by Cal LaFountain.
People miss most of what anyone has to say in a book, in a lecture, in a life. People listen better than they read. Stories encode ancient empathy. Such is the stress and emphasis of voice. The average person of the day doesn’t engage with the literature of the day because it fails to scrub its heel of precious expressions stenched in nostalgia.
Audiobooks jolt literature into the play of modern culture. Literature shifts its mode of consumption from reading to listening. The audiobook invites new guests to the future party of literature now.
The Reader-Listener
The Reader-Listener controls their experience with audiobooks. They utilize found time. They multitask. They allow their attention to wander. The same holds true of traditional reading, yet audiobooks deliver greater flexibility by any measurable dimension.
There’s an unexplored relationship between endorphins and literature. As the primary audio coupled with cardio exercise, music enjoys a long and storied mingling with human fitness. Why run in silence when you can run to Steve Reich’s Eight Lines? Why lift kettlebells in silence when you can lift kettlebells to Meshuggah’s Rational Gaze? Why do push ups in silence when you can do push ups to Adam F’s Metropolis?
Music enhances exercise. Until recently, such a blending was impossible for literature. Readers were obliged to sit in a chair, recline back, or lie down, to absorb a book. The surge in accessibility to mobile technology and more convenient listening solutions gives literature its turn to ally with endorphins.
The right section in a song when coinciding with the endorphin release of physical exercise generates ecstatic moments tempting radical personal transformation. Situated in a listener’s ears during exercise, a sentence now has an equal potential to connect with a brain buzzing on a body’s motion.
The sovereign ear contacts brainwaves with the agency to press pause, the agency to double the playback rate, the agency to move on to another title altogether. This gradation gyrates from a feeble whisper to a pleasurable Semtex detonation of language. The medium is as much about time as it is about story. The future party of literature is one whose fun relies on the agency of The Reader-Listener. Why should literature stagnate in mediums that forbid the option to choose how one spends their time?
A book shouldn’t be a tax on a life. With printed books, reading pace, comprehension, and the immobility of the body bind The Reader-Listener. Most people aren’t walking and reading. For most people, physical books are tinsel ornamenting their interior life, no different from hanging a painting or photograph. They’re mere props to sponsor conversation with a visitor or impress a date.
How much has literature suffered from its method of delivery? For much of history, its consumers were composed of immobile dorks doing their best to combat the entropy imminent in long sedentary periods. Sure, physical books offer tactile relief from digital realms, but they shouldn’t be the sole option. The print vehicle, nostalgic and precious to its cult, restricts the average person. The attitude of the past reaps literature’s lagging. Literacy barricades stories as an exclusive endeavor in the modern world, an activity attracting only a certain sect of blowhards. I say it’s time listening trumps literacy.
The Publisher
The Publisher interested in reducing their environmental impact may consider audiobooks. Audiobooks allow The Publisher and The Author to create stories that move with the passage of time and physical space. Audiobooks let the story roam, if not only in content, then at least in the antics of time uncaged.
The Publisher has a chance to dare forward. As a format, audiobooks aren’t new. What’s new is the opportunity born from a ready infrastructure and cultural climate robust to champion the audiobook, smartphones and digital distribution platforms the concierge for stories told through sound. The Publisher abandons the dint of the medium, once confined to images of sweaty-chested romance novel graphic design on bulky CDs stacked on shelves at the public library.
The Author
In modern English, morphed and bastardized as it is, words are flexible. Phrases even more. Audiobooks have an advantage over the printed word here. You won’t know unless you listen to a spoken version of these words, whether I’m saying a tear in heaven’s wind, a tear in heaven’s wind, a tear in heaven’s wind, or a tear in heaven’s wind.
The audiobook possesses an innate ability to obscure and draw curtains for the enjoyment of The Reader-Listener. In an audiobook, language is nothing more than the flamboyance of the soul arranged in sonic mutations.
My intrigue and support lie with those who began writing printed books, because they were the relevant medium of the time, with those ample in attention faced toward newer forms, and with all those future-facing and nostalgia-resistant, taking the fun dare to attend the future party of literature.
Cal LaFountain’s audiobook Puddle Is an Ocean to an Ant is out now on Xocord. His cut of the cloud is callafountain.com.