A BLIND BIBLIOPHILE EYES AUDIOBOOKS By Ryan Knighton I’ve been going blind for fifteen years now. That’s serious procrastination, true to my slacker ethic. Only a sliver of clarity remains in my right eye, while the rest of my sight conjures what a world of Vaseline might resemble. True, it’s worrisome to look in the mirror, to find only a smear and a nostril for a face, but I’ve also some readerly, , less-rhinocentric melancholies. For one thing, I miss print. I miss its voice. And its sanity. More than ten years ago I gave up reading for its audacious cousin, listening. A few audio books were kicking around, but make no mistake, they weren’t as abundant, economical or consumer-sexy as today’s digitized potboilers. Or is it pod-boilers? As recent as a decade ago, only a select number of narratives were stored on something called “tape”. You might recall the innovation, although it was primarily used by me and my kin, the blind and the squinty. Cassette books were that inferior to paper. More dangerous, too. Consider the threat of weight. I still know a blind guy with a spinal injury from reading. Once he tried to lug his four-track tape deck and an audio edition of Bleak House to the bus stop. Hefty reading. The poor guy needed two seats and a duffle bag just to get in a paragraph before work. Not once did he complain, though. Living low-fi is nothing knew to the blind. We navigate with sticks, don’t forget. The first time I ordered a set of taped books, they arrived in the mail, on loan from the Canadian national Institute for the Blind. Because I couldn’t read Braille, I couldn’t browse their slim list of titles. The easiest alternative was to select by crapshoot. On the order form, I checked off “Canadian Literature” as an area of interest. A few random picks arrived the following week. These included an Ethiopian cookbook and an 8-pound box of cassettes called The Idiot.. Good title. I never knew that Dostoevsky once toughed the streets of Okatokes. According to my Canadian Literature, he likely whipped up a nice Yatakelt, too. As for my university education, postmodernism kept me from flunking out. Along with distribution and girth, another early taped book peculiarity was the quality of the readings I enjoyed. For my courses in psychoanalytic theory, numerous volunteers read to me about Karl Young and the collective unconscience of our Archie-types. I thought my paper about Jughead as shadow figure was pretty good. Who knew the cure for blindness was postmodernism? But strange as it may sound, even though I’m more or less blind, I’m still trying to learn how to read audio books. Despite a decade of reliance upon them, my brain remains wired to print. During my last days of reading, I cobbled together words one letter at a time, suffering crippling headaches and eye-strain from the effort. Later, when I finally conceded to the need for taped books, listening proved no less punitive. The headaches and eye-strain continued. These were the phantom pains of an amputee. My eyes wouldn’t let go of their duty, and they ached from the work they still imagined they were doing. Ironically, today I seek out that pain as an index of literary pleasure. It took me several years, but I rediscovered how to listen again, remembering how to be a child who gives in to a story found in the voice of another person. Soon, reading dissolved into listening, and writing transformed into a kind of crafted speech. My headaches went away. With one exception. Sometimes I hear a narrative that is so unmistakably composed, I can’t pretend to hear it as speech. Instead, I am acutely aware of the writing, its kinetic density, its deliberate music and precision, and the headaches and phantom eye-strain return. I’m reading again. It sounds that way. When I hear sentences by Charles Dickens, or Martin Amis, I can’t help but hear writing. As the John Cougar ditty goes, it hurts so good. Things in audioland are a lot better now, which can be a different problem. Among other challenges are the new, fancy-pants production values. These get in my way, as they must for other people, too. To give a visual analogy, Imagine cracking open a fresh copy of Shake Hands With the Devil, to find several hundred pages of curly, rococo font, something suitable to a lame wedding invitation. I’ve known a similar phenomenon in my ears. That’s how I felt when Sean Penn red Bob Dylan’s Chronicles to me. My mind is still reeling from the experience. I couldn’t help but imagine a good old vamp session between Dave Van Ronk and that lovable guy from I Am Sam. I also couldn’t help but think of Bob Dylan working days as a disability poster boy for Starbucks. As an audio book, its quite the confusing memoir. I’d probably do better trying to read it to myself. Above all, then, when I say I miss print, I suppose what I really mean is that I miss the voice in my head, the one that used to read to me. I miss him. Maybe one day some new innovation in audio book technology can help me find that voice again. I’m sure it’s in here somewhere, collecting dust on a shelf. ©2006 Ryan Knighton No portion of this article may be reprinted without permission from the author. BACK

PRIVATE BITS  -  PULP  -  PROPAGANDA  -  WARM FUZZIES  -  SIGHTINGS  -  YOUR TWO BITS  -  Site Design by DCCG  -  Email the Webmaster