Story Recording - Premature Adventures in Dating

I told this story last Sunday at a house show. I squeezed my story in between sets by Von Strantz and Families, though there were also excellent songs coming out of Kevin Schlereth and Up the Chain. Check out all their music and also listen to this story for like five minutes. The sound quality is low, but the story quality is high.

Read to Each Other

I can be anything;
Take a look,
It's in a book:
A Reading Rainbow.
—"Reading Rainbow Theme," Tina Fabrique

It's almost Halloween again, when kids go trick-or-treating, adults get drunk and go to costume parties (I assume?), and my friends and I gather to read aloud to each other. I've already written here about this odd household Halloween tradition of mine, so I thought instead that I would take some time to write about my more general experience with the joys of reading aloud.

I have been read aloud to* for as long as I can remember. Like any two-year-old with an ounce of sense, I was obsessed with Goodnight Moon and insisted that it be read to me on an extremely regular basis. I also loved Are You My Mother? with a burning passion and, if what you needed was to make three- to six-year-old me laugh till I couldn't breathe, all you needed to do was read me the climax in which the baby bird realizes that a steam shovel is not its mother.** And when my kindergarten teacher introduced the class to The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, I thought it was the most amazing thing on God's green earth.

But more than these early favorites, what really ignited my love of reading aloud was my father's practice of reading to me and my sister every night before bed, starting when we were in 4th or 5th grade or so. He began with the Chronicles of Narnia and then moved on to A Wrinkle in Time and The Hobbit. When his mother expressed concern that in reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone his children might become enamored of witchcraft and sorcery, Dad reassured her by saying that he would read it (and, as it turned out, its sequels) to us to make sure we didn't get any weird ideas. Dad was fantastic at this stuff; he created different voices and personas for the characters, adopting as many distinct accents and tones of voice as he could to create the impression that we were really encountering the different people in the pages of the books he read to us. (Dad's interpretation of Hagrid is still my preferred one.)

In college, I learned that it was, in fact, possible for adults to read things to other adults for fun, when a friend invited a group of us over for a reading of Faust during my first year of school. We read by candle light and delighted in the darkness of the story and the oddity of what we were doing. That night was born both the idea for the Library of Babel podcast that I created and ran thoughout college (named for the first story I read, for which this blog was also eventually named) and for the annual Halloween story nights I would start a year or two later. (I wanted to do a radio show on the college radio station, but they didn't have room for me until much later in my colege career; the podcast was created in the meantime as a balm for my frustrated soul.)

The greatest joy of creating the podcast was in learning to inhabit different characters and animate a story on my own, overlaying the more basic pleasure of having created a thing for its own sake, that is, not an assignment or requirement but a personal project, an accomplishment. It was a good thing. I may return to it someday.

Me, reading to an audience at Story Lab

The most recent project in this vein has been even better, though, in its way: learning to tell others my own stories. In truth, it has been a joy just to know I have some exciting and fun things to say, which is still a fairly new thing. I have not sought out adventure in my life often, so it's taken a while to build up a collection of things to tell others about. But more than that, it has been a joy to share, to try and delight and entertain and inform others with the facts of my life.

This communal element, this sharing, is the best reason for people to read to each other. Sometimes we run out of things to say, out of reasons to be together, out of ways of connecting. I think reading aloud, whether our own stories or someone else's, can help us fill in the gaps, strengthen the bonds, and enrich the spaces between us. I encourage you to give it a try sometime. Perhaps you can go, right now, find a friend, and read a short story or a poem together, maybe something by Roald Dahl (this, perhaps?). Or find a couple friends, and get together to read a book (how about The Giver? It's a classic, an easy read, and good for talking about afterward.) Or maybe sit down in front of a computer, record yourself reading something, and just send it to somebody. Read to each other, is what I'm trying to say. Read to each other.

---

*Side note: I once came across a contest to end a sentence as many prepositions as possible. The winning entry was a sentence in which a child asks his father why he brought the wrong book up to his bedroom: "What did you bring the book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"
**Your other option was showing me a VHS of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, particularly the part when Piglet is trying to fly a kite but nearly gets blown into the sky by the heavy winds. But I digress.

Photo sources:
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Dos_Passos_reads_aloud_to_Katy_Dos_Passos%28%3F%29_aboard_the_Anita,_1932.jpg
2. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/slightlyeverything/4895401675/
3. Nate Irvine  

A Halloween Tradition: Storytelling

"Minos, King of Crete," Gustave Dore, illustration for the Divine Comedy

Everything you can think of is true,
And fishes make wishes on you.
We’re fighting our way up dreamland’s spine,
Red flamingos and expensive wine...

—"Everything You Can Think (Of Is True)," Tom Waits

Out along the edge is
Always where I burn to be:
The further on the edge,
The hotter the intensity. 
—"Danger Zone," Kenny Loggins

For the last several years at Halloween, my roommates and I have gathered our varied acquaintances in our home to do something that adults rarely do these days: read aloud together.

I personally love reading aloud; I enjoy the feeling of community it generates, the opportunity to discuss something read immediately after reading it, and the chance to use one's voice to, to almost become someone else. I suppose it's like acting, but more accessible to non-actors.

Here's the thing, though: my roommates and I aren't really trying to revive some lost cultural institution of communal reading aloud, withered on the vine of human entertainments as radio, film, and television have sucked up its nutrients. (If you'd like to read a brief opinion piece on that subject, this one is good.) No, what we're trying to do is freak each other out.

You see, I've never liked haunted houses, and I don't usually go in for horror movies or suspense films (exceptions: Alien, The Thing, and early-middle M. Night Shyamalan movies). My roommates have similar tastes. Reading scary stuff aloud is a nice way to freak ourselves out without having to venture into those danger zones.

It is also, admittedly, a good excuse to get a bunch of people into our house and eat gigantic quantities of baked goods and other treats (viz. puppy dog chow¹). BUT let us not go into that; instead, allow me to narrate a typical Halloween at our house for you, if you've never joined us.

As the guests arrive, the iPod speakers in the living room are set up with a playlist of more-or-less lighthearted Halloween mood music, e.g., Tom Waits' Everything You Can Think (Of Is True), Dead Man's Bones' My Body's a Zombie for You, or Sufjan Stevens' John Wayne Gacy. People mill about, cupcakes and brownies and the like are distributed. After a period of socialization, the readings begin.

When we read, the book or papers with the story are passed around the circle of folks, each person who wants to read taking a turn. I usually take on the role of "guy who knows about this sort of thing" and give people advice about how to read aloud effectively (read a little slower than you feel is natural, try to speak clearly and deliberately, and have fun with it).

We usually start with something quite short, often with a sort of twist ending; something that's not obviously horrible all the way along, but ends up nasty. The Chaser by John Collier² has often filled this role, but this year I'm considering trying out Skin by Roald Dahl.³

After this come one or two longer stories, usually marked by more suspense and intensity throughout. We often use science fiction for this, having read the unsettling Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven⁴ and the mesmerizing Nightfall by Isaac Asimov,⁵ though we have also filled it with The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle.⁶ This year, I think I'm going to try M.R. James' Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad, ⁷ but I don't know; I might go track down a copy of Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors and pick out something. Also, we'll probably do The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe.

All this time there's usually some background music going, something atmospheric but not necessarily terrifying. But with the last thing we do, that changes a bit.

The last story is always H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. This may seem like an odd choice to end things with, as it is quite long, quite old, and very slow, not to mention full of obscure words and occasional weird, nigh-unintelligible rural speech approximations.⁸

However, what this story lacks in momentum it more than makes up for in slow-building, gut-wrenching horror; and it's the best kind of horror: the horror of the unknown. What exactly is at the back of the terrible events of the story is never made completely clear, as Lovecraft builds a series of increasingly unusual, unpleasant, and upsetting events into a mysterious, terrifying climax.

As we read the story, I put on the most unsettling ambient music I can scrounge up out of my archives, typically some William Basinksi and some music (called, improbably, "Pasibutbut") from Taiwan's native people that is really, really unnerving, at least to me. When the end finally arrives, and strange lights are flashing in the sky, the earth is trembling, and the trees are swaying in a wind from some other dimension, I put on the really weird stuff, take the story in hand, and read in my most wild-eyed, burning voice. People, including myself, tend to freak out. And it's great.

---

<sup>1. AKA "mud buddies," apparently.
2. A very brief story about a young man buying a love potion he doesn't understand the consequences of.
3. About a homeless man with a tattoo on his back done by a famous painter.
4. About a night when the moon is suddenly fiercely bright, indicating that the sun has expanded or flared, destroying the day side of earth, and that this likely is the narrator's last night, along with everyone else's.
5. About a place where night only happens once every several thousand years, causing madness among the planet's population and the destruction of civilizations.
6. A creepy Sherlock Holmes story about a mysterious death, a weird uncle with exotic pets, and a young woman stuck in a huge freaky old mansion.
7. About a dude who finds a whistle that summons a ghost.
8. E.g., "...it must a’ come in that stone . . . pizened the whole place . . . dun’t know what it wants . . . that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone . . . they smashed it . . . it was that same colour . . . jest the same, like the flowers an’ plants . . . must a’ ben more of ’em . . . seeds . . . seeds . . . they growed . . . I seen it the fust time this week."</sup>

The This Much Is True Experience

This is the sound of my soul. 

—"(I Know This Much Is) True," Spandau Ballet

Tuesday night I went on stage at an event called This Much Is True, and it was awesome.

This Much Is True ("TMIT" hereafter) is a storytelling event not unlike Story Lab, about which I've written before (there's a recording of a performance I did at Story Lab here). Telling stories is an important thing for me, and has been for some time. I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point in my life I realized that I could get the attention of a large group of people if I remembered an interesting-enough story and told it in a gripping way. Indeed, without stories to tell (or an audience that will listen), I'm typically lost in large group settings.

I'm always excited to tell stories to a new audience, but what made me extra excited to do TMIT was that, unlike most other events I've performed at, TMIT is invitation only. I had no way of signing up or requesting a slot. Instead, I had to wait for one of the show's hosts to see me do my thing and invite me to perform. I was also excited because I knew that most people invited to perform at TMIT are thoroughly talented. I was going to be performing alongside seasoned storytellers, actors, and others who've been in this game or related ones for a long time.

Given that fact, I felt oddly unintimidated. Honestly, I was a bit cocky: up until this show, I'd performed with lots of people with less experience than me or just less audience appeal, so it was always easy to feel like I'd done a great job by simply comparing myself to my fellow performers. And, now that I think about it, I totally expected to keep doing that. I went up first, and afterwards, I was all set in my chair, ready to rate myself against my fellow performers and feel great about myself because I was as good or better than they were.

So it was a shock when everyone else did either really well or fantastically well. Almost every other story was more emotionally fraught, more engaging, or funnier than mine, sometimes all at once. I slowly realized how un-unique my talents were in this context. As my roommate pointed out to me later, it was not unlike the transition I talked about briefly in the story I'd told on stage: in high school, I believed I was an intellectual all-star because I compared myself to my peers, but college put me in my place. I was similarly taken down a few notches here.

Thus, I was a little dazed when intermission rolled around. I got up and walked around a bit, eventually bumping into one of the show's co-hosts—the one I'd never met before. I complimented her on her story, noting that she had taken a universal experience and used it to describe something very personal. (I'm still not sure if this was a profound analytical comment or the merest pseudo-intellectual fluff, but she took it in the spirit it was meant: I was trying to say I'd paid attention to her story and liked it.) I then half-complained about being put first in the show's lineup, saying that her co-host tended to put me first in shows and I wasn't sure why. (This is a little annoying if, say, you have friends who tend to show up late to things and they miss your material because you were first.) She responded that she knew why her co-host tended to put me first: I had great energy, the kind that makes people laugh from the get-go. It's exactly the kind of thing you need to start a show off right and draw people into the experience. It's typically thought of as a place of honor, she said.

So I sat back down for the second half of the show, my confidence in my uniqueness restored. And then I was blown away again by three amazing storytellers. The last of the three was a nationally recognized storyteller and musician, who told a gut-bustingly funny and simultaneously affecting and warm story about cleaning out his parents' house after his mother passed away. He brought the house down, and I was put back in my place. This time, though, I felt happy to be there, because it felt like a place to grow from and aspire to be as great as others had been that night. 

---

Ahem. Because this is stuck in my head and needs to be let out somewhere:

Ah, hah-hah, HAAAH HAAA, I KNOW this MUCH is true...Ah, hah-hah, HAAAH HAAA, I KNOW this MUCH IS TRUUUUUUE....

My apologies.