Acoustic Inertia: Recent Episodes

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Hi friends,

The day after I sent out my last transmission, on Jean Toomer’s Cane and the sun (& time, imprints, impressions, various shades of dusk…), I got an email invite from Lieven Lahaye for a reading/talk of his at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, where he’d just completed a residency. I wrote him back to say I would be there, and he responded that it “was a nice coincidence to see/hear your newsletter, minutes after I sent out that e-mail, and recognize some of the same things I’ve been busy with myself the last few months.”

I was also struck by the overlap in our respective recent obsessions after hearing him read about impressions, exposure, and sun-bleached paper, among other things. Lieven does a project called Catalog, along with designer Ott Metusala, a serial publication in which each single-essay issue is printed on the large printer sheets that, when folded, create a 16-page ‘signature.’ At the end of the project, all of these issue-signatures will be bound together into a book. The most recent of these essay/issues is called “Hard Sun,” borrowing its title from a piece by artist Duncan Smith.

I asked Lieven if he wanted to record “Hard Sun” for this newsletter, as a kind of ‘response,’ in the loosest sense, to the last one. Lieven’s writing is also a really nice example of fragmented writing, and of connecting various unrelated things to “reveal a larger whole” (Dodie Bellamy) — what he might also term “accretion” (from another issue of Catalog!). I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

As always, references from the recording are below.

by for now,

Meg

Catalog, a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala

Waking into weird weather as a list…

Francis Alÿs’ “In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing)” (1997)

“This is another instance of the use of blindness as a pejorative metaphor….” Joseph Grigely Instagram

A Keeper of Earth and Time

Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field

Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins

Duncan Smith, The Age of Oil

Bastien Gachet

Dodie Bellamy, Bee Reaved

Lieven Lahaye, “Can’t Do Hard Sun Whim,” 2022

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Hi friends,

Today’s transmission (which you can listen to above) is all about fragmented writing, and the practice of collecting, accumulating, and assembling. And also resembling — mimicry, imitation — and the formation or presentation of self; it’s kind of meandering, it will make more sense when you listen to it.

One thing I don’t get into so much in the voice memo but I think is an interesting aspect to this whole idea of connecting sources, texts, quotes, and people through writing (and becoming, I guess) is the practice of citation. I think credit and citation are important, and I think discussions of originality and copying at this moment in time are interesting, and I’m thinking about it in parallel to the thoughts in this email. I feel lucky to have this piece of writing “Multidimensional Citation” by Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst, and Mindy Seu to point you to. They cite “Feminist Approaches to Citation” by Maiko Tanaka, which is also great. And I really like Valeria Luiselli’s “Notes on Sources” in the back of her book The Lost Children Archive, which you’ll have to acquire the book to read but I highly recommend doing that anyways. And, relatedly, Legacy Russell on footnotes (!).

In that spirit (and as usual) below my signature is a list of the things I quote and reference in the recording:

yours in the salvage,
meg

Dodie Bellamy, Bee Reaved

Susan Sontag, introduction to Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Other Writings

“…pious work of salvage” quote also by Sontag and C.C.’s Mail Blog on the subject

Mimesis Wikipedia entry

Anne Truitt’s Daybook

Are.na channel “Fragment as Form”

Eve L. Ewing, “what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife”

Sarah Davidson, “A Visit with Joan Didion”

Rebecca Wolff, “And when I say a poem”

Nathalie Léger quote

Charles Broskoski, “On Motivation”

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

Anne Carson, “Stillness” lecture

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit megmillerworld.substack.com

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Hi friends,

I spent the weekend reading Sonnet(s) by Mexican Artist Ulises Carrion, which was recently re-published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Then I decided to write a newsletter about his Language poetry, which is really very visual and probably frustrating to just hear about without being able to see it. But we’ll see—maybe this further abstraction of language would be approved by Carrion. In any case I made this Are.na channel too in case you want to use it to follow along for a highly sophisticated audio-visual experience.

This isn’t in the reading, but it is in the channel: going further down the Carrion rabbit hole led me to this Madeline Gins Reader, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words, which I had been meaning to read. Gins, who was also an architect, wrote and thought of books in a similar way as Carrion, in that she considered the spatial dynamics of language and created what Carrion called “structures in motion.” I think you could easily relate what both of these artists do to concrete poetry, but what both distinguishes them from others and connects them to each other, for me, is their focus is not just the page but the book as a whole, as a “total work of art.” In Gin’s “Word Rain,” for example, which I could and might spend a whole separate newsletter talking about, some of the pages include photographed hands holding the edges of the book, as if reminding the reader that the book is an object, and the text is only animated by reader.

Anyways, one line that really stood out to me in “Word Rain” relates the reader to mist: “I appear on a page which would otherwise be blank. I, the mist, the agent…I was picking up the meaning without stopping to accumulate words. Speed. I loved it. Soon it would be over. The words stuck to the mist, I to the meaning.” It made me think of this exchange, which feels very misty to me, in a good way.

Thanks for being my mist,

Meg

p.s. as always I’d love for you to send me an audio response if you feel like it!

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Hi friends,

A few weeks ago I sent you a reading from an interview with Saidiya Hartman in The White Review. Since then, I’ve read her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and can’t recommend it enough. I also attended a (virtual) talk hosted by Silver Press with Hartman, Canisia Lubrin, Nat Raha, and Christina Sharpe in conversation, Poetry is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition, which you can now listen to on NTS. I sent it to a friend and she sent me back the same quote from Hartman that I had written down: “poetics is the possession of opaqueness, the key to producing the otherwise. Poetics as a way to think critically about making. A theory. A form itself. The reformation of form.”

Speaking of friends sending me things straight to my soul, this week’s recording is courtesy of Charmaine Li, who read a passage from Tao: The Watercourse Way about the yin-yang polarity, “in hopes of sending some calm vibes.” It had exactly that effect, and now I’m sending it on to you. As she transmits, “It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive. For it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent end of the universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being, as sound from silence and light from space.”

warmth and relaxation,

meg

p.s. have you guys heard emma rae norton’s website with the sound of its own making? It’s a digital response to Box with the Sound of its Own Making by Robert Morris.

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Hi friends,

Today’s transmission is a reading of part of an interview with Saidiya Hartman in the White Review on her recent book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. It’s really good, you should read the whole thing. Later in the recording I ask what you’ve been reading, and if you feel like it, to please send me a recording of it, or part of it. As always, I’ll send out whatever I get back in the next newsletter.

hope you all are going ok,

big love,

meg

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Hi friends,

A couple of weeks ago, I sent you some sound, looked back at one of the most famous examples of shared authorship, and wondered about a new kind of oral tradition for assembling stories and preserving memories. Here’s the follow-up, wherein Jessi adds some thoughts to our patchwork composition.

This is a special sort of transmission, and one particularly apt to the topic, because it’s a mix of her words and someone else’s that she’s conveying to us. Jessi sent her voice memo right after getting out of a writing workshop with Garth Greenwell, when his voice was still fresh in her mind. Alongside some really nice ideas around language, style, and rhetoric—“language is giving us data that our senses can process”— and Jessi’s own thoughtful synthesis and word choice for carrying them forward, I also love that you can hear her flipping the pages of her notebook. You’ll also find out what moon dust is like.

Speak soon,

Meg

p.s. Did you guys see this piece on Edoardo Ballerini, who’s found (relative) fame as an audiobook narrator of a bunch of well-known books, like My Struggle and the Bible? I like the audio players embedded in the story, and also the detail about how the house he lives in was once inhabited by a silent movie star. “…the house of a silent actor is now occupied by one who uses only voice on projects,” Ballerini told me by email. “What a century will do.”

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Hi everyone,

Today’s rendition of the newsletter covers a lot of ground. First, I talk about oral traditions, galloping pace, and memory, particularly in regards to the Greek myths and their contemporary interpreters. I put a few links below in case you’re curious about any of the references included. Plus, Laurel phones in with a voice memo in response to a previous newsletter, and we end with a dramatic recording of the rain as heard from my courtyard. You can expect smooth transitions and an even sound quality—I’m nothing if not tech savvy.

Links:

Madeline Miller on The Ezra Klein Show

Emily Wilson’s (very good) translation of The Odyssey

Profile of Emily Wilson in The New York Times Magazine

Ok for now,

Meg

p.s. Have you guys seen Courtney Cassidy’s Sounds Nice website? It’s great, and Courtney has a really nice way of thinking about sound. She sent me a recording of rain on her former roof in Oakland that became the inspiration for my own rain recording.

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Hi friends,

A couple of weeks ago, I sent you some sound, described my room-sized world, and asked you what was going on in yours. Here’s the follow-up, wherein two special guests phone in with their own voice recordings.

They’re so different from each other and I love them both: Becca describes a voice memo as a “partial but true representation of being present with someone,” and reflects on quarantine and the differences between being alone and being lonely. Chelsea spies on her neighbors, details a pinto bean recipe, and leans into long pauses, letting the noises of her surroundings seep into the recording. Listen closely to hear the sounds of a woodpecker and music drifting in from an open window somewhere in Brooklyn.

Talk soon,

Meg

p.s. Speaking of sound, have you guys heard Jon Mooallem’s podcast, where he just takes a walk in the woods and records it? It’s good ambient sound for when you’re working, soothing and non-distracting. But there’s also a sense of momentum, of moving steadily, even swiftly, forward, that I find comforting in a time when uncertainty has suspended the familiar gait of our daily lives.

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Hi guys,

You’re getting this because you signed up on my website to receive my audio-based newsletter, possibly aeons ago. Here it is! Sorry it took so long.

As a reminder, the idea behind this was for me to send out an email with a short voice recording (above) about whatever I was thinking about or preoccupied by. If you want to respond with your own voice message, that would be really nice—you can just send it back to me via an MP3 attachment before a week from today (Sunday). I’ll stitch together the responses and send out another email with those. Hopefully it will feel kind of like a conversation, or maybe something like an audio message board.

But also no pressure, you can just listen. It’s kind of an experiment that will probably keep evolving—feel free to email me if you have ideas.

Hope you all are doing ok in your respective homes! And I hope you’ll enjoy being sent some sound.

Soon,

Meg

“The only true logic is sound”—Eileen Myles to Chris Kraus at an NYC library talk a while ago

Thank you to Laurel and Leo for your help <3

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