For Whom the Podcast Tolls
A few words about how much I've enjoyed making a Hemingway podcast.
I snug the microphone up close to my mouth. On one screen in front of me my recording software, GarageBand, with its glowing blue bands of sound tracks, the squiggly lines the digitized manifestations of my voice and a classical guitar piece I’ve recorded as a background track. On the other screen, in zoomed-in, extra-large font is my script. On the desk in front of me my copy of In Our Time lays splayed, its margins filled with my indecipherable notations. I take a breath, position the track head at the right place, take hold of the mouse and steer the cursor to the small red record button on the toolbar, and when I click it, the recording track starts to move, a brighter blue light gliding across the track, new blips of black lines appearing if I make a sound.
It’s daunting, and I try not to pay attention to the tape head rolling forward, all that empty silence being recorded until I start filling it up with my words, my voice. Headphones on, the oddly foreign and unfamiliar sound of my voice heard from outside of my own skull is right there alongside my “actual” voice whenever I speak. I’m reading a head a few words, trying to pace myself, to land on the consonants, to not slur words together, to show emotion and not make it sound too read or scripted, to think about what I’ve written, what I’m saying, to try to speak with the appropriate level of emotion, maybe even to add a little life to a line that otherwise might fall flat, an observation that is too obvious or mundane. My eyes flit from one screen to the other, and I’m going good, feeling the cadences of speech now that seem to bring a little extra oomph to the words until…I skip a word, I slur several words together, I realize I’m leaning too far from the mic, I bang against the mic stand, the neighbor starts up his leaf blower, a hickory nut crashes down on the roof of my small office, my phone rings, silence mode not turned on…any of a hundred things could happen and I make a loud Bronx cheer into the microphone, click the square stop icon, utter a profanity or two.…
Despite the often endless and still foreign to me process of writing, editing, and recording my podcast, Hemingway Word For Word, I find the process thrilling in ways teaching never quite was as I work to blend together smart, original takes on Hemingway’s writing and bolster these with an emotionally charged and easy-to-listen-to voice and tonally appropriate background music. Most recently I’ve even taken on the task of recording the music myself on my classical guitar (which also avoids copyright issues).
This week I have been hard at work on my 10th episode, on the second part of the masterful story “Big Two-Hearted River.” It is the last story in the collection, In Our Time, and I want it to be especially good as it marks the completion of the first book I will address in the podcast.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started this endeavor a little over a year ago. I knew there were many things I had to say about Hemingway the artist (not to be confused with Hemingway the man—listen to the podcast for more on that)—things I have worked hard over the years to help my college and high school students think about and respond to. I also knew I didn’t want my audience to only be academics, to think of it in the same way I think of “academic” essays I’ve written on him, nor even for it to be like the many Hemingway conference papers I’ve delivered. As I started writing that first ever episode on probably his most famous story of all time, “Hills Like White Elephants,” I saw right away that a podcast was the perfect vessel for trying to say what I’ve always wanted to say about his work. Immediately I liked the freedom of acting more like a traditional lecturer or performer. I wasn’t trying to tease out student responses, wasn’t asking probing questions hoping to spark dialogue, nor was I trying to argue for a clear and concise thesis. In the world of the podcast, it’s only my voice, some quiet classical guitar in the background, me meandering through my many and varied ideas on the value and rich complexity of Hemingway’s work.
From the first few words I tentatively wrote long hand on a yellow legal pad last summer, I felt at home and comfortable in this unfamiliar space, and when recording, I found myself both reading the script I had written and frequently forging off in new, unexpected directions, making new discoveries.
One of the great things for me about the whole affair has been how many things I’ve known and felt and “understood,” but have never worked hard enough to put them down in manageable, communicable terms. The podcast has also allowed me to make numerous exciting discoveries about the meaning that lies beneath the surface of Hemingway’s seemingly simple texts, discoveries that often come to me as I lean close the microphone and begin to speak.
Here’s an example from the podcast I am in the process of recording. There’s a scene in the second part of “Big Two-Hearted River” where the protagonist, Nick Adams, on a fishing trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, hooks and cannot land an enormous trout. After losing the fish, Nick thinks about “him” swimming in the depths, “below the light” and “angry.” While so many other images resound with more overt meaning, (like the fish he hooks and catches who lives in the very center of a hollow log—see my The Fish in the Log essay for more on that), I don’t think I’ve ever “taught” or thought much about this brief moment in the long story, but while writing and then recording the episode, I started to see (and work to express) what a powerful image that is. The brooding, angry trout who is shocked and stunned by the events and now has swum far down “below the light” is a perfect echo of Nick, who is back from WWI where he too has suffered physical injuries and is very likely suffering from being “shell shocked” (what we now refer to as PTSD). By metaphorically considering that big, sulking, angry trout, far below the light, Nick may well be able to see his own condition with more clarity and depth. Throughout the story he is also frequently seen seeking out light, emerging from shadows, drying in the sunlight, and he seems especially careful to avoid the swamp where the “light doesn’t come through.”
Unlike writing more formal academic essays where you need to remain doggedly focused on a task (I once wrote a very long essay on the words “now, nowhere, and nothing” in For Whom the Bell Tolls; you can find it in this edition of The North Dakota Quarterly), podcasting affords me the ability to meander, to touch on things briefly then move on, to let my thinking take me wherever it wants…
In the episode I’m about to publish, I found myself reading the following passage aloud:
The trout hung heavy in the net, mottled trout back and silver sides in the meshes. Nick unhooked him; heavy sides, good to hold, big undershot jaw, and slipped him, heaving and big sliding, into the long sack that hung from his shoulders in the water. / Nick spread the mouth of the sack against the current and it filled, heavy with water. He held it up, the bottom in the stream, and the water poured out through the sides. Inside at the bottom was the big trout, alive in the water.
So much is happening all at once here (and listening to the episode once I’ve finished it will give you more context). But what grabbed my interest were all the dizzying repetitions (I’ve bolded repeating words). Wherever you find moments of intense repetition in Hemingway, you almost always find the rhetorical form known as a chiasmus, a pattern of repetition commonly used by Hemingway first brought to my attention by the scholar Max Nänny. A chiasmus uses the following structure, A-B-C-D-D-C-B-A, where each letter stands for a specific (or very similar) word. Chiasmuses can be any length, and they are often described as a folded or folding pattern, since the central or turning point words appear at the center of the form. Nänny has observed many of them in Hemingway’s writing, some chartable throughout entire stories or chapters. Within this short passage, you can find several chiasmuses (and probably more that I’ve missed): “hung-sides-sides-hung.” “Hung-trout-big-big-him (trout)-hung.” “Big-water-current-stream (current)-water-big.” Or even just “water-water-water-water” (these words evenly spaced throughout the second part of the passage). These patterned repetitions bring me to read Hemingway’s work in almost the same way you look at a painting, each word a kind of brushstroke on the canvas of the page. I’m also struck here with the phrase “big sliding,” no comma between the words, as if “big sliding” were some one new thing that Nick/Hemingway has found a way to convey by joining two words in a new way. The word “heaving” also contains the “heav” from “heavy,” and seems to emerge from it almost, or at least belong with it poetically….
Ok, I’ll stop myself from going further here. You can find much more in the podcast….
I love the freedom to go wherever the story takes me when writing and recording my podcast, and if two ideas seem too unalike, without any transitional element able to pull them together, I can always just stop talking and add a few moments of background music—a pause, a place to allow ideas to settle in and take hold before moving onto something new.
I write this in between recording, and the audio file I will ultimately ask my computer to transform into an mp3 file then upload to Spotify for Podcasters is a hot mess. I have still to record the last 5 single-spaced pages of a 10-page document, now printed out and covered with coss-outs and marginalia….
But even though the technology is sometimes hard to master and the process requires so much more than just writing well, and so much that is new to me, it has also opened up my thinking and helped me to see and express things perhaps more completely and effectively than other forms allow. And while the podcast is far from being “viral” or making me any money, the 9 posted episodes have been listened to nearly 4000 times in more than 30 countries. This is one aspect of digital/online publishing that I like—to get to see exactly how many times people are looking, are actually there on the other end of it all.
Ideally, I’d like to see a book come out of this, one that retains the spoken, less formal tone of the production and avoids the jargon of “academese,” but for now I’m just happy to have made the time to piece it all together, to have found such a useful vessel for communicating things I’ve wanted to express for so long now.
As a new addition to Journey Casts, I’m adding links to books I mention in these posts if you are interested in purchasing. As a point of full disclosure, I do receive small percentage of the sale of the books as an affiliate. Here is link to In Our Time.
You will soon be able to find other books I’ve addressed in these pages on my Journey Casts store page. I’m delighted to have become affiliated with Bookshop.org, given their commitment to helping small, independent bookstores survive in the era of massive online booksellers, and any books purchased with these links will contribute to that cause.
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Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”
I can’t wait for Big Two Hearted River pt. 2