Before I started this RMSYL malarkey, I didn’t know my condenser mics from my dynamics; my omnidirectionals, from my unidirectionals; my male XLRs from my 1/4 inch jack plugs.
Just point-it-at-someone’s-face directional is what I’d initially planned to do. I thought lav mics were something the KGB taped under toilet seats (or if you’re MI6, under a fake rock). When someone told me I needed a dead cat, I said: “Don’t be so 1993.”
I won’t go on.
So in the last six months I’ve had to seriously geek up.
And I’m inevitably still struggling along some of the lower foothills of my sound-engineer’s learning curve. Which is really just a long-winded way of me trying to explain the slightly ramshackle nature of this recording, hopefully not in the listening, but certainly in the making of.
Ramshackleness however does in some strange way complement (and compliment) this wonderful Ali Smith story from her collection The First Person and Other Stories, as well as to its reader, Rachel Stroud.
My thanks to both of them.
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Thank you. Great story choice and well read, despite difficulties with the technology. It brought to mind this poem.
The Bookstall
Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open-that one
and that-and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.
For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read-these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.
Linda Pastan
Thanks Jen. I still feel this way, particularly in libraries. Like the little boy whose favourite Uncle owns a sweet shop and so you’re free to sample whatever you like and as much of it as you want.
The only downside of this, when it comes to reading, is that my eyes really ARE to big for my stomach (reading capacity) and I buy ten, maybe even a hundred, times more than I can actually savour.
Ah books…
ah books indeed. i am not joking when i say that not one day goes by that i don’t buy a book or check three out from the library. that’s insane. and yet i continue