The Chill Room

The Chill Room, 1 May 2009 11:00pm PST

128k, one hour.

This is one that you have to go into in order to get out. It's not linear, even though I read straight through about thirty pages of the last section of the novel. I am not trying to "act" the text, i.e., no fake Irish brogue, I am just letting the words go on their own and take me with them. It begins sort of haltingly, catching up with itself, grows confident and more and more assured, until I lose myself in the reading and I become Beckett's voice and he becomes me. And then I don't know anymore.

With this I am sort of reminded of the weirdest things I've ever heard on the radio, like how in 1981 on WBAI in New York John Cage did a reading of his Empty Words -- it took about twelve hours and was about putting a Thoreau text to I Ching operations. My favorite part, which ran from about 5 to 6 in the morning, eliminated all vowels from the text and for an hour all Cage read were the consonants of the words. Or back in the mid-90s the amazing Damion Romero played, on his Psychotechnics radio show on L.A.'s KXLU, a forty minute recording of a woman giving birth! While the words I read do make sense, where the consciousness goes during this [unnamable] experience is like nothing I've ever done before.