This episode features Kate, Kandice, and Michelle's efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also their own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and their interactions with the surviving archival materials. This led them to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.

With additional archival materials available in a supplementary slideshow, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.

This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producers:

Kate Moffatt is a recent graduate of the MA program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research interests lie primarily with women’s pedestrianism in the Romantic period and women’s book history, and she brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.

Michelle Levy is Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University. She brings a strong theoretical background in literary and sound studies to the SpokenWeb Project, and extensive expertise in data architecture and management that contributes to our creation of metadata standards necessary for the aggregation of diverse corpora of recorded literary readings.

Kandice Sharren is a recent graduate of the PhD program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.

Featured Guests:

Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis is retired from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where she was the Executive Director of the Vancouver campus. During her thirty-four years there she served in many capacities, notably founding the Writing and Publishing Program and co-founding the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. The constant theme in her career has been her interest in literature and communication, her belief in lifelong learning, and the responsibility for educators in the support of civil society. In her retirement to private life she enjoys singing in the Performing Arts Lodge (PAL) Chorus, sharing the lives of family and friends, and pursuing the occasional  speaking engagement or program development project.

Carolyn Tate worked as the Director of Information for Continuing Studies at SFU from 1980 to 1982, and as Director of the Liberal Studies program in Continuing Studies at SFU from 1982 to 1987. She has a BA from UBC, an MA from McGill University, an unfinished PhD from University College, University of London, and an LL.B (J.D.) from Queen's University. She is now retired from law and resides in Toronto, Ontario, but takes trips to various continents and has fun with her grandchildren.

Citations:

Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.

Gallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.

vladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.

“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021.  https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295. 

“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021.  https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.

Errata:

We refer to the “Liberal Studies Department” in the episode; Liberal Studies was actually a program that was part of Continuing Studies.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Judith Burr

AUDIO SOURCES

Audio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.

Audio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016),  https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.

RESOURCES

Gibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019,  http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.

Moss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.

Perry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019. 

----- Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.

In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.

jamilah and Jessica share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

Katherine McLeod (PhD) researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb, produces ShortCuts, a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, and curates the site Where Poets Read. She is the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library. Find her at @kathmcleod. 

Featured Guests:

jamilah malika (SAIC, MFA '19) is an artist and writer contemplating refusal, repetition, dedication and intimacy. sometimes this means text off page, sound, video, textile, photocopies and/or objects at times combined as installation. whether embroidering yaki ponytail hair on burlap, mounting paper sculpture or shaking up spaces with sound, she centres Black womanhood with care. her work has played or shown from Berlin to LA and across Canada including Contemporary Field Gallery (Vancouver,) Circuit Gallery (Toronto) and Artscape (Peterborough).

Jessica Karuhanga is a Canadian Ugandan-British artist whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, writing, drawing and performance. Through her practice she explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity – illness, rage, grief, desire and longing within the context of Black embodiment. She has presented her work at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto (2020), The Bentway, Toronto (2019), Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Onsite Gallery, Toronto (2018), Museum London, London (2018), and Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017). Her writing has been published by C Magazine, BlackFlash, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling. She has been featured in AGO’s Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, filthy dreams, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art. She earned her BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese and Québécois ancestries. Her writing is forthcoming in Carnation, and has previously appeared in GUTS , Ossa , and Shameless Magazine. Faith is a proud alum of Our Bodies, Our Stories, a creative collective for queer, trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour artists mentored by Kama La Mackerel, and she recently completed the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2020 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze. She is studying for her Hons. B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Find her @paretriarchy and faithpare.com.

*

SpokenWeb’s 2020-2021 Artist-Curator Residency Award was adjudicated by Dr. Kristin Moriah (Queen’s University) and Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Mother Tongue Media). Find out out more about the residency, the projects, and the process here: https://spokenweb.ca/announcing-the-spokenweb-artist-curator-in-residence-fellows-fall-2020-winter-2021/

Listen to the full audio of Jessica’s composition ALL OF ME https://soundcloud.com/kichoncho/all-of-me

Read jamilah’s article “Listening Feels” in Canadian Art: Frequencies (Spring 2021).

*

Music used in episode:

Original SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot

Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642

Links to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:

Lillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/

Octavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred

Michelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome):https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/

Nikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals:https://www.alexispauline.com/

Jessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel

“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE

Shani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts

Soledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/

Rashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/

Jeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/

Rucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland

AUDIO SOURCES

Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Phyllis Webb’s reading in Montreal on November 18, 1966. The entire recording can be accessed here. 

RESOURCES

Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018. 

McGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/. 

McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.

---. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.

Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965. 

Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.

This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio. 

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producers:

Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where her research project, “Towards an Ethics of Listening in Literary Study” intersects the fields of Oral History and Literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices. She co-directs the audio/multimedia archives of Fred Wah, and has done significant cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Roy Kiyooka. Her critical work appears in the recent publications Canlit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka (Guernica Editions, 2020). With Karis Shearer, she co-edited Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020).

Michael O’Driscoll is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts, and Special Advisor to the Provost as Convenor for Congress 2021 at the University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and his expertise in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on poetry and poetics as a form of material culture studies. His interests in material culture range from sound studies, archive theory, radical poetics, and technologies of writing to the energy humanities and intermedia studies. He is a Governing Board Member and a member of the UAlberta research team for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.

Interviewees:

Mathieu Aubin is a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where he is co-leading the Oral Literary History project. His work currently focuses on the role of literary events in advancing LGBTQ2+ social justice initiatives in Canada since the second half of the twentieth century. He has published on queerness and feminism in Vancouver’s small presses and literary magazines in Canadian Literature.

Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations. Clint is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program, Department of English, Simon Fraser University and works on psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, Indigenous literature, and digital culture. His most recent book is Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture, (Bloomsbury, 2018), and he is co-editing, with Paul Kingsbury, Lacan and the Environment forthcoming in 2021 from Palgrave. (Photo by Chris Brayshaw)

Treena Chambers is a Métis scholar who has worked as a bookseller, union organizer, researcher, and writer. She has a BA from SFU in International Studies and is currently a Masters' student in the SFU School of Public Policy. She brings her experience as a mature student and her Métis background into her studies of decolonization and identity. Her 2018 essay "Hair Raizing" was shortlisted by the Indigenous Voices Awards, as well her 2020 work "Forest Fires and Falling Stars." She has also contributed work to the book "unsettling EDUCATIONAL MODERNISM".

T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) and other minoritized digital media and performance practices. This work includes a monograph, entitled Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, nearing completion. T.L. is also a performance artist, who appears in alter-ego form on cabaret stages and in video screens as Mrs Trixie Cane. 

Credits:

The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses

Take Me To the Cabaret by Billy MurrayOld phonograph “Cabaret”

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret

Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax

Blur the World by Tagirijus

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world

Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise

The following are spoken word performance clips

Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.

“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books. 

Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text, 

T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland

AUDIO SOURCES

Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967. 

Audio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.

Audio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin are from a conversation recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.

RESOURCES

Aubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.

@mathieujpaubin. “In today's listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work... eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980. 

Avison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982. 

Sarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.

Nickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.

Quebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records,  2006.

Part one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.

Episoder Producers:

This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.

Citations:

Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.

Gallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.

Gallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p. 

Gallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39.

Gallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96.

kyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.

Mavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Mavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Mackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces

vladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.

Simon Fraser University wishes to hear from any copyright owner, or their representative, who believes that this project has not properly attributed their work, has used it without authorization in violation of Canada's Copyright Act, or has released confidential information in violation of the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. 

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland

AUDIO SOURCE

Audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.

RESOURCES

Keenaghan, Eric. “Interchange – How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry.” Interchange, https://beta.prx.org/stories/355960.

Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/

Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/. 

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Elegy in Joy.” Waterlily Fire: Poems, 1935-1962. Macmillan, 1963.

---. “Käthe Kollwitz.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006. 

---. The Life of Poetry. Current Books, 1949.

---. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” [audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series]. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969

Music and Sound Effects

bay_area_bob. "Sound FX for a notification." Freesound.org, Nov 2020.

original music by Jason Camlot, 2019.

scissors audio (original by K. McLeod), 2020.

Together we listen back to select "Cylinder Talk" sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar - Literary Listening as Cultural Technique - the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producers:

Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb director) is Professor in the Department of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media (2019) and Language Acts (2007). He is also the author of four collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, and What the World Said.

Stacey Copeland  is a media producer and Communication Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She received her MA from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture program and a BA in Media Production from Ryerson University. She is currently the podcast project manager for The Spokenweb Podcast and the supervising producer of Amplify Podcast Network. website: http://staceycopeland.com/

Cylinder Talks Featured:

• Alexandra Sweny,  “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s Environments Series”
  • Sound Clips:  Original recordings of Montreal by Alexandra Sweny.
• Sara Adams,  “Henry Mayhew and Victorian London”
  • Sound Clips: “Victorian Street.” British Library, Sounds, Sound Effects. Collection: Period Backgrounds.  Editor, Benet Bergonzi.  Published, 1994.
• Aubrey Grant,  “Poe’s Impossible Sound”
  • Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.
• Andrew Whiteman,  “Bronze lance heads”
  • Sound Clips:
    • “Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)
    • “Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)
    • —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)
    • Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.
    • Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.

References:

• Eidsheim, Nina Sun.  The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.
• Feaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation.  Indiana University, 2007.
• Hoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.
• Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.
• Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.
• Peter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.
• Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.
• Picker, John.  Victorian Soundscapes.  Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.
• Robinson, Dylan.  Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
• Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.
• Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.  Fordham UP, 2015.
• Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.  New York University Press, 2016.
• Teibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.
• World Soundscape Project - Sonic Research Studio - Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.

Additional Sound Clips:

• Camlot, Jason.  Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.
• “A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.
• "Big Ben clock tower of Westminster - striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o'clock" (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.
• bpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.
• Humanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.
• “Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12”
• disc, 1916.
• New, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.
• sbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.
• Spliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.
• “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.
• “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.
• Udall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.
• Westerkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland

Resources

Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/

Robinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” [audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series]. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969

Find out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.