

Just read another entry in the Barnouw book, Radio Drama in Action, which I haven't looked into for a while. This entry was a broadcast of a program called The Halls of Congress, which presented excerpts from congressional debates. Barnouw's introduction remarks that the producer of another prospective program with a similar theme had failed in his attempts to broadcast actual recordings of congressional debates. Members of congress had objected to this proposal on various grounds, including their stated objection to being taken out of context (if radio were to broadcast parts but not all of speeches) and to having their privacy violated (if microphones picked up things that they said in confidence while waiting their turn to speak on the floor). Due to such objections, The Halls of Congress used actors to reenact speeches taken from the Congressional Record. Seems a little old fashioned until you consider the present Supreme Court's refusal to allow sound or image recording.

I'm reminded of Ian Rodger's discussion (in Radio Drama) of the cooperation that blossomed between the BBC's drama and features divisions in the days before easily portable tape-recording equipment. When compiling documentary features based on interviews taken in the field, producers had to use a two-part process involving transcription of interviews, followed by in-studio reenactments by actors. Rodger makes it sound as if the limitation that initiated this process actually ended up providing a great benefit in many ways. The actors, writers, and producers all worked closely together, with the drama-minded folks helping the features staff inject dramatic excitement to the productions. And, of course, the features producers, who were experimenting with how to turn compilations of interviews into something with dramatic interest, were in many ways a step ahead of the drama department in figuring out how to use radio for dramatic purposes.

I bet that programs like The Halls of Congress and the British pre-tape-recording features were more exciting and entertaining than what we have today as a result of tape (and now digital) recording. I think of Nina Totenberg's fine recaps of Supreme Court arguments--she takes the accurately reported words of the justices but condenses and synthesizes their speeches into something that works as a coherent whole. It seems that these earlier dramatized documentaries probably worked similarly.

You can also see in The Halls of Congress an awareness of the need of helping the listener out when translating the transcript of the Congressional Record into a dramatized radio program. There are elements like "voices" that rise up when a break in the transcript (what would be ellipses in print) is introduced. And the narrator is careful to introduce each speaker when he (no women in these 1945 congressional debates) begins to speak, even if he has spoken several times before.

"Novelization" and "radio literature"?

2008-05-06T13:48:00.004-06:00

In the introduction to The Dialogic Imagination, a collection of four essays about the novel by Bakhtin, editor Michael Holquist discusses the term "novelization":

"[N]ovel" is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system. Literary systems are comprised of canons, and 'novelization' is fundamentally anticanonical. It will not permit generic monologue. Always it will insist on the dialogue between what a given system will admit as literature and those texts that are otherwise excluded from such a definition of literature. What is more conventionally thought of as the novel is simply the most complex and distilled expression of this impulse. (xxxi)

As Holquist discusses, the novel is not a convention that can be characterized as we would characterize a sonnet, for example: 14 lines with a rhyme scheme expressing the deeply held (often romantic) feelings of an individual speaker. Unlike sonnet, epic, lyric, tragedy, etc., the novel is characterized rather by its incorporation of other literary modes (it can include the dramatic, the epic, and the lyric in a single work) and its refusal to submit to any boundaries. The novel, therefore, presents a "dialogue" among literary "systems."

Novelization, crucially, exposes the conventions that uphold inclusions (what is "admit[ted] as literature") and exclusions. The arbitrary nature of literary forms is thus revealed by the novel.

As I was reading this description of the novel, it felt to me somehow similar to my thoughts about electronic media and their interactions with literature (through adaptations among media and references within one artistic medium to another). Many accounts of these new media--and of the art works and art forms that they make possible--try to establish the legitimacy of their subject matter by claiming that a radio play, for example, or a film is unique and distinct from previous forms. With radio plays, people (like Everett Frost, in the article I'm now reading--"Mediated Drama, Dramatized Media") comment on what radio drama can do that no other art form can do (Frost references the subjective confusion expressed by Kopit's Wings). Attempts are made to form a "canon" of radio plays, which are demonstrably distinct from stage plays.

Like Frost and his ilk, I have been trying to come to some understanding about what is unique about radio plays, what can be said to be their character. I have been going about this, paradoxically, by thinking about the various other genres that influence and constitute the radio play--poetry, stage plays, prose fiction. Until today I have seen radio plays both as unique and as hybrids of all these constituent forms.

But it might be that what is most significant about radio plays is not a distinct character. Rather, the complete opposite may be true: perhaps radio plays (and many other art forms expressed through new(ish) media) are most significant as hybrids and collages of other art forms. They are not unique forms, then, but rather occasions for gathering the other various literary forms together. And perhaps radio plays function something like the Bakhtinian novel: they reflect on and reveal something about other literary genres.

I'm not sure yet how this relationship between radio drama and literature works. But to suggest that there is a significant relationship, akin to the process of "novelization," would fit with claims that I have started to formulate about the role of radio drama in the work of authors. Radio drama, I want to say, acts as a space of exploration for writers whose primary work is in different genres. Dylan Thomas, whose "serious" work is poetry, or Samuel Beckett, whose efforts are mainly directed to the stage and to his prose fiction, use radio drama as a venue for exploring the meaning of literature as such (or of various subdivisions of literature). And perhaps they use radio in this way not simply because it is something separate from their primary literary work but rather because radio drama actually is formally suited to such explorations.

_Five in the Morning_ by Rotozaza

2008-04-27T08:27:00.003-06:00

I went this past Friday night to the Salvage Vanguard Theater to see Five in the Morning, a play by the London-based company Rotozaza. The performance was part of the fourth annual Fuse Box Festival in Austin.

Three actors (two women and a man) in bathing suits follow commands given by unseen actors (three different voices, distinct female voices for each female actor, and a male voice commanding the male actor). These commanding voices are amplified, and I suspect that they're pre-recorded. The play seems deliberately to make the audience wonder about this, however. At first the actors pause awkwardly and look confused after the commands are given, as if they have no previous knowledge of what commands they will receive. The impression the actors seem to be aiming for is of regular people thrust into this situation of being compelled to do something against their will (or at least something they are not prepared for). They are asked to do things like assume a static position that reveals "everything about you" (I'm [mis]quoting from memory); or the man and one of the women are asked to figure out how he can take her into his arms and hold her as if she is a ball. It could be very interesting if the show were to change these opening moments for each performance (I say opening moments because later it becomes clear that at least some sections of the show must be rehearsed). But the actors seem a little too studied in their hesitations and embarrassment on hearing certain commands. They are acting as if they are not acting.

A certain amount of awkwardness, then, is part of the act. And this makes it a challenge to evaluate the actors. At first I thought they were not very good--an amateur improv team, I found myself thinking, could do this stuff better than these folks. But one of the effects of the play is an uneasiness with what is going on. There is a clever sequence in which the actors are asked to form a human tower, which works out fine in the first instance when the man and the larger woman are on the bottom, supporting the small actress on top. But the voices then reposition the people so that the small woman is to be on the bottom of a vertical tower (so that the two other actors would need to be on top of her). The small actress's arms shake and become red from the effort of supporting the man (the taller actress never completely mounts the top of this unsteady tower). The actor's body seems to be under some genuine strain, and the audience must become involved at this moment, hoping the actress does not get hurt, even if if knows by this point that the cast has done these moves before.

Another impressive, somewhat earlier, moment is responsible for the audience's awareness of the pre-meditation of this all. The male and one of the female actors fight over a towel while the other female actor does increasingly complex movements involving touching her hand to her knee, chin, shoulder, etc. The commands become successively faster, with less and less time between command and compliance, until voice and corresponding action are nearly simultaneous. The timing is impressive, and the effect is particularly striking since the play has gradually led up to this convergence, earlier making you wonder if the actors know what is coming. When finally actor and voice match up, there is a slight surprise in finding out that the actor can now anticipate what is to be said.

It is an interesting play. The actors were not particularly talented, I thought (the tall woman was probably the best, especially in a scene where she starts walking toward the audience, her voice gradually taking over for the amplified voice that has been feeding her her lines, and challenges the audience by staring straight at them and questioning their role in all of this; the man was probably the weakest, not succeeding very well in a moment when he is supposed to crack under the pressure of following the voice's every command). But the concept was smart, and the various scenes--separated by darkness and a very loud sound of rushing water that sounds as if a microphone had been placed at the bottom of a waterfall--fit together nicely into a whole. The ideas of vulnerable actors, disembodied voices issuing commands, and disconnected scenes taking place in a vaguely distopian post-modern setting (the characters here are in "Aquaworld") are not new, but the young company pulled them off with enthusiastic flair.

Yesterday an Incident Occurred

2007-11-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Producers and other professionals at the BBC used to talk informally about the "play to Hoover to" and the "play to clear lunch to." The idea was that the former's quality was so low that it didn't matter much if one heard all (or any) of it. The latter encompassed most of the higher-quality programming, but even this better stuff did not require a great deal of attention; clearing the dishes from lunch still involves some distracting clatter and a partial removal of one's mind from the play. It seems that all too infrequently did a play rise to the level of the play to simply sit down and listen to.

As I listen to more plays, I am developing my own critical vocabulary based on the hoover/dishes distinction. I have plays to mow the lawn to (with a manual push mower--not as loud as power mowers, so a basic farce or thriller play can withstand the noise), plays to rake leaves to, plays to do dishes to, and plays to hand or fold laundry to. Beckett, Dylan Thomas, and the Welles/Mercury/Campbell group are the only writers or producers of radio drama who have led me to sit down and listen without performing any accompanying housework. And even Beckett sometimes only rises to the level of the play to sift compost to (the most meditative and least distracting of all household chores or yard work.

In a way, I do not think that my tendency to form these categories (or, rather, to use radio drama thusly as aural accompaniment to other, more primary tasks) fairly denigrates the art form. If one can justify radio's blindness in artistic terms and argue successfully that its lack of visuals is not an aesthetic shortcoming, it is also true that this blindness encourages listeners to fill their visual field with some other activity. These other activities are often distracting. But then other artistic experiences offer their own distractions. I vividly recall not only the August Wilson play Jitney but also the incessant chattering of the many old couples watching the play with me in the Alley Theatre; not only the film 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould but also the make-out session in a carport that followed it; not only the film Wolf (okay, maybe that one is less vivid) but also the feeling of sweating and thinking I would pass out from the heat in the balcony of the sold-out Kabuki theater (and also the news footage of O.J.'s Bronco that I had been watching earlier in the day in that month of my high-school graduation. The point is, there is no such thing as the artistic experience that occurs in an isolated, pressurized chamber--no more for the consumer of art than for the producer. Far from lessening my experience of Mercury's Les Miserable or Thomas's Under Milk Wood, the dishes I washed or the leaves I raked while listening to those plays has only bound the two activities in my mind, so that those tedious household chores now bear the imaginative echo of the more memorable aural accompaniment they once shared.

That said, I would like to maintain the rating system based on household chores, and I am currently trying to apply an evaluative chore to the play Yesterday An Incident Occurred by Mark Ravenhill, which is the latest BBC offering that I've heard. For me it is technically a play to do the dishes to, and I haven't quite finished the play yet because my dishes ran out. It may be a sign of the play's quality that I did not extend it by moving on to folding the clothes that have been on the drying rack for the last two weeks. That is, by the time I had finished the dishes and listened to 30-40 minutes of it, I didn't think too highly of Yesterday An Incident Occurred.

When the play began, it actually seemed that it might be one for sitting down in a darkened room. Ravenhill, the author of Shopping and Fucking, seemed to take this commission (for BBC 3's "Free Thinking festival of ideas in Liverpool") seriously, and he seemed to understand the demands of the medium very well. The play was recorded, in the words of the online description from the BBC's website, "in the atmospheric Victorian civil court of St Georges Hall," which not only provides a great acoustic effect through the echoes of an imperial-era courtroom but also lends symbolic weight to the play's topic: the overreaching of the British justice system in the wake of Al-qaeda terrorist attacks. The play is formally stylized in a very nice way, with an Orwellian or Kafkaesque panel of vague authority figures leading cheers of "hurrah," chanted and repeated by the large-sounding live audience, after each statement of patriotic bromides. These go from benign and easily supportable to increasingly sinister and indefensible as the play goes on amid growing hysteria over an allegorical assault upon an innocent civilian.

The problem with the play is that its plot and the ideas it develops cannot match Ravenhill's formal and technical proficiency. While I was expecting the "Free Thinking" festival to present challenging ideas, this play offered only a predictable warning against the overreactions of those who seek safety through punitive measures like branding of those who fail to report on neighbors suspected of terrorism. While such seemingly absurd legal measures may indeed have their real-life equivalents in American torture policies and in the very aggressive security measures being implemented in the UK, by now the sort of people who listen to programs like BBC 3's festival of ideas are well aware of these excesses. And in any event, the play provides little human interest to sustain the heavy-handed lesson it is presenting. The characters are deliberately flat (the "man in the yellow tie," who ostensibly emerges out of the live, studio audience and into the spotlight as the reluctant informer who then demands his own punishment; the innocent object of the evil terrorist, who hates everything that his victim stands for); and part of the point is certainly that the media in a "democratic society" creates such caricatures of good and evil. But pointing this out does not make a great play, and this one seems to have little else to offer.

It seems that the enduring problem that radio drama faces is not the fact that listeners are almost inevitably distracted during broadcasts. What I am more concerned about is the perceived need to center plays on politics and current events. This may be a natural tendency on a medium that has such a vital role in presenting news. And the play of ideas can certainly come off well--I enjoyed the L.A. production of Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma very much. But many of the BBC plays push a message without attending to the artistic merit of the story.

Seeing it Through

2007-11-17T11:06:00.001-07:00

I just finished listening to Seeing it Through by Neil Brand, which BBC Radio 3 broadcast a week or two ago. It was about Charles Masterman and the de facto ministry of information that he led for England during WWI. It is one of those history plays that is not terribly interesting formally--the play's function is more a presentation of ideas (the disingenuous justifications for England's entry into the war, which could have been avoided; the potential benefits and drawbacks of propaganda) than an artistically innovative drama.

I did admire the way in which intervals in the play were filled with Anglican hymns (wish I knew enough about those hymns to know which one(s)), equating the secular propaganda put out by Masterman and his stable of writers (Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and other very prominent Edwardian authors) with the spiritual justifications for Britain's imperialist adventures.

The play may also be interesting for me down the road because H.G. Wells plays a very prominent part as a somewhat reluctant participant in Masterman's initiative and a frequent sparring partner with him. Wells, by now a utopian thinker and eugenist, believes that a philosopher-king class should openly broadcast acknowledged propaganda in order to lead people towards the greater good.

German Theatre in America

2007-11-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

So I saw the Schimmelphennig play Start Up three days ago and should write something about it before it fades from my memory. Not that it wasn't memorable, but it was not the groundbreaking, eye-opening experience I was expecting from one of Europe's hottest young dramatists, as yet undiscovered in the States. The play actually felt dated more than anything--not necessarily in a bad way. My strongest impression was of 1970s American plays, especially Sam Shepard, with a hint of Mamet here and there in the form of phatic phrases traded between characters in a rhythmic, subtly musical way. I guess one could say that in this play, in which three Germans set out to bring German culture to Americans but end up falling under the spell of American culture and abandoning their plan, it is somewhat interesting that the successful German playwright is getting his idea of America from a now-historical American theatrical tradition. If aping Shepard, Mamet, and Death of a Salesman was a deliberate choice, it would go along with the play's theme of the stereotypes that we acquire from our mediated lives in which countries increasingly exist for us in their movie versions, or in the impression we get of them through the news.

We notice the presence of Sam Shepard in the journey-quest of a group of young people into the mythic but corrupted American West. The synopsis of the play on the troupe's Web site says that the three Germans (the couple Kati and Rob and their friend Micha) have landed in "Anytown, USA" after a long trip on their private bus. The anonymity of the place and of the fairly flat characters they meet (Ike, a mildly philosophical but ultimately business-minded property owner who rents them a storefront for their theater, and his daughter Liz, who has become intellectually and sexually liberated in college) rings of Shepard or Wallace Shawn. And Ike's promotion of entrepreneurship and of turning a profit as the greatest goods, with a sober recognition that many such ventures will fail, seems to channel Horatio Alger by way of Willy Loman and Glengarry Glen Ross.

The greatest updating of these perennial American themes comes with the show's gimmick, which is that the play about three Germans traveling around the country, trying to sell German theater to Americans, is being performed by a group of Germans (and two American actors, and two Austrian video artists) traveling around the country on a bus. The video footage that is projected on the screen at times during the play is constantly updated as the group travels around the country. Certain very Shepard-like monologues, often involving a fairly heavy-handed description of a dramatic and significant near-miss at a railroad crossing, are pieced together from fragments of the speeches that the actors recorded at humorous places visited along their tour (a minor-league baseball stadium, closed for the off-season, where the famished Rob futilely searches for an open concession stand; a tourist-trap wild-west village; a kitschy antique shop filled with American-flag festooned knick-knacks). I called this a gimmick, and it can appear to be merely an advantageous use of advances in computer technology--to the left of the stage was a table where three or four crew members sat before Apple lap tops, controlling the video and sound projection. But the role of media is an important and interesting element of the play. About midway through, Micha, who has been left at the storefront while the others search for food, suddenly stands before a podium with a microphone, addressing a lecture on German-American relations to the audience. It is full of iconic images of the invasion of Normandy, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Airlift, and prominent members of the George W. Bush administration. While these images chart the ebb and flow of friendliness and cooperation between the two countries over the past sixty years, they also illustrate the role of mediated images in forming our perception and knowledge of these two nations. The Americans' knowledge of Germany mostly comes through these history-book images (and a single German film, Das Boot), while the Germans' understanding of America comes mainly through western films and more recent media images (a news magazine photograph of Colon Powell holding up the infamous vial of radioactive material figures prominently in Micha's history slideshow, as he comments on the cooling of German-American relations after Germany's post-9/11 support of America's military action in Afghanistan).

This idea of media-produced caricatures of countries and cultures becomes focused on the business that the Germans wish to start. While his compatriots waver in their support of the theater venture, Micha remains firm, idealistically believing that an offer of true German culture (which, however, the play never defines or depicts) will be welcomed by the populace of this nameless American town. Ike, however, takes the position of market populism in insisting that the Germans provide a service defined by already existing demand--either a gas station, a hot dog stand, or a video store. Rob, whether because of hunger-induced weakness or the seductions of Ike's American-dream rhetoric, begins to welcome the video store idea, but even he is dismayed by the logical conclusion of Ike's demand-driven business plan, which it turns out will lead their video store to provide a predominantly erotic selection, given the rental history of another video store that once occupied the same storefront. This conclusion offers a pessimistic commentary on both the logic of free market capitalism and the potential for quality culture in Anytown, USA. Yet, the German actors end up riding off into the sunset, with Kati choosing to stay behind with Ike while Liz and Micha (after hooking up for comically acrobatic sex while they were alone in the storefront), along with Rob, journey off into the great American unknown, much as these actors are doing as they head off to El Paso and other points west on their way to Los Angeles.

Welles the Magician

2007-11-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

I have been listening again to War of the Worlds, since I'll be playing it for my students next Monday (in preparation for our dip into radio drama with Beckett's All That Fall a few weeks later). I have also started reading H.G. Wells' novel for the first time. It's interesting to notice how the novel deals with communications technology, with the telegraphs and news reports doing only a moderately good job of informing Londoners of the invasion taking place nearby; and Wells also seems to criticize the metropolis's short-sightedness in assuming that nothing beyond the city limits can possibly have much importance. Perhaps this is why Howard Koch (and Welles? I don't remember what his involvement was in planning the adaptation) chose to make this particular adaption centered on the medium of radio. In the radio play, the communications are instantaneous and far more effective. Yet, given the response of some of the listening public, perhaps Wells' original satire was just updated to a new technology.

I finished War while washing dishes and didn't have anything new downloaded to the iPod, so I started listening again to the 7-part Les Miserables by Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air. My God, that is good stuff. The sound effects, like a distant army advancing over a hill or a bomber plane coming through some far-off clouds, make the opening sequences incredibly dramatic--an exemplary use of sound. And Welles' voice as the narrator is virtually unrecognizable and pitch-perfect. A work of art.

American radio drama factories

2007-11-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

I am reading Ian Rodger's 1982 book Radio Drama (London: MacMillan), which is on loan from Stephen F. Austin University and due back shortly. Rodger was a writer and reviewer (for The Listener) of radio plays. His book begins with the usual lamentations over the lack of critical attention devoted to radio plays, despite their relatively large audience when compared to stage production. He provides an interesting, if fairly unoriginal, perspective on the effects of the mass audience on radio writing. Rodger contrasts pre-broadcasting literatures, such as the stage play and the novel, with broadcasting: the former, aimed at a limited audience, could presume that its readership or audience did not include certain sectors of society, such as servants and peasants, and that it could therefore make fun of such people, upon whom it did not depend for its commercial success. With radio, however, audiences broadened, and the writer was forced to engage in the much more difficult task of appealing across social classes. Generally Rodger seems to see this as a good development; he seems critical of the exclusionary literature of past ages. But there are interesting moment in which he indicates that the products of such new pressures must be artistically weakened.

One such moment, which may have some relevance for discussions of Orson Welles' radio work (given his self-promotion as the auteur versus his actual role as merely one of many collaborators working on his Mercury and Campbell broadcasts), concerns the effects of commercial sponsorship on American radio drama. Rodger quotes Eckhard Breitinger's industrially tinged description of American radio drama authorship: “Commercial sponsoring and commercial forms of production [...] implies an implementation of industrial modes of manufacturing scripts by using dialoguers and the almost mechanical assembling of individual scenes or parts of a programme by different hands into a ‘unified whole.” Rodger goes on to comment on Breitinger's assessment, continuing the industiral metaphor, “Such factory conditions obviously precluded the free expression of the individual artist and rarely encouraged work of intellectual integrity” (30).

That "intellectual integrity" is the highest aim of art is not a universally accepted proposition, and it may be a problematic one in radio art. As Michele Hilmes writes in Radio Voices, radio often projected false images of the individual artist, such as Welles, whose intellectual integrity purportedly created programs that, in fact, resulted from widespread collaboration. In discussing American radio drama, Rodger acknowledges the help that Welles had, referring to "Howard Koch's adapation of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells" (31), which Welles "produced." But elsewhere he upholds the concept of the individual artistic creator, singling out Archibald MacLeish for rare praise among American radio artists. It seems important that MacLeish is a poet, the model for the isolated, creative individual (Rodger quotes MacLeish's advocacy of poetic radio writing, "The eye is a realist [...] the ear is already half poet" [31]); and here he maintains MacLeish's status as sole originator of The Fall of the City by representing Irving Reis's role as merely a solicitor of the work: "Irving Reis initiated poetic drama on radio when he invited Archibald MacLeish to write The Fall of the City. I don't know if Reis's role was really this limited, but the extremely collaborative nature of radio production would make one suspect that MacLeish was only one piece of the creative puzzle.

This issue of the genesis of radio works seems to be an important one. Rodger elsewhere celebrates the "sense of community" that produces radio broadcasts, whereby "producers, actors, technicians and writers collaborate rather than compete. There is a swift and open exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect which is not common in the theatre or film and television studios" (4). But where is the line which, once crossed, signals the transition from product of happy collaboration to a precluding of "the free expression of the individual artist"? Rodger seems to place the line somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He justifies this nationalized evaluation of artistic integrity through the reasoning that America was even more diverse than England, requiring an extremely monotone drama that would not offend or confuse any listeners. This seems to make sense. And I don't know that I would argue against the harmful effects of sponsorship on artistic creation. Still, the concept of the individual artist seems to come under serious attack with the mass media, and I don't know that Rodger interrogates this concept fully enough.

Rodger does, however, have an interesting observation about the use of narrators in American radio drama. Staying on his theme of the ethnically diverse American audience, Rodger notes that such “random and disparate audiences required a genial interlocutor to lead them into the dramatized scenes" (30). Although he doesn't specifically mention Welles in connection to this narrating function, Welles seems to be one such "genial interlocutor," particularly given his interest in uniting listeners of different races and national origins under some idea of American (and more broadly defined Western) culture.

The Doctor's Dilemma, Part 2

2007-11-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

I finished listening to Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, which ended up being great fun (it started out that way as well). It seems that the play was conventionally staged and merely recorded for radio; either this, or the actors engaged in a moderate amount of action. The giveaway is a scene in which one of the doctors is asking the artist if the latter can repay money that the former has lent. The audience began laughing as the artist apparently searched futilely through his pockets for money (a very non radiogenic scene).

The plot of the satirical play concerns several doctors, each of whom seems to be more pompous and yet less medically apt than the last. They each have been knighted for supposedly groundbreaking scientific advances, all of which are clearly ineffective at best, and detrimental to patients' health at worst. They are good natured enough, however. The central character, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, has just been knighted for his advances in immunology, and the play introduces the other doctors who have come to congratulate him. As some of these well-wishers are departing, a woman comes in to plead with Ridgeon to help her tubercular husband Louis Dubedat. Ridgeon says he is full up with patients and cannot possibly take another, unless Mrs. Dubedat can convince him that her husband is worth saving. Mrs. Dubedat then shows Sir Colenso a drawing of herself that her husband has done, and whether he admires more its apparent artistic merit or its image of the beautiful young wife, Sir Colenso agrees that Louis is, indeed, worth saving. This is good news for the Dubedats but bad news for a doctor friend of Sir Colenso's, the single non-knighted visitor, who is a failure because he is too good and honest to join the medical swindle in which his colleagues have happily immersed themselves.

Sir Colenso's choice to save the genius artist due to his contribution to society seems sound, until we meet Louis. In fact, before an audience is introduced to him, we hear the doctors' relation of their first meeting with the young artist, who has stolen something or borrowed money from each during the course of their dinner. Louis, it turns out, is a scoundrel, though a clever and talented one. When he appears on stage, confronted by the doctors who have now gotten a good read of his character, his sophistry almost convinces us that the true artist is justified in whatever anti-social actions he undertakes. Almost. Indeed, the doctors, who are as likely to kill their patients as to save them, seem to be in no moral position to condemn Louis for profiting by trickery. Here seems to be the typical Shavian move (as far as I can gather it from having seen or heard only two plays), to force the audience to define their own version of morality in the midst of an apparent moral vacuum. To complicate this dilemma further, Sir Colenso has fallen in love with Mrs. Dubedat and decides that he will save his good doctor friend and pass the artist off to a colleague, whose quack cure will certainly kill Mr. Dubedat. In the end, Dubedat dies, but Mrs. Dubedat marries another man, and her late husband has the last laugh.

The play introduces an interesting mix of Victorian atmosphere (the old doctors are clearly the old Victorian guard, and the scene of Dubedat's "beautiful" death has a highly Victorian coloring) and modernist moral ambiguity.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this production worked very well on radio. The characters' personalities are revealed perfectly through their voices (although Mrs. Dubedat, whose lush voice at first provides a pleasant illustration of her sensuous beauty, becomes distractingly maudlin at times), and the mode of the play--a moral argument between conflicting perspectives--is well suited to radio's bent for controversy and debate.

Roland Schimmelpfennig

2007-11-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

A week and a day from now, I'll be going to see a play by Roland Schimmelpfennig at Vortex Theatre, here in Austin. The publicity from the theatre calls him "Germany's foremost contemporary playwright, and this interview on New York Theatre Wire concurs, calling him "one of the most prolific and heralded young dramatists in Europe." It also notes that he is relatively unknown in America, and indeed I had never heard of him.

The play, Start Up, seems to be at least partially about some venture to sell German culture to Americans, and the troupe performing the play is putting a metatheatrical spin on the work by performing it as part of an American tour through relative backwaters of American culture--i.e., they're not performing solely in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. So they (3 German actors and 2 American ones, an Austrian video artists, and a few assorted others) are bringing some German culture to uncultured Americans (hello, Austin). As they travel across the states, they are recording their trip and then working the recordings into the plays so that the performance is different each time.

The interview linked to above has an interesting discussion of another of Schimmelpfenig's plays, Die Frau von Frueher (The Woman Before), which was playing in New York at the time the interview was published. The interviewer calls the play very cinematic in its transitions between locations and times. Schimmelpfennig mentions that in its European productions voiceovers or signs signaled the changes in time, but that was not done in New York, making it more cinematic. There are also periodic blackouts of the stage, with single characters remaining in the foreground to narrate, an effect that Schimmelpfennig compares to a Greek chorus.

Well, we will see next week how Start Up is. This performance seems as if it will be a unique experience in any event.

The Doctor's Dilemma

2007-11-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

A poem I read today in The Best American Poetry 1992, and not related at all to the subject of this post, G.B. Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, the audio version of which I've been listening to this evening. It was produced by L.A. Theatre Works, and the first half, at least, is excellent. I think I read somewhere (maybe in one of the essays in Peter Lewis' Radio Drama collection) that Shaw is supposed to be one of the authors whose plays transfer well to radio. Not having seen this play before (I think, in fact, that Major Barbara is the only Shaw play that I've seen), I don't know if this production altered the text at all for radio, but so far there doesn't seem to be much action that has needed to be described through dialogue. Instead, it seems almost completely to rely on dialogue.

I find myself wondering if I'm missing much by listening to and not seeing the play. Thinking of The Seagull, which I saw last Monday, Chekhov's plays could work fairly well on radio in the sense that the dialogue alone can carry the play. Yet so much of Chekhov's genius is in his choreography--the way in which he balances the different groupings of characters on the stage. The movement of bodies is crucial to the play's effect, if it is staged effectively. Shaw, in this play at least, does not seem to have the same stage dynamics that Chekhov does. Whereas Chekhov creates architectonic relationships among different ages, genders, occupations, social classes, etc., Shaw seems more interested in having his characters serve as mouthpieces for a variety of comic opinions. Certainly there seems to be a variety of status (the many successful doctors versus the poor doctor who is a failure because he is the only one to adhere to his principles) and of age, but these distinctions come across through the variety of voices of the radio actors. I suppose the same could be done with Chekhov--different vocal colors to express the different characters' qualities. That is to say, I suppose that most transformations between media will find compensations for the loss of the source medium's capabilities.

The Last Day of the War

2007-11-03T17:27:00.001-06:00

I've been making my way through Erik Barnouw's collection of radio plays titled Radio Drama in Action (1945). The latest one that I've read is "The Last Day of the War" by Sergeant Arthur Laurents. Like many of the plays in this collection, it reads like wartime propaganda, although aside from one or two complaints about fascists who want to ruin the American way of life, this one is short on pro-war content, limiting itself to an informative analysis of the challenges facing soldiers who are returning home.

The play focuses on one soldier named Mickey Ryan who has been seriously wounded by shrapnel from a shell that exploded near him. The play's title refers, in one sense to the day on which Mickey's second leg is amputated, but in another to the paradoxical fact that Mickey's real battle is only beginning once the war is over. To make this paradox clear, the play is bracketed by two different but equally vivid sounds, the first representing battlefield combat
(Mickey's injury is signaled by "The long shrill scream of a shell [which] explodes violently on mike"). The play ends with a different sound, that of Mickey slowly mounting three steps with the aid of crutches and his new wooden legs. The end seems very moving and highly effective--clearly this is among the higher quality pieces of wartime propaganda.

One way in which the play clearly takes advantage of its medium is through a representation of Mickey's body that creates a distinct sense of its presence and size. Mickey is described as large: "big, lazy shoulders, strong thighs" (93), and this rough sketch of his bulk is soon expressed far more precisely: "He's 5 feet 11. He weighs 178 pounds and that ain't hay to the pill rollers who carry him on a litter 650 yards to the batallion aid station" (94). This sketch, with its numerically exact "178 pounds," presents an interesting combination of abstract measurement and palpable weight, as we sympathize with the burden of these "pill rollers." The measurements and descriptions of his size, of course, set up the later description of his diminishment upon double amputation. After the first leg is amputated, the narrator refers to Mickey's remaining leg as "that limb which still makes Mickey Ryan 5 feet 11" (97). The remaining leg contracts gangrene, however, and "Mickey Ryan didn't stand 5 feet 11 any more" (102).

As the play moves toward its concluding message of the importance of Mickey's inner transformation, it deemphasizes physical change in favor of a psychological focus. And in this focus the play takes advantage of its medium's ability to alter our perception of reality through speech. Immediately after the narrator's announcement that Mickey is not "5 feet 11 any more," Mickey's wife enters the hospital for her first visit since his injury. Following the narrator's physical description of her--"A little blonde kid dressed in woman's clothes, nervously twisting the very thin gold band on her third finger, left hand"--the woman introduces herself to a major, providing a concise drama of the inner turmoil surrounding her identity and her relationship to Mickey: "I'm Margie Ryan . . . Mrs. Ryan . . . Mickey Ryan's wife" (102). In radio, speech must indicate identity (in the absence of visual clues that would help the audience of a stage play or film). Early in the play, the narrator, like the God of Genesis, hands off the task of naming to one of his creations:

Voice.

Aidman.

Now, however, Mrs. Ryan names herself, an important development toward the characters' autonomy as Mickey moves toward life outside of the military hospital.

The drama's end play's with the notion of manipulating the meaning of physical reality through words. As he tries to coax Mickey to walk up the three stairs on his wooden legs, the Major turns the challenge into a metaphor for the new, psychological battle that will replace Mickey's earlier physical combat:

Major.

Mickey.

Major.

Mickey.

Major.

But when Mrs. Ryan suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, Mickey loses heart, taking a more cynical view of the Major's analogy as "Just a big spiel to get me to walk up three steps" (110). In the end, however, Mickey makes the three steps up, with the last sound we hear from him being the sound of his prosthetic foot on the top stair. And Mrs. Ryan's reaction--"Mickey . . . Oh, Mickey!" (110) tells us that he has accepted the challenge of this new struggle. It is a dramatic ending, even when read and not heard in its intended medium.

Radio texts, wireless words, and more

2007-11-02T22:16:00.000-06:00

This blog will contain my thoughts on radio drama, literature written for or broadcast on radio, and other intersections between radio and literature. I invite anyone with similar interests on these subjects to add your own comments.