The Growlery (June 2003) Essays by Michael Gilleland "Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here." Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter VIII
Noise Reading Aloud Hoaxes Most Recent Essays Archives

Noise

One of the infallible signs of spring where I live is the emergence from hibernation of cars blaring loud music from their open windows. The German philosopher Schopenhauer, in his essay On Noise, complained bitterly about the cracking of whips, a sound rarely heard these days. What would he have said about our age of chainsaws, leaf blowers, personal watercraft, and snowmobiles? I occasionally see cars sporting a bumper sticker which reads "Start Seeing Motorcycles." Motorcycles may be hard to detect with the naked eye, but not with the naked ear.

I'm cursed with an abnormal sensitivity to noise. The pad of a dog's feet across the wooden floor in my bedroom is enough to rouse me from sleep. One summer night in North Carolina, where I used to live, I spent a futile hour crawling around on the floor, trying to silence a cricket whose incessant chirping was keeping me awake. In his poem "A Minor Bird," Robert Frost says that "There must be something wrong in wanting to silence any song," and perhaps he's right. Boy Scouts learn that you can determine the temperature in Fahrenheit from a cricket by counting the number of chirps in a fifteen-second interval and adding 39, although some actual numbers don't seem to corroborate this formula. The next time a cricket keeps me awake, I'll try it.

One song I would like to silence is yapping into a cell phone in public. A couple of weeks ago I was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with friends. A boor at the next table, dining alone, kept yelling into one of these infernal devices during the entire meal.

One of my fellow employees has the unpleasant habit, nearly every morning, of calling up a local weather report number and putting the phone on hands-free while he listens to the day's forecast. Another workplace nuisance is the dull muttering of a radio in a neighboring office. I have earphones, used by workers who operate jackhammers, which are supposed to block out sound, but the chatter from that radio penetrates even these.

There are few places in the United States today where you can escape man-made noise. When I step outside my house before sunrise, I hear the roar of the freeway half a mile away. The sound of airplanes taking off and landing blights entire urban neighborhoods. Even the desert isn't immune from the ear-splitting racket of all-terrain vehicles. Surely Rousseau was right when he said, "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil."

Milton coined the word "Pandemonium" to mean "the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers" (Paradise Lost, 1.756-757). Its meaning soon shifted from that particular noisy place to any noisy place, and is now used of noise pure and simple. The etymology of this word is an apt reminder of the hellish, diabolical nature of noise.

In a letter to his wife (July 2, 1776), John Adams wrote about the Fourth of July, "It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for ever more." By illuminations he meant fireworks. I'm as patriotic as the next fellow, but I could easily dispense with the whine, snap, crackle, and pop of fireworks on the Fourth of July. I'll continue to celebrate the holiday as I have in years past, by quietly reading the Declaration of Independence.

It's not unusual for people to snap under the pressure of noise. A few days ago (June 2003) in Miami, Florida, Kevin Evers shot Luis Ledesma, Patricio Ernesto Fondovila, and Elizabeth Ferreira to death because of loud music. Gary Wayne Michaels wounded, but did not kill, Timothy M. Bey in Morgantown, North Carolina, for the same reason (October, 2001).

Sometimes it's dangerous or fatal even to complain about noise. In Covington, Kentucky (July 2002), Xavier M. Smith shot Douglas Gambrel after he objected to the loud music blaring from Smith's car, and in White Center, Washington (December 2002), Stephen Garrett's complaints about noise ended abruptly when he was stabbed to death by Edward McLaughlin.

My father used to snore loud enough to rattle the dishes in the cupboards. Literally. But that's one loud noise I'd give anything to be able to hear again. It would be sweet music to my ears.

Reading Aloud

After he became blind in 1652, the English poet John Milton (1608-1674) forced his daughters to read aloud to him in various foreign languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin) which they didn't even understand. There's an eerie painting (ca. 1656) in the Louvre of the blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughter, and Delacroix (1798-1863) painted the same subject.

Labor leader Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), who founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886, started his career as a reader in a cigar factory, someone who read newspapers and books aloud to the cigar makers. Although often illiterate, the cigar makers were not ignorant, thanks to the readers, and in the nineteenth century the Spanish crown at times outlawed the practice of reading aloud in colonial cigar factories, as a practice likely to foster independent thought and incite rebellion.

Greg Marcks' short film Lector (2000) tells the story of a reader in an Ybor City, Florida, cigar factory, a "lector de tabaqueria" named Cesar Hidalgo. His father and grandfather had also been readers before him, but Cesar's career is cut short when the cigar makers decide, in 1924, that they would rather listen to a radio than a reader. Despite the inexorable march of technology, readers are apparently not obsolete in cigar factories even today.

When you're reading silently, it's easy to skip over sentences and even entire paragraphs. It's not so easy when you're reading aloud. Children love repetition and seem never to get tired of hearing their favorite books read over and over again. When I used to read aloud to my son, at the end of a long day, I would sometimes try to cheat, by reading only the first sentence on a page, especially of a book which he'd heard dozens of times. But he wasn't fooled, and insisted that I read every single word exactly as written.

Reciting poetry from memory is a variation of reading aloud. At a local bookstore a few weeks ago, Garrison Keillor invited members of the public to recite their favorite poems from memory. I'm proud to say that my twelve-year-old daughter participated, reciting William Blake's "Tyger, tyger, burning bright," but I'm ashamed to admit that I myself can't recite more than a few stray couplets from memory. Schools used to encourage this type of thing -- I memorized Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" in junior high school, although I'd be hard-pressed to recall them now. Nowadays, I suppose, this falls under the category of "learning by rote," anathema to the modern educational establishment, which frowns upon it as mere "parroting" or "regurgitating."

Hoaxes

On 28 December, 1917, journalist H.L. Mencken published an article entitled A Neglected Anniversary in the New York Evening Mail, about the supposed 75th anniversary of the invention of the bathtub. In the course of the article he claimed that President Millard Fillmore installed the first bathtub in the White House in 1851. The plausibility of certain details, such as a reference to a non-existent medical journal, gives a veneer of verisimilitude to the hoax. Mencken kept his little joke secret for eight years, and it was not until he confessed (in an article "Melancholy Reflections," which appeared on May 23, 1926, in the Chicago Tribune) that the truth became known.

The amazing thing about Mencken's joke is that you can still find Web sites which solemnly trumpet the fact that President Fillmore (or his wife Abigail) installed the first bathtub in the White House! An example is a page of Presidential Trivia: Little Known Facts About Our Chief Executive Officer, on the web site of the Instructional Materials Center of the University of Missouri-Kansas City's School of Education. I always thought that Missouri was supposed to be the Show-Me state. Falsehoods are long-lived and deep-rooted, as stubborn to eradicate as kudzu.

Mark Twain, in his days as a journalist, penned several hoaxes. Two of his best known are Petrified Man and A Bloody Massacre near Carson, both published originally in the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise and widely reprinted in other papers of the day. A few years later, in an column printed in The Galaxy, Twain discussed both of these hoaxes without apology.

Something in me loves a clever hoax, especially one aimed at the pomposity of the academic or cultural avant-garde. Humphrey Carpenter, in the first chapter of The Inklings (1978), describes an elaborate prank planned by C.S. Lewis and his friends but unfortunately never perpetrated. They composed parodies of modernist verse, purportedly written by the imaginary siblings Rollo and Bridget Considine, and intended to mail them from Vienna to T.S. Eliot's magazine Criterion, in the hope that Eliot would publish them as serious poems.

The most successful academic hoax of recent years was a bogus article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which physicist Alan Sokal submitted to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University Press and at the time edited by Andrew Ross. Ross accepted the article for publication, and it appeared in the 1996 Spring/Summer issue on pages 217-252. Sokal immediately revealed his article as a hoax in a letter to Lingua Franca (May/June 1996, pages 62-64). An excellent dossier of documents on the ensuing controversy can be found on Sokal's web site devoted to the hoax.

Journalists are taught not to accept a fact unless it's vouched for by two or more sources, a prescription that always reminds me of Deuteronomy 19:15: "One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established," although journalists are not usually known as keen Bible readers.

It's a commonplace of textual criticism that the evidence of manuscripts should be weighed, not counted. The combined authority of forty-nine sources might count as nothing against the dissenting voice of one, especially if the forty-nine mindlessly parrot what they've heard, not what they know.