Work with your Hands

The other day I sat down to tackle a long overdue sewing project, and as I started to thread the needle, I noticed a feeling of restiveness creep upon me. The slow task of mending the holes in my socks appeared before me as a dull, empty stretch of wasted time. I’m not used to the kind of mental space that mending socks brings. A product of my times, I am accustomed to a nearly constant stream of stimulation. Though I like to think of myself as an old-fashioned, crafty person, I’m really not used to working with my hands. I long to have such patience.  

When I need inspiration for reconnecting with that part of myself, I turn to the essays of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin is best known for “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which many undergraduates read at some point in their education. “The Storyteller” is another of his classic essays. 

In “The Work of Art,” Benjamin argues that the factory-made objects of modern times are without the auras of the handcrafted objects of yore. In “The Storyteller,” he departs from the realm of objects and applies the same thinking to the realm of experience and speech. A storyteller, writes Benjamin, is someone who has the ability to exchange their experiences with others through their voice. But the storyteller, as Benjamin describes them, is in sharp decline. Benjamin’s diagnosis for this problem is dense and complicated. But a good diagnosis is the first step towards finding a cure. In other words, these insights can help us find ways that we can recover the innate storytellers within ourselves. I will focus on one small part of Benjamin’s argument here, and leave to you discover the rest of this very rich essay yourself. 

Benjamin’s unlikely champion of storytelling is boredom. He writes that the traditional university of storytelling was the artisan’s workshop, where tradesmen rubbed elbows and exchanged tales while they did their work. Their work was often repetitive, and the tedious nature of good craftsmanship was also the key to developing good storytelling. “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience,” writes Benjamin. 

During hours of mundane tasks, the artisan’s mind had time to ruminate on his or her personal experience, then to formulate it into a well-tellable tale. They also had the time and repose to absorb the stories of others. By and large we are not the working artisans that we used to be, so storytelling, writes Benjamin, is coming to an end:  

“It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while [stories] are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.”

If you are like me and you are sometimes seized by anxiety at the thought of working with your hands, try to remind yourself that the repetitive tasks of everyday life are useful in ways that might not at first seem obvious. While you are washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or mending the holes in your socks, you are also mulling over your days, formulating narrative structures that will later surface in your exchanges with others. The everyday practical work of life creates the time and space necessary for you to be present to the stories within and around you.  

The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin, written in 1936, 24 pages. Translated by Harry Zohn, from Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.

Poetic Voice

As a child, I was lucky enough to grow up listening to David Whyte cassette tapes in my mother’s car. At the age of eleven or twelve, I had not yet come to appreciate poetry. But poetry came alive for me in Whyte’s tapes. Listening to a well-read poem is an entirely different experience than encountering it on the page. David Whyte reading poetry is like receiving a loaf of warm bread, fresh from the oven. It is life sustaining. Simple in its genius.

Achieving the most basic effect often requires the most adept skill. In this Tedx Talk, Whyte introduces us to his thorough, methodical approach to poetry, employing several poems as platforms for a discussion of what he terms the conversational nature of reality. 

First there is his charming accent. Whyte hails from Yorkshire, England, and so he has that classic British lilt, which for my American ear always signals a sense of confident erudition. But he is also a traveler and has long made his home in the Pacific Northwest, and so in his tone we sense a very down-to-earth, wool-socks-in-sandals kind of lilt. As a child, I remember being drawn in and calmed by the rhythm of his metered, melodic speech. He uses the range of his voice to strike a delicate balance between animating poetry with emphasis and variation in tone, and remaining neutral enough so that there is space for our own imaginations to work. 

Emphasis is placed not just by inflection, but also through repetition. An important line can be read two, three, or four times. Each time we hear it, another layer is peeled back, and we feel the language more profoundly. By the third or fourth time we are no longer just hearing the words—we are experiencing the meaning behind the words. 

In this talk, Whyte opens with his poem ‘Everything is Waiting for You.’ The first time he reads it, he repeats several lines, several times, as if he wants to make sure his listeners catch each piece. When he reaches the end of the poem, he repeats the last line, “Everything is waiting for you,” leaning in, repeating it again, “everything, everything, everything.” At this point you really feel it as an invitation, as if it emanates from something bigger than the poem or even poet. 

Then Whyte recites the entire poem again. You’ll feel comfortable when he starts over from the beginning: it is your chance to put together all the pieces that you caught the first time, and to catch more of the pieces you’d missed. 

Whyte’s poetic voice will—to use one of his own metaphors—make you feel like a snake, shedding your outermost skin. Little by little, he will peel away at your fragile defense, until you start to feel the steady warmth glowing at your core. 

Life at the Frontier: the Conversational Nature of Reality, David Whyte (20 min), Tedx Puget Sound

Holy Heck, I’m Hearing Triple!

I love it when Radiolab tells a story from the outside and the inside, in both past tense and in present tense, using different people's voices, and different recordings of the same person's voice, to create a single narrative arc that is easy to follow and dreamily immersive. 

There’s a lot of risk in using multiple tracks of the same person's voice to construct a single narrative. Such a tangle could quickly become disorienting, but with Radiolab, it's easy listening. 

Placebo is one of my all-time favorite Radiolab episodes—an hour of rapid-fire ideas and ruminations on the unknown. A great story-within-a-story starts at 32:20 and finishes at 39:05, in which Abumrad follows his father, a doctor, through a typical day at the hospital. 

It takes a while to pick out the three versions of Abumrad’s voice. First, there is what I will call his on-location voice, testing the microphone with his father. Then his in-studio voice, orienting you in the scene. Then, at 37:05, a voice that is distinct from both, in-interview with his father. Because each was recorded differently, presumably in a different space, or with different equipment, each has a slightly different timbre. 

The differences between them are subtle, but listen carefully and you can pick them out. Then notice how each one makes its own contribution to the story.

In film these types of voices or sounds are referred to as "diegetic" and "nondiegetic." Diegetic sound is sound that people inside the story can hear—in the case of radio, this is normally the on-location sound, the person speaking in a field recording. Nondiegetic sound is said to be sound that's just for the viewer or listener—in this case, Abumrad as the in-studio narrator, and the interview clips. 

In this story, as in most radio, the diegetic and nondiegetic voices fill different narrative functions. The diegetic (on-location) voice gives you a feeling of where your protagonist is and what it's like to be there. The nondiegetic (in-studio) voice provides structure, context, and background information that characters inside the story don't necessarily have. 

This story stays close to convention. Abumrad's in-studio voice speaks directly into your ear, giving you the inside scoop. Then Abumrad's on-location voice gives you a sense of the hospital environment as he follows his father through the bustling corridors. The interview clips play a third function, giving us a window into Abumrad’s relationship with his father. 

This story is brilliant because it hides its artifice well. You probably won't notice that there are three versions of Abumrad's voice, because they parallel one another closely, following the timeline of Abumrad's day in the hospital with his father. Even though each voice was recorded in its own moment, the chronological structure of this story creates a smooth, consistently supported, and satisfying story arc that feels like a single unfolding of time. 

Any one voice alone couldn't tell this story as well as the three combined. Without the in-studio voice, the story would lack in background and context. Without the on-location voice, there wouldn't be the same sense of immediacy. And without the in-interview exchanges, we would miss the father-son intimacy that these clips bring to bear. 

Building on a chronological structure, these three voices flow naturally together. Hearing triple has never been so easy.

Placebo, produced in 2007 by Radiolab, excerpt from "The White Coat" lasts from 32:20 to 39:05

The Bard

Poetry and jazz. We tend to think of this combination as the epitome of the avant garde. But actually, it descends from the longest tradition in human communication, where the storyteller is a singer, a songster, a minstrel, a bard.   

I have always been intimidated by the poem-song, because it has the potential to go so terribly awry. But my interest was recently revived when I came across this rare gem: San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, live at the Blackhawk. The year is 1958, Rexroth is a center of gravity in literary San Francisco, a reluctant mentor to the Beats, and is performing here at one of the era’s most serious jazz venues.    

I suggest starting with the poem-song, ‘I didn’t want it…’ It’s fun. You’ll find yourself both tapping your foot to the rhythm and nodding your head at certain lines in the poem. Both the spoken word and the music become catchier through their combination. How is this done?

We know precisely how it’s done, because—another reason this is such a rare gem—the poet tells us. In this text from the jacket cover of the original LP, Rexroth explains the creative process between himself and his band. The playful exchange, Rexroth explains, is the product of a strategic balance between spontaneity and good planning. 

Here we sense the flow of something which is improvised and spontaneous, and at the same time, a degree of synthesis which indicates that this performance has been well thought through. Rexroth explains: 

We certainly don’t just spontaneously blow off the tops of our heads. Most of these pieces are standard tunes, carefully rehearsed many times with the poet until we’ve got a good clear rich head arrangement. We don’t write it down, because we want to keep as much spontaneity and invention as possible, but at the same time we want plenty of substance to the music, and, of course, we want poet and band to ‘go together.’

It doesn’t necessarily have to be poetry and jazz. It could also be memoir and polka. If there’s one thing we can learn from Rexroth, it’s that we shouldn’t be afraid of the story-music combination, to have fun and get a little silly, to experiment and to invent. But we shouldn’t either relax too much, and should definitely rehearse it a few times. The responsibility is great; we’ll be carrying on the tradition of storytelling as song.  

‘I didn’t want it...’ by Kenneth Rexroth. Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk, 1958. [3:20] 

 This poem-song is also posted here.

Expert Kindness

When you work in radio, you have the power to record, edit, broadcast, and comment upon another person’s words. Once you have an interview on tape, that’s it. That person’s voice is frozen in time. If you critique their argument, then they won’t have the chance to respond. If you insult them, they won’t be able to defend themselves, or to insult you back. If you muscle all the advantages inherent to your position, you could really take the upper hand. But it’s better for everybody, including your listener, if you remain kind. Kindness and generosity are central to great storytelling. 

I was reminded of this while I was listening to radio superstar Ira Glass on This American Life’s Kid Politics episode. In Act Two, Climate Changes. People Don’t, Glass mediates a conversation between a climate science education expert (Dr. Johnson) and a 14 year-old girl (Erin), who is not convinced that climate change is real. Glass gives Dr. Johnson the opportunity to run through the most compelling evidence for climate change, then asks Erin whether she’s at all convinced by what Dr. Johnson has said. 

The central question is whether the American education system is in a position to persuade the public that climate change is real. (In 2009, only 57% of the US population believed that there was solid evidence for climate change.) Can science ever win over a skeptic?

You can feel in 14-year-old Erin’s voice that she’s a little intimidated by the situation. But her nervousness subsides as it becomes clear that Glass has only good intentions. As the interviewer and host, it’s up to Glass to provide both of his guests a safe space for expression. That he is so nice is anything but accidental or casual; if you listen closely, you get the sense that his kindness is complex, considered, and strategic.

He sets up the safe space from the beginning, by introducing Erin as a “really great, really smart kid.” After Dr. Johnson covers some tricky material about the Earth’s wobble, Glass says to Erin, “So I feel like some of this has gotten a little bit technical. Erin, before I ask you whether you find any of this convincing, do you have questions about any of this?” She says, “Not really, I think I understand most of it.” He responds, “That’s the way I feel too. I feel like I understand most of it.” 

He says, “Yah,” and “Mmhm,” while she’s speaking, like little nods of agreement. And at one point he summarizes how he thinks Erin might be feeling: “...like you’re caught up in a he-said-she-said kind of argument?” and asks if that’s correct. She says “Kind of, yes.” He empathizes with Erin every chance he gets, and never tells her that she is wrong.  

There is inherent drama in the unfair match between a climate-science expert and a 14-year-old skeptic. But Glass diffuses the tension by making young Erin the authority; she is the one with the power to say whether the evidence is convincing or not. As listeners, we are able to relax, knowing that in spite of the risky premise of this experiment, nobody is going to get hurt. 

Glass being so kind also gives Erin the opportunity to open up. This is beneficial to us listeners as well, because Erin says things that she may have otherwise been uncomfortable saying. So we come to better understand the logic behind her skepticism. 

Imagine that you’re Erin when you listen to this piece. Even though there might be some disagreement lingering, you’ll get the sense that she could listen to this story and not be offended. That’s probably a good litmus test for knowing whether you’re being kind or not. Could your interviewee listen and feel fairly treated?  

Aside from increasing your chances of making and keeping friends, kindness has the added benefit of improving any story you produce. In this case, Glass’ kindness allows the piece to develop in ways that it never could have developed without it.

Climate Changes. People Don’t. (14 min) Act 2 in Episode 424. This American Life 1/14/2011.

Off to a Good Start

I think that the most challenging part of a writing a story for radio is formulating the introduction. The stakes are very high: your listener will decide within a few short seconds whether to stick around for your story or whether to turn the proverbial dial, and so you must do everything you can to persuade that listener to stay, and you must do it quickly. A good introduction has the magical power to seize a person’s attention and keep them curious about how your story will unfold. 

I came across a great example of this within the Stanford Storytelling Project’s archives, in The Human Map, by Raj Bhandari. Within the first 30 seconds, Bhandari introduces himself, his topic, his character, and, perhaps most importantly, promises us that we will learn something new if we continue listening. So what else can we do but stay?! 

Here is the transcript of the first 30 seconds. I think it’s worth reading closely, because it is so packed with top-notch craft elements.

A genome is complete set of genetic material in a human. Through most of human history it has been hidden. But in today’s world we can now look into ourselves and map our genetic code. We can now understand ourselves at the basic, elemental level. But we’re more than just amino acids and proteins. This is the story of someone who learned a lot about her genes. But she found out that knowing about her genetic sequence raised more questions than it answered. 

Here’s what this brief introduction accomplishes: 

1. Starts by making sure that the audience is familiar with his topic. Defines his terms in very simple language that everyone can relate to. 

2. Indicates the context of his subject, the conversation to which this story makes a contribution. 

3. Clearly signals a mystery/question, and has an implicit promise. Implies what you will learn/understand something new by the end of the story. 

4. Introduces its narrator (himself) and his character.

As an aside, look how many sentences he uses in that intro! Short clauses are audio gold (because they’re easier for your listener’s brain to process), and when you listen to the story, you won’t even notice that he’s using them. Your attention will be drawn to the story of the woman who explores the mysteries of her DNA, right from the start.

The Human Map (19 minutes), produced by Raj Bhandari and Jonah Willihnganz for State of the Human in 2010

Tempo

When I first started producing radio, I took it upon myself to enlighten my listeners with unusual sound combinations. I would edit my stories so that the fast and the slow were sporadically mixed. Long, slow fade-ins were placed between quick, short speech excerpts. Sometimes I would sandwich five minutes of music between fifteen-second intervals of an interview. I thought I was doing my audience a favor by challenging their normal listening habits. I thought that the element of surprise would foster their keen listening. 

Now when I go back and listen to those stories, I realize that more than catching their attention, I was probably testing my listeners’ patience. The varying speeds of speech and music, and the unpredictability of it all, probably prevented the kind of attention I was hoping to encourage. In creating such a wild mish-mash of fast and slow, I think I thwarted my own attempt at producing immersive, engaging stories. 

There’s nothing wrong with a slow or fast story, per se, but over time I’ve come to prefer one or the other, not both at the same time. Listening to a good story should be like walking, or rowing, or carrying on a comfortable conversation. It should have a rhythm, a tempo, and it should keep that pace from beginning to end. This, I think, is more likely to sustain a listener’s attention over a long period of time.  

If you listen carefully to any great radio story, you’ll notice that it usually has a regular pace. The distance between speech, music, and ambient sound clips will be pretty consistent. Radiolab is super fast; This American Life tends to be on the medium side, sometimes slow. One venue that produces very immersive medium-paced stories, in which the balance between narration and scoring sustains a natural sense of momentum, is WNYC’s Studio 360. 

Their Peabody-award-winning episode, Moby-Dick, traces the influence that Melville’s 1851 book has had on several artists. Host Kurt Andersen speaks with, among others, musician Laurie Anderson, painter/sculptor Frank Stella, playwright Tony Kushner, and Juilliard professor Stanley Crouch.   

Towards the beginning of this episode, Andersen follows Professor Crouch into the classroom at Juilliard, where he is teaching a class on jazz in American history. Crouch compares the prose of Herman Melville to the stride piano of James P. Johnson, even though Moby-Dick was written “half a century before jazz was born.” This little vignette [7:00-12:30] follows a typical editing pattern of a just-right-paced story.

If you listen with a stopwatch, you’ll find that this story has a pretty even clip: 20-40 seconds of speech are followed by 10-20 seconds of music or ambient sound. There is some variation, but the regular rate of exchange between narration and music allows the listener to take in a reasonable amount of information, then have moment to process it, while anticipating the information to come. 

The music in this piece is edited to round out the ideas of Professor Crouch, as well as to queue us about what to expect next. In the opening, Professor Crouch compares the fearlessness of Melville’s prose to the improvisational technique in Johnson’s music. As Crouch draws this parallel, we hear the piano underneath, illustrating his idea. When he has finished a sentence, the piano music takes the stage for 10-20 seconds, as if adding color to the picture Crouch has created. 

Then, just when we expect it, the music fades down slowly, but stays softly underneath, and Crouch comes in with a new idea. The music simultaneously begins a new motif, paralleling the change in the direction of the story. When Crouch finishes his sentence, the music surfaces again, as if it absorbed Crouch’s new idea and is further embellishing it. The balance between narration and scoring in this piece, and the steady tempo of the exchange, sets up a structure of anticipation and satisfaction which carries us listeners merrily along.   

A good tempo is the kind of thing your listeners will probably never notice. It only stands out when it’s missing. If you listen to this Studio 360 piece, you’ll find it much easier to pay attention to the story than to notice the pacing. This, I’ve realized, is a good thing. 

Moby-Dick, [7:00-12:30], Kurt Andersen interviews Stanley Crouch, produced by Studio 360, Episode 1252, Dec 2011

One Step Script at a Time

We don’t know who this story comes from, and perhaps because the author remains anonymous, listening to The Age of Consent feels like being on the receiving side of a confessional booth. This story is essentially a series of incommodious admissions, portrayed through a series of vividly-narrated, increasingly intense moments. 

In the interest of protecting the author’s privacy, This American Life’s senior producer Julie Snyder reads the story on the air. It is recounted in the first person, and centers on the author’s teenage daughter’s first foray into sexual activity. 

Like any great story, this one is told in such a way that it feels organic and spontaneous, but also like any great story, it is actually very carefully engineered. In radio in particular, a story’s design remains well hidden because so much of its power comes from feeling authentic, intimate, and spontaneous.

Great stories, written and spoken, are often designed to develop in a series of building beats. I wanted to get a sense of how this story builds, and to do that, I made an outline as I listened. At the Stanford Storytelling Project, we made outlines at the start of every story’s production. We called them step scripts because they described the steps of the story (others call them storyboards or beat scripts). 

Step scripts can sometimes feel like an extra task in the production process, but they actually save us a lot of time, because making changes to a step script involves a lot less heavy lifting than making changes to a fully written and developed script. Step scripts enable us to tighten transitions, generate a more dramatic narrative arc, and make sure that every reflection in our story is earned by the anchor of a scene before we take the time to write the fully scripted version of a story. 

For my purposes in this post, a step is anything that advances the plot of the story. A step is usually an event or decision, and sometimes that event or decision is coupled with a reflection or interpretation. My stories are usually comprised of not more than 10 steps. 

So here’s our step script of ‘The Age of Consent’ (you might want to listen first, then look at this):

1. Scene: Mother at the kitchen table, late at night, ruminating over the fact that her 16-year-old daughter just lost her virginity. Reflection: She is not the mother she wanted to be, disappointed in the way her daughter has turned out. 

2. Scene: Mother calls the clinic to arrange birth control for daughter, receives an icy tone from receptionist, disapproval. Reflection: Embarrassed. Imagines a hypothetical situation in which a “good mother” tells her daughter not to have sex again until she’s married. 

3. Scene: Daughter comes home with a rose from boyfriend, and a morning-after pill. Mother tries to speed up doctor’s appointment. Reflection: Sense of urgency. Less than a week after losing her virginity, daughter is on the pill. 

4. Scene: Mother and daughter take a trip to Chicago. At lunch daughter asks if her boyfriend can stay the night in their hotel room. Mother consents.

5. Mother wakes up the next morning to see daughter and boyfriend tangled in a blanket. Reflection: Mother is baffled by her own role in the situation. Also has a “disquieting sense of envy.” 

6. Scene: Few weeks later, mother is reading in bed. She hears daughter downstairs cutting the screen out of her window. Daughter tells mother that her boyfriend is coming over. Mother tells daughter to let him in the front door. Reflection: Mother is tired and unhappy. Making her daughter happy seems more important than protecting her virginity or her reputation. 

7. Scene: Because daughter’s boyfriend is staying the night so often, the tension between daughter and her father has come to a boil. Daughter wants her mother to leave her father. Daughter asks if she and her boyfriend can stay at a hotel for the night. Reflection: Mother identifies with her daughter. Staying at a hotel could be therapeutic. 

8. Scene: Because daughter is 16 years old, mother has to check her in at the hotel. Mother watches people in pool, restaurant, and sprawls across the bed. Reflection: Mother understands why her daughter wanted to come here. She doesn’t want to leave. Mother wants same refuge she is giving to her daughter.

Through this exercise we are able to see how the tension in this story builds, and keeps on building, right through the end. Listening, we experience a decent dose of discomfort. But with a step script in hand we are able to step back from the emotional impact of the story and take a more critical look at its design. This kind of tool gives us the opportunity to manipulate a story’s rhythms and beats, such that each step yields its intended effect.      

The Age of Consent, (12 min), starts at [33:30] Episode 341, ‘How to Talk to Kids,’ produced and read by Julie Snyder, 2007.

Supportive Environments in Advanced Palliative Care

A map and evaluation of the academic literature on evidence-based design as it pertains to the last days of life. What is known about the impact of sensory environment on patients’ sense of well-being in the dying process? What is not known? This report was commissioned by OPCARE9, Stockholms Sjukhus, and the Karolinska Institute.

Druid Heights

Druid Heights was home to some the Bay Area’s most prominent countercultural figures of the 1950's, 60s, and 70s, whose influences on American society include significant contributions to the areas of feminism, literature, religion and philosophy, sexuality, film, music, arts and crafts, dance, and drug culture. This report identified the historical resources of Druid Heights and evaluated their eligibility for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Following publication, it was featured in the New York Times. This report was commissioned by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.