I planned out a month during the summer, however, to do just that. Prior to the 4th of July I commenced the undertaking, just in time for the new landlord to commence construction, six days a week, which is still ongoing. This made the undertaking a journey against the noise current, prompting me to push against the churning noise of Brooklyn, localized in hammers and airplanes making their landing at LaGuardia airport. In between barking dogs and knife fights, I sought moments of silence or near silence, and word by word I spoke aloud the entire story. So, not only did I relive the story in extreme slow-motion, I became incredibly intimate with my voice and then not even my voice but the position of my mouth and lips and tongue and teeth. Many times I pictured my skull resonating these sounds, and I began to relive the emergence of language in all of its complexities via my species. I wondered from time to time what the whole story would sound like if it was read aloud in Japanese. Or Spanish. Or Navajo. Sometimes I drifted so far away from the meaning of the sounds that I felt like an alien soundbox. Ultimately I marveled at the complexity of imagination woven out of 26 simple letters my species uses in the English language. And of course over the four months that it took me to record the book, I'm certain my dogs wondered why I was talking to myself in the closet.
Should you chance upon this post, please take a listen for free, and be forewarned, I've been called a female Tom Waits. This is not just some pass-the-time audiobook. This is a work of audio art. If nothing else, I will pirate radio station it out to the cosmos in hopes some other species will receive my transmission. After all, we are all here to discover why we are here. I just tucked my discovery into something named detective fiction... Listen to salem x on Soundcloud here.
