A Sense of Doubt blog post #3181 - New Yorker Hodge Podge - Dizziness, Audio Books, and Toni Morrison
I subscribed to the New Yorker to get this article on Critical Race Theory:
I subscribed at a discount, and I will probably unsubscribe at the end of December before I am charged an enormous amount for the next year. Sorry New Yorker. I have to cut costs.
And so, I am trying to get some value in by sharing article that are behind a pay wall (come at me, bro) before I unsubscribe.
Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery
Balance disorders like vertigo can be devastating for
patients—but they’re often invisible to the doctors who treat them.
By Shayla Love
October
10, 2023
I went for a jog along the East River, in Brooklyn. Everything seemed to be in the right place—clouds above me, wooden boardwalk below. Still, the 7 a.m. sunlight seemed brighter than usual, and the water rippled in a disjointed way, like a film reel missing a few frames. My head was heavy on my shoulders. Confusingly, it also felt as though it might float away.
Back in my apartment, I rolled out a yoga mat and stretched. When I tilted my head to touch my foot, the room began to rotate like a carrousel. I’d had dizzy episodes before, but never anything this intense. I lay down, but the spinning only sped up. I curled up and waited—prayed—for it to end. When it didn’t, I reached for my phone and called a friend who lived nearby.
To let my friend in, I had to crawl the length of my apartment. “Something is wrong,” I told her softly.
At the emergency room, I was helped into a wheelchair because I could barely stand. During the next hour, the E.R. staff ruled out anything life-threatening, like a stroke, yet they couldn’t say what was wrong. It was difficult to diagnose the cause of a dizzy spell, the doctors said, because dizziness is a sensation, not a disease. Many different conditions can produce it. One said that I probably had labyrinthitis, or inflammation of the inner ear, and typed it into my chart.
The swirling behind my forehead lasted all day and night. I couldn’t look at computer screens, so after a week and a half I took sick leave from my writing job.
I scheduled appointments with virtually every relevant specialist. An audiologist checked my hearing and an ear, nose, and throat doctor shined a light into my ears. Neurologists inspected the movement of my eyes. A physical therapist who specializes in balance issues asked me to close my eyes and stand on one foot. Simply visiting all these doctors was dizzying. As I crisscrossed the city, I had to focus on every footstep to keep from toppling over. Through it all, my tests were coming back normal. My hearing and sight were fine; an MRI was clear.
During one appointment, my neurologist’s questions began to veer off the medical path. Did I get car sick as a child? Did I enjoy roller coasters? What about boats? Had I made any big life changes recently? Finally, we seemed to be making progress: I hate roller coasters and have always been prone to car sickness, and my life had, in fact, changed dramatically of late. I had left a long-term relationship and, for the first time in ten years, was living alone, untethered. I was going on dates, and thinking about leaving my job for good.
My neurologist seemed to be suggesting that dizziness was more than a physical phenomenon. To understand it, I would need to think about what was going on in my head and my life. Based on my answers, as well as my sensitivity to light, he at last gave me a diagnosis: vestibular migraine.
The symptoms of vestibular migraine—the world spinning like a globe, days of painless dizziness—seemed to match. But the diagnosis also frustrated me. Even as a health journalist, I had never heard of vestibular migraine. Its name suggested that an unwieldy neurological condition, migraines, could somehow get tangled up with the vestibular system, which helps shape our sense of balance.
The experience of dizziness has been documented for thousands of
years, and it’s one of the most common complaints that bring people to the
doctor. Even children can readily identify it: if you are old enough to play
Ring Around the Rosie, you know what it feels like. Yet dizziness, like pain,
isn’t something that can be seen directly in an X-ray or an MRI; it must be
described by the person who feels it, and terms like “vertigo” and
“light-headedness” never seem to capture the entire experience, or how profoundly
it can unsettle us. Even doctors break down dizzy spells into a staggering
number of mythic-sounding categories, many of which are poorly understood:
labyrinthitis, mal de débarquement, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo,
Ménière’s disease, vestibular neuritis, vestibular migraine. I left the
neurologist’s office with new words for my symptoms, but they didn’t adequately
clear up what was happening inside my body, or why. I had a pamphlet about
migraines in my bag, but I felt haunted by all the questions it didn’t answer.
Iexperienced my
first spell of dizziness about ten years ago, when I was a twenty-one-year-old
college student living on a farm in France. I went to a doctor in the Pyrenees,
and because my vocabulary didn’t include the words “dizzy” or “off-balance,” I waved
my hands a lot and repeated the phrase mal à la tête, or headache. I was confined to bed for
a week. Two years later, during my senior year of college, a thin film of
dizziness perturbed me for almost three months. Even in my native tongue, I
could only explain with metaphors. My dizziness made me feel that my skull was
a washing machine on a spin cycle, or that the ground was bulging upward under
my feet. Sometimes I felt that my body was subject to a different gravitational
force than those around me. For more than ten years, my medical tests were
inconclusive. My condition was unfindable, invisible.
Many dizzy people struggle to describe
their symptoms. “I hear ‘light-headed’ a lot,” Sue Whitney, a professor of
physical therapy at the University of Pittsburgh who helps people with
vestibular rehabilitation, told me. Her patients often say that they feel like
they’re floating—“or, ‘I’m off,’ or ‘my head feels funny.’ ” Soumit
Dasgupta, an audiovestibular doctor from the U.K., added “fuzzy-headed” and
“brain fog” to the list. A friend, who also received a vestibular-migraine
diagnosis, told me that his episodes begin when his eyes start to drift toward
the left. Living with dizziness, he said, is like trying to walk on a rocking
boat.
Biologically speaking, the vestibular
system is located in the inner ear, next to the spiral-shaped cavity known as
the cochlea. If the cochlea were a snail’s shell, the vestibular organs—the
saccule, the utricle, and three semicircular canals—would make up the snail’s
body. Together, they are known as the labyrinth because of their twisting
shape. The canals are positioned at roughly right angles to one another, and as
fluid moves through them, they can detect if the head is moving up and down,
side to side, or left to right. The saccule and utricle detect acceleration and
tilting.
Vestibular organs appeared early in
evolutionary history—they are key for survival—and most terrestrial animals
have them. One medical textbook describes how the vestibular system “plays a
subtle, almost occult role” in our sensory experience. Michael Goldberg, a
Columbia University neurologist, has said that the vestibular system helps our
bodies answer “two questions basic to the human condition: Where am I going?
Which way is up?” But there are many ways that the vestibular system can
malfunction.
You can trigger a dizzy spell by standing up too fast, skipping lunch, spinning in a circle, or drinking too much alcohol. Dizziness can be linked to one’s ears, brain, heart, or metabolic system. The treatments, likewise, are heterogeneous. In benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, crystals in the inner ear canals become loose; physical repositioning, known as maneuvers, can usually treat it. For conditions of chronic dizziness called persistent postural perceptual dizziness (P.P.P.D.), vestibular rehabilitation and S.S.R.I.s, which normally treat depression and anxiety, seem to work better. Vestibular migraine is treated through the use of migraine-specific supplements or medications—which wouldn’t be advised for someone with the buildup of inner-ear fluid known as Ménière’s disease.
The sensation we call dizziness is a sort
of general alarm system for the body—but just as a fire alarm can’t tell you
where a fire is burning (or whether someone walked through the emergency exit
by mistake), it doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s wrong. Dasgupta argued that
diagnosing the causes of dizziness requires a lost clinical art known as
anamnesis, or a holistic interview about the patient’s symptoms and their
surrounding context. “This is like detective work,” he said. Diego Kaski, who
treats vestibular patients as a consulting neurologist at the U.K.’s National
Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, tries to understand his patient’s
symptoms by imagining that they are happening to him. He often relies on
gestures: if people have vertigo, which includes the illusion of movement,
“they might spin their finger or their hand around,” Kaski told me. Others will
hold onto their heads or rock their upper bodies from side to side. Patient
accounts tend to be psychological as well as physical. “You lose control of
what your body is doing, and that can be quite a fearful experience,” Kaski
said. Many dizzy people wonder whether they are dying.
While visiting
doctor after doctor, I learned from a Google search about what sounded like a
dizziness utopia: the German Center for Vertigo and Balance Disorders, or
D.S.G.Z., in Munich. It was originally funded by the German federal government
and, since 2019, has operated as an interdisciplinary center of the University
Hospital of Munich.
In February, I travelled to Munich and
took a train to the hospital’s expansive medical campus, about half an hour
from the city center. To find the D.S.G.Z., I followed an elaborate system of
colored lines and numbers that were printed on the ground. They led me through
a maze of hallways and stairwells until I arrived at a door, which was adorned
with an image of a brain and the labyrinth of the inner ear. I found Andreas
Zwergal, a neurologist and the director of the D.S.G.Z., in his office. He wore
a white doctor’s coat and had a thick head of brown hair, which bounced when he
got animated.
Zwergal did not set out to become a
dizziness doctor, but he has had a personal connection to the condition for
much of his life. His father had a dizziness episode in his late fifties and
had to retire early from his high-school teaching position. More recently,
Zwergal’s wife woke up dizzy one morning; he was the first doctor to examine
her. He concluded that she was experiencing a vestibular migraine, like me.
I pulled out my notebook to show Zwergal a
list of the dozen conditions that my dizziness has been attributed to over the
years, from labyrinthitis to low blood pressure. He seemed unsurprised. “People
do have these long trajectories and patient histories,” he said, leaning back
in his chair. With a gentle tone that softened his German lilt, he added,
“Hopefully, you’ve survived that psychologically normal, but many patients get
depressed or frustrated.”
To explain the differences between
diagnoses, Zwergal imitated their manifestations. Some vestibular disorders,
like B.P.P.V., affect a person’s balance and walk; he staggered from foot to
foot, swinging his arms and tilting to one side. For others, like P.P.P.D. or
Ménière’s, the dizziness is constrained to the head, and to one’s perception;
he demonstrated by grabbing one temple and swirling his eyes around in their
sockets. He did all this without a trace of mocking or humor. Chronic dizziness
is more serious than most people can imagine, he said. Half of patients have so
much difficulty that they take part-time jobs or stop working altogether. “If
people had to rate the severity of impairment of benign paroxysmal positional
vertigo against a heart attack, most of them would say that vertigo was the
worst feeling of their life,” Zwergal said.
The D.S.G.Z. clinic is a circular loop of
examination rooms, each containing different tools to measure aspects of
dizziness. “We bring everything together in one place,” Zwergal told me. The
majority of patients come from more than two hundred miles away. On a tour, I
saw an older woman looking at black and white lines on a screen as they moved
horizontally. Another patient gazed at a spinning cylinder that a woman in
scrubs was holding. These tests looked at the eyes, in hopes that their
movements could be correlated with a particular disorder. Nearby, in the “gait
room,” a special carpet measured the precise weight, position, and speed of a
person’s steps.
One of the D.S.G.Z.’s aims is to create a
taxonomy of every kind of dizziness, which could bring about a new era of
diagnosis for patients like me. In recent years, specialists have started using
a standardized diagnostic process called TiTrATE, which
focusses on “timing, triggers, and targeted bedside eye examinations.” The
D.S.G.Z. has asked doctors around the world to send videos of their dizzy
patients to the center and has also created an online initiative, dizzynet, where clinicians and researchers can
collaborate. One day, doctors will be able to compare a patient’s eye
movements, walking patterns, and visual or auditory disturbances with all the
others in the database. A center scientist, Virginia Flanagin, is working with
colleagues on a method for measuring and analyzing eye movements; others are
studying posturography, or how people stand.
In the hallway, Zwergal pointed at a
reproduction of “Senecio,” a 1922 painting by Paul Klee. An abstracted face—a
little goofy, but also haunting—loomed in front of an orange background. The
figure’s red pupils were not in line with each other. This is a common
vestibular symptom known as skewed deviation, Zwergal explained. “The eyes are
the window to the brain,” he said.
On my second
day in Munich, down the hall from the clinic, I visited Doreen Huppert, one of
the few researchers who studies the history of dizziness. She had the look of
an art gallerist, with shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyeliner. She spread
a stack of papers across her desk: descriptions of dizziness she has found in
ancient texts from around the world, from Rome to China. In “The Yellow
Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine,” a Chinese text from around 300 B.C., a
man named Huang Di asks a doctor about height-induced vertigo. “Everything
spins around and I feel dizzy,” Huang Di says. “What kind of Qi causes this?’’
The word vertigo comes from the Latin verb vertere, which means to turn; another word, caligo, described dizziness that came from feelings
of exultation or losing one’s grip on reality. Dizziness was understood as an
emotional state as well as a physical one: when Vespasian assumed the role of
Roman emperor, after Nero’s suicide, he reportedly felt “an earthquake” in his
body and was seized by “a curious dizziness.” Claudius Galenus, a doctor who
treated Marcus Aurelius, named the labyrinth in the inner ear after the Cretan
myth, of the maze with a minotaur at its center.
When I told Huppert that I have vestibular
migraines, she shuffled through her papers to find a quotation from Aretaeus of
Cappadocia, who described a headache paired with erratic eye movements in
second-century Rome. “The face is distorted spasmodically, the eyes remain
glassy and rigid like horns or move to and fro forcedly, and the patient is
dizzy,” Aretaeus wrote. He noted that patients may be overcome with “taedium
vitae,” or a weariness of life. I felt a pang of solidarity with the ancient
Romans.
Medical anatomists studied semicircular
canals in the sixteenth century by cutting open cadavers and drawing their
insides, but doctors didn’t gain a deeper understanding of the vestibular
system until the nineteenth century. When a French scientist, Jean Pierre
Flourens, removed and destroyed the inner-ear canals of pigeons, he showed that
their heads started to move and the birds lost their balance.
There is still much left to discover.
Zwergal told me that the center was investigating a biological test for
vestibular migraine. Patients with traditional migraines often have elevated
levels of a protein called calcitonin-gene-related peptide, or C.G.R.P. Could
the same protein serve as a biomarker for vestibular migraine? When Zwergal
asked me whether I wanted to try the test, I readily agreed.
At the clinic, I asked Zwergal what he
needed from me—blood, urine, saliva? Actually, he explained, the protein was
found in one’s eyes. I sat in a hard chair and leaned my head back as a
researcher placed a thin plastic pipette up against my tear duct. I thought
about how, this past summer, I woke up each morning hoping that the dizziness
had faded, and often cried when I discovered that it had not.
“Look up to the sky,” the researcher said,
and collected seven microlitres of my tears.
Six years ago,
on his family’s land in Indiana, the author John Green cleared a trail straight
through the woods near his house. He dug up honeysuckle and ivy, laid down a
bed of wood chips, and lined the way with bricks. A week later, his balance
failed. “The world began to roll and spin,” he wrote in an essay about the
experience. “I was suddenly a very small boat in very high seas.” He was
diagnosed with labyrinthitis and needed six weeks to recover.
According to a video that Green made,
dizziness pushed him to reëxamine his life. He decided to stop pursuing
projects with only money in mind and focus on what he was passionate about.
“It’s tempting to make labyrinthitis a metaphor,” Green wrote. “I spent a month
drawing a straight line of a trail only to be told that life is never simple
paths—only dizzying labyrinths folding in on themselves.”
For a while, I found comfort in a
metaphor, too. When my dizziness began, my apartment was decorated with a
blue-and-white poster of a square labyrinth, by a graphic designer named Utsav
Verma. A caption explained the difference between a labyrinth, which follows a
single continuous path, and a maze, which contains many forks and dead ends. In
the E.R., when the doctor said “labyrinthitis,” Verma’s print flashed in my
mind.
Labyrinths, for me, became a symbol of
acceptance. I told myself that even when I felt lost in a dizzy spell, I was
slowly moving toward the center of something. Like Green, I reflected on what
mattered to me: I quit my job, moved into a new apartment, and tried to create
a more balanced work life. I visited labyrinths in New York and built one out
of bricks, at a community garden where I volunteer.
Then, in July, I visited a famous
twelfth-century labyrinth at the Notre-Dame de Chartres, in France. For nearly
an hour, I stood in line with tourists, who seemed less interested in walking
the winding path than in stopping to pray. Jostled by the crowd, feeling
anything but acceptance, I realized that I had reached the limits of my
metaphor. If there was any meaning in my experience, I wasn’t going to find it
here. And so I left.
Back in New York, I was walking through a
subway station, on my way to meet a friend for breakfast, when I checked my
phone and saw that Zwergal had e-mailed me. I opened his message while climbing
stairs, two at a time—an activity that, less than a year before, I would not
have dared to attempt. My tears, Zwergal wrote, contained unusually high levels
of C.G.R.P. I stopped on the stairs, taking in the news, and noticed some tears
forming in my eyes.
Once you’ve been dizzy for a while, it can
be hard to tell when you’re feeling better. As I got used to going about daily
activities, I sometimes asked myself: am I still dizzy, or not? What does a
non-dizzy state even feel like? Lately, I have come to think of dizziness
itself as an absence, not a presence. It is the opposite of balance—the foil to
knowing where your body is in space. Many things have to be working properly
for you to feel balanced; only one needs to malfunction to send your world spinning.
This is why I had so much trouble talking about my dizziness. It’s like trying
to describe a silence, or a shadow.
The discovery of a protein in my tears is
not life-changing, and potential treatments are some ways off. Even so,
Zwergal’s e-mail gave me the first piece of physical evidence I had ever had
for my dizziness. I started taking supplements that help with migraines.
Slowly, I began to feel better.
Recently, I woke up early and wondered
whether I was ready to go for a jog. I had been avoiding running since last
summer; it was too tightly linked to the day my dizziness set in. I tightened
my laces, walked outside, and, with trepidation, broke into a slow run. I
looked for any sign that something might be wrong, but the ground stayed
steady. I jogged my old route and caught my breath in a waterfront park. I
looked out at the river and saw sunlight shimmering on the surface. The water
was in motion, and I was still. I turned away from the shore and ran
home. ♦
An earlier
version of this article misstated the unit of measurement used in the
collection of tears.
Confessions of an Audiobook Addict
It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the
world with an author’s voice filling your ears.
October
11, 2023
Though audiobooks have their origins in recordings made for the blind as early as 1948 (Helen Keller called such books “the most valuable tool for the blind since the development of Braille”), they now form their own media ecosystem, with awards for production and performance (Audies), dedicated online forums for review and appraisal (AudioFile magazine), and publishers’ “beginner’s guides” to cultivating a relationship with audiobooks. The audiobook’s ascent into full-blown aesthetic autonomy came with the arrival of the iPod and its MP3 file format in 2001, and, as of 2023, more than half the U.S. population has listened to an audiobook (in Sweden, they outsell hardcovers). And, although it is tempting to evaluate audiobooks against the benchmark of physical books, they are really an entirely different thing. Of course, you’re not free to casually reread, paragraph reset, glance at the index, flip the book over to scan the insipid blurbs, or all the other desultory nonlinear things we do with books. And the tempo is fixed, though not entirely; you can set the speed at quarter increments, which gives a range of choices, from the soporific lowest setting, .25x, to the caffeinated upper end, at 2x. And audiobooks are not at all the same thing as a podcast. The latter are often messy, warts-and-all conversations, with all the “ums,” “likes,” laughs, and snorts left in, whereas an audiobook is a polished, edited, artificial production.
Exemplary of the audiobook as a production to be consumed the way you would a movie or a playlist are the hugely popular celebrity autobiographies read by the author. Springsteen’s memoir, “Born to Run,” kicks off with the tag riff of the titular tune, and then Bruce comes in reading like one of the gas-station sages in his songs. His occasional podcasting partner Barack Obama reads his own book “A Promised Land” (a version of the title of a Springsteen tune, incidentally) in those pleasantly elongated Chicago diphthongs that we know so well and that make him sound eternally sanguine. You could start a religion around David Lynch reading his book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.” Lynch’s voice oscillates between chipper Howdy Doody squareness and disarmingly strange metaphysical injunctions, as when he advises the listener to avoid the “Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity,” urging us instead to “dive within.” (also, each chapter begins with an ominous “Eraserhead”-ish whoosh). One from this genre that I particularly like is “I’m Keith Hernandez” read by Keith Hernandez, a member of the great Mets lineup that won the 1986 World Series. I hear Keith on cable TV two or three times a week during baseball season, so I get my fix in the offseason by listening to him tell stories about getting into scrapes with drunk umpires in the minor-leagues, on up to becoming an eleven-time gold-glove winner, and his appearances as himself on a couple episodes of “Seinfeld” (not to mention the Ph.D.-level insights about the science of hitting along the way).
Listening to authors from the more overtly literary end of the spectrum reading their own books can add new dimensions to the voice that we know on the page. Recently, during a long wait in the T.S.A. line at LaGuardia, I listened to the late David Foster Wallace read from his nonfiction collection “Consider the Lobster.” Wallace has a slightly breathy, adenoidal reading style, which brings out the humor in his pyrotechnic verbosity, and the title essay includes a truly ingenious audiobook device: each time Wallace moves to one of his knotty and protracted footnotes, a filter alters the sound E.Q. to delineate it from the main text. Nicholson Baker, reading as the fictional character Paul Chowder from his novel “The Anthologist,” sounds like a children’s-television-show host on PCP, saying things like “truth smells like Chinese food and sweat,” while Robert Caro’s memoir about the writing process, “Working,” pairs perfectly with his plangent New York City accent, in which every “time” is toyim, every “stand” is stayend, every “fast” is fayist.
Then there are the celebrity readers of other people’s books (like Irons reading “Lolita”). In some cases, a narrator’s past work may inflect the listening experience. The inspired choice of James Earl Jones reading the King James Bible, marvellous all around, also makes one think of Lord Vader imperiously commanding one to love thine enemy. The chilly delicacies of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as read by Diane Keaton make for a disorienting (and not totally unpleasant) collision of the apocalyptic Yeats poem with which the book begins (and which furnishes Didion’s title) and the memory of that post-tennis, shabby-chic Ralph Lauren look of vest, tie, and oversized pants from “Annie Hall.” Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles” led me to imagine a mashup of Jeff Spicoli and Harvey Milk birthing some kind of Dylan cosplay entity.
Professional voice actors tend toward
livelier performances, even sometimes adopting different timbres for different
characters. In one of the audiobooks of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,”
the male narrator jumps to quivering falsetto whenever the femme fatale Brigid
O’Shaughnessy speaks, while in Agatha Christie’s “The Mystery of the Blue Train,”
Hugh Fraser’s posh British third-person switches to something like a
central-casting captain of industry fused with a cowboy when the American
millionaire Rufus Van Aldin appears. (Americans in Christie are always
millionaires.)
In some cases, an audiobook narrator is so
striking and distinctive that their performance threatens to usurp the author
as the main attraction. My regular re-immersion in the prose of Henry James is
by this point so in admixture with the voice of Flo Gibson that I can’t read
“Daisy Miller,” “The Turn of the Screw,”
“The Ambassadors,” or “The Golden Bowl”
without hearing her crisp, musical, sapient voice, which makes me think of a
human owl. (Gibson, who died in 2011, had a career going back to the golden age
of radio and was once named “Best Female Narrator” by the Audio Publishers
Association.)
There is also a peculiar effect whereby
different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single
mongrel super-book. The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,”
Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style,”
and Nabokov’s epic “Ada” are all read by
Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary
enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention
is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction,
all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved
science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like
a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit
for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying
things like, “[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated
insectoid cartouche” (that’s from William Gibson’s “Zero History”). Dean
also reads “Arsenals of Folly: The Making of
the Nuclear Arms Race,” by Richard Rhodes, a great historian of
nuclear weaponry, a field that nicely dovetails with the ecological-disaster
settings of much of the science fiction.
And then there are the free-form
public-domain guerilla readers, D.I.Y. recordists tackling all of Poe or Plato,
all of “Moby-Dick,” the
journals of Lewis and Clark, or the history of Egypt, in eccentric feats of
endurance undertaken under wildly varying microphone quality and often
including unedited lip smacks and popped “P”s, and endearing attempts at
correct pronunciation of original languages. There’s a Wild West of audio lit
out there, all for free (via LibriVox).
And what of the many untapped hybrid
possibilities? How about audio-born works of prose with sound design? Or giving
the listener a menu of choices to select between different timbres or styles of
reading, or the option of adding abstract background texture (white-noise surf,
generator hum, light rain, urban din)? Or books that come with playlists to
pair with different sections at the reader’s discretion? (I am ignoring, for
the moment, how the licensing and I.P. legality is supposed to work with all this,
which would likely be beyond byzantine.) Such hybrid artifacts might well
involve new forms of comprehension, or maybe just something we don’t have a
name for yet. In the meantime, I will hope for the imminent arrival of
audiobooks that I wish existed but do not: Could we have Benedict Cumberbatch
reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach,”
Cate Blanchett reading Iris Murdoch’s “The Sovereignty of Good,”
or “Hamlet” read by Dave
Chappelle, please? ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/toni-morrison-the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are
The
Work You Do, the Person You Are
The pleasure of being necessary to my
parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome
mouths to feed.
May 29, 2017
All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.
Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.
In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run errands, and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet . . .
Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.
Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home. ♦
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- Days ago = 3045 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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