"So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn't spent such a large portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum- to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction-sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures- within. ‘The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,’ says George Santayana, Whose autobiography (volume 1) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audio cassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects held together with Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, that the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine-these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Myler frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison.”
Nicholson Baker The Fermata
