booktwo.org

Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment.

The idea has been around for a while – see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example – but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography in the same devices, and making a useful connection between the two media produced.

Literature is usually, and paradoxically, perceived as both static – fixed and unchanging on the page – and temporal; spooling along a timeline, occupying an extended period from start to finish. If literature has a photo moment, a pinpointable spot, it is the phoneme, or perhaps the word. Joyce’s great ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng‘, my favorite sound in all literature, or Keat’s ‘Forlorn!’, tolling like a bell in Ode to a Nightingale.

Is there such a thing as a long textual moment? If there is, I would suggest that it can perhaps be found – again paradoxically – in silence, whether in the Beckett’s brooding pauses, or the crystalline, breathless moment at the end of a poem, when the last words hang in the air and, soundlessly, resound.

Above, my ‘long photo’ of African Wild Dogs pacing their enclosure at London Zoo, taken this bright, shiny morning on the canal.

Continuing booktwo’s mission to push lit into every available media space, online and off, we’re pleased to present a muxtape featuring some of our favourite pieces of poetry and spoken word. I’ve always been rubbish at arranging mixtapes, so apologies if the order jars a little.

1. William Burroughs – Thanksgiving Prayer
2. Stephen Spender – The Truly Great
3. Thom Gunn – Moly
4. Richard Hell – “The Rev. Hell Gets Confused”
5. Rainer Maria Rilke – Too Alone
6. Louis MacNeice – Prayer Before Birth
7. Ivor Cutler – Shop Lifters
8. Don Paterson – The Lover
9. Hilaire Belloc – Tarantella
10. T.S. Eliot – The Wasteland Part I – The Burial of the Dead
11. Brion Gysin – Junk is no good baby
12. James Joyce – Anna Livia Plurabelle (Finnegans Wake) > London, 1929

Listen to it here.

All readings are recordings of the authors themselves, with the exception of Rilke, who was, you know, German (I actually love my bilingual edition of Rilke’s selected poems, which allows you to savour the tone of the original language, even if you don’t quite understand it – but I digress). There is something quite special about hearing an author read their own work. They’ve been gathered over time from the peerless Poetry Archive, Ubuweb, and other places.

Enjoy – and know this isn’t just fobbing you off instead of real content. We’re actually working on something quite big.

The Poetry Archive is a fantastic example of what the connected, high-speed web can do for literature. Inspired by a meeting in 1999 between the UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington, it provides recordings of English-language poets reading their own works.

It’s a wonderful idea, exactly the sort of thing a Poet Laureate should be coming up with and promoting, and exactly the kind of resource that the Internet can handle so well. The archive is quite small at the moment (not to mention mostly male and entirely white, which seems pretty unforgiveable), but can grow forever, and hopefully new features will be added with more content. It would be good, for example, to be able to embed poems, like YouTube videos, in other pages – imagine opening up a MySpace profile, for example, and hearing not The Horrors or somesuch, but Allen Ginsberg intoning Howl?

I tried to hack the extensive javascript used to play the recordings, but did not succeed. If anyone finds a way to stream the files directly from the site, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll just link to a couple of personal favourites: here’s Louis MacNiece reading his dark, depths-of-the-war, Prayer before Birth, and Don Paterson’s lovely Scottish brogue in The Lover.

I got very excited when I saw a quote from Tristan Tzara on the rotating front page too (“Poetry shakes the laughter out of the apple tree”), but alas, no Tzara yet. There’s some great files on him at ubuweb however:

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