I recently read two very different essays that make useful companion pieces. The first is a talk by Allison Parrish, who says “I’m a poet and computer programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program/Interactive Media Arts program.” Her prose strikes me as more professorial than poetic; here’s a sample:
The prototypical example of a transcription is a “transcript”—a written artifact that records the “content” of a stretch of language that was spoken out loud. And indeed, I’ll be talking about transcripts of this kind in more detail later. But I think the term “transcription” usefully applies to adaptations of language between any two modalities. For example, producing a typewritten copy of a handwritten manuscript is a kind of transcription. Taking notes on a lecture is a kind of transcription. Under this definition, even my verbal performance of this talk (reading from my speaker notes) is a variety of transcription.
She contrasts a “folk theory of transcription,” which is that transcription is, for the most part, a transparent process that mostly “just works,” with a more complex view that takes into account all sorts of things that get lost in the process; in her conclusion she says:
So: nothing survives transcription, in the sense that no text makes it to the far side of the transcription process with its life intact. And also, nothing does not survive transcription: the empty parts of a text, the silent parts, the parts of the text that draw attention to its own materiality, specifically operate outside transcription’s capabilities. And all of us—whether as artists, poets, or everyday conversationalists—draw on the “nothing” that forms the gap between what can be transcribed and what cannot as a productive and creative resource.
But we can also look at this from the other direction and recognize that, although no transcript can be accurate, transcriptions are an important site for linguistic intervention. Transcriptions crack open ontologies. You could say that, in a sense, the very goal of making a transcription in the first place is to make an argument about what cannot be transcribed. Nothing survives transcription, and though we may be “lost” (as Jordan Magnuson fears), at least we’re all lost together in an flowering forest of collaborative interpretation.
I found it thought-provoking but, well, academic (“Transcriptions crack open ontologies”); it leaves the reader stroking their chin and saying “Hmm.” Immediately after finishing it, I read John Lee Clark’s fiery “Against Access” (from McSweeney’s 64), which begins with a baseball “bearing personalized inscriptions by two players on the Minnesota Twins, Chuck Knoblauch and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett” that was given him by a staff writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune when he could still see well enough to enjoy baseball, and continues:
Although he gave me the baseball in the summer of 1993, it evokes my happiest sports memory, which took place two years earlier, when the Twins played in the greatest World Series ever. When Kirby walloped it out of the park to take us into Game Seven, I could hardly breathe. Then it was John Smoltz and Jack Morris taking turns on the mound. In the bottom of the tenth, with Smoltz out of the game and Alejandro Pena in relief, a Twin stretched a bloop into a double. A few at-bats later, the bases were loaded, and when the next batter made contact, the first tore off. As Dan Gladden, a.k.a. Clinton Daniel Gladden III, a.k.a. the Dazzle Man, flew down the home stretch, the universe, the whole world, my very being rushed toward him. Nothing can do justice to the moment he leaped and landed on home plate except witnessing it with your own eyes. Any attempt to describe it is futile. Description can only serve a roundabout purpose.
It took me a long time to realize this. I continued to follow sports after I could no longer witness events with my eyes. It pleased me to believe I still had access through sports news, box scores, occasionally enlisting someone to sit next to me and relay games, and, above all, reading fine sportswriting. Wasn’t baseball synonymous with literature? It therefore baffled me when I found myself keeping up with sports less and less. I skipped the Super Bowl a few years after the television screen ceased to be legible, breaking a tradition going back as far as memory. I unsubscribed from ESPN: The Magazine even though the list of magazines available in hard copy Braille is short and precious. Then it was down to one sportswriter, Bill Simmons, a most diverting raconteur. I accepted that I now required good writing to maintain my interest in sports. But even the Sports Guy’s columns began to lose their charm after a while. What was going on?
At first, what I read or listened to live through an interpreter teemed with players I had worshipped with my own eyes. I knew their faces, their tics, the way they licked their upper lips or groaned or stared or gasped in horror or with joy. As they faded into retirement, there was less and less poetry in what I gathered, replaced by new and strange and meaningless names. Direct experience goes a long way. It meant that sports did resonate with me for years after my last eloquent encounter. But without direct experience, I learned I couldn’t access the same life.
He goes on to talk about “access” (“Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don’t care about your whatever.”) and “our first truly tactile language, called Protactile” (see this LH post), providing some apposite anecdotes; here’s a sample:
In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”
“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”
Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”
It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option.
I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff in there that a lot of people would disagree with, but my point is that it sounds like a person talking, urgently, and saying things that need to be heard and dealt with. The first talk sounds like, well, a professor giving a talk. It’s probably an unfair comparison, and all it really shows is that I like personal voices rather than impersonal verbiage. (See Gogol’s importunate narrators in flea-bitten coats.)
The first except’s focus on what a transcription omits made me think about alphabets, writ large. Think of Ellington’s—or was it Strayhorn’s?—Take the A Train. The rests “sound” as
important as the notes. Musical notation transcribes those critical, countable silences.
As a youth I played contrabass clarinets, both b-flat and e-flat, in orchestras and symphonic wind ensembles. Often times the parts were transcriptions of parts originally written for strings.
The rests were frequent and often lengthy tacet passages, with a rest sign with a large number above it. Different kinds of silences.
I am confused in the first paragraph because I am not 100% sure either way whether the unnamed “Twin [who] stretched a bloop into a double” is or isn’t the subsequently-referenced Dan (the Dazzle Man) Gladden. A good editor ought to have done something about that. Although I accept that many non-American readers may find the entire paragraph baffling.
It is Gladden.
From the play-by-play of Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, Gladden led off the bottom of the 10th with a double, which is how he wound up on 3rd to score the only, and winning, run of the game.
Gladden is also the “first” in “the first tore off”, although here the narrator’s memory is inaccurate. With only one out, he did not run on contact, but demonstrated admirable restraint in waiting for the ball to land in play (Gladden is seen waiting in the lower left at 0:23) before jogging home, just in case it had somehow been caught and he needed to tag up in order to score legally.
Clark: “Nothing can do justice to the moment he leaped and landed on home plate except witnessing it with your own eyes. Any attempt to describe it is futile.”
Some are more futile than others; this reminds me of a passage from Blue Highways, where an old man argues that the skill of description was lost when TV supplanted radio:
The second essay reminds me of something I find annoying in The New Yorker’s typically excellent reportage. They will always give a description of the person who is the subject such as the color of their hair, what they are wearing etc. It must be editorial policy. But why? It adds no value to what the subject thus described is saying and the narrative does not hinge on such details.
I’m pretty sure I remember Knoblauch saving what would have been the winning run in game six, by faking that he had the ball at second.
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
(The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens)
And the Insurance Man hits that one out of the park!
This is just Mastodon, isn’t it? That is well known as a community of stern moral police, often about things that would seem bizarre even to many nerds sympathetic to the idea of libre and distributed social. (For example, it was common until well into 2024 for the highest-ranking posts on mastodon.social to be about hectoring people for not wearing a mask in public or observing social distancing, i.e. the Covid precautions that even committed and high-solidarity countries gave up years ago now). Has there been a big moralistic push for alt tags in some other internet circles that I haven’t noticed?
I was once told by a newspaper sports reporter that he assumed people had seen highlights on cable.
I wonder whether Clark tried listening to baseball on the radio. Though radio announcers are often just tv announcers rotating booths.
I’m sure he did; his point is that even the most vivid description is useless when your memory of the direct experience of what’s being described has faded away.
When I was a kid with no interest in sports, my dad had Cincinnati Reds baseball on the radio whenever there was a game. I’m sure he had a vivid picture of everything that was happening. To me, as I think I’ve said elsewhere, it was like listening to the Ethiopic Mass, enunciated one. word. at. a. time.
@earthtopus. I must say that looking at your link for what happened in between Gladden’s double and his actual scored run, it seems like a rather high-risk defensive strategy for Atlanta to have loaded the bases via intentional walks once Gladden had already reached third. OTOH, I guess they were in a situation where Minnesota scoring multiple runs in that inning was not actually any worse for them than Minnesota scoring a single run, so the trade-offs were different than they might otherwise have been and I guess more baserunners meant increased odds of getting someone else out before Gladden could quite make it to home.
That said, I would enjoy seeing a transcript of the radio coverage of that bottom-of-the-tenth, not least to see how spare/minimalist versus colorful it was.
@J.W. Brewer
I read loading the bases was a concession to the fact that even a long fly ball would score Gladden on a tag up from third, and that the only intended route of escape on a ball put in play was by getting a double play via force-outs at any combination of bases. Even if Gladden had crossed home plate before such a double play had technically been completed, by rule it wouldn’t have counted as a run.
Yes, I’ve seen that move made more than once.
A transcription (automated via YouTube, although some of the statements get predictably garbled — Gladden is referred to as “Clanton” as least once) of the radio call of the bottom of the tenth, synced to the television broadcast with gaps in the audio when the radio announcers were taking various breaks, can be found here, starting at 2:44:08 if the timestamp doesn’t work.
The personally funny thing about this thread is that I’m not even really much of a baseball fan.
In the seventies my father used to listen to speedskating on the radio, to high-strung live reports of technique, facial expressions and pace, of opening and closing gaps, of the importance of being first out of the bend before changing lanes, for round after round and pair after pair of skaters, carefully noting the dryly reported lap times and predicting the development of the race. When we finally got a TV in 1977, he soon lost interest.
We would often listen to the radio calls while watching baseball playoff and World Series games with the televisoon sound off. The radio play by play could be a lot more informative.
Yes, I did that as well. The Mets had terrific radio announcers in the ’80s.
The radio play by play could be a lot more informative.
Same with cricket commentary on BBC Radio 3. ‘Johnners’ was an institution. The gasometer, the seagulls in the outfield, the obscure statistics from the ‘Bearded Wonder’, the cakes at afternoon tea, … Indeed the actual play was more of a distraction from the entertainment.