Tetherd Cow Ahead

Over at Jill Writes I learnt about a grass roots promotion for a book called The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison by blogger Paul Davidson.

Jill says:

The subtitle of the book pretty much sums it up: The Historically Inaccurate and Totally Fictitious Cyber Diaries of Everyone Worth Knowing. The premise is this: friendly bloggers give Paul a hand in promoting his book by spending the work week of April 10-14 blogging as historical figures (of their own choice, but that aren’t included in the book). Readers guess who they are.

Well, I’m a bit of an outsider on this, but I support anyone doing something clever, especially if there is a literary bent to the enterprise, and the idea caught my fancy so I’m participating in spirit if not in fact (and besides I missed the starting post).

Herewith my guest writer’s first entry. I don’t think it will be too hard to guess who it is, but it’s kinda not the point for me – I just like the idea.

Settle back, and light a solitary candle. Are you sitting comfortably…? OK, channelling:

April 11, 2006

Dear reader, once again have I retired to take up pen
(These days should I say keyboard? I can never be quite sure…)
And resume my nightly journal of philosophies nocturnal,
The ephemera infernal that my mind will not ignore;
Visions from the world of Charon that the righteous would abhor
Rendered tangible once more.

And I draw the heavy curtain, sure that she is dreaming, certain
That the night will bring her respite from the coughs that rack her core
This I hope, at least, for hoping is my only way of coping
Else I sit here merely moping, and the dread comes as before
Crushing, crashing waves of dread from some cold atramentous shore
Heaving heavy at my door…

…to be continued

A friend of mine told me the other day that secondhand copies of The Da Vinci Code are now so numerous that charities are refusing to take them any more. This led me to wonder to what kinds of uses we might put the ever-increasing tonnage of this dreary piece of literary ephemera as it reaches the end of its far-too-extended lifespan.

Here are some possibilities that occurred to me. Further suggestions welcome:

⊕ Send them back to Dan Brown so that he might comprehend the true magnitude of the hell he has wrought upon the rest of us.

⊕ Build a new World Trade Center out of them, because, should it be bombed by terrorists again, who would care?

⊕ Save them to build levees against rising sea levels (caused by global warming, caused by lack of trees, caused by manufacture of copies of The Da Vinci Code…)

⊕ Send them to prisons and make inmates read them if solitary confinement doesn’t work.

⊕ Build churches out of them.*

⊕ Use them to lure termites away from endangered wooden buildings.

⊕ Build a huge Wickerman-style structure out of them, imprison Dan Brown inside and burn it.

OK, over to you guys.

*’Cause that would piss a lot of people off.

Yes folks, we can reveal that after a lengthy and heated correspondence between Mr Brown and the Tetherd Cow Ahead History Department the author has acknowledged that his other book missed the mark by a country mile.

He has agreed to amend the numerous philosophical and historical errors in that previous work and tell the story the way it really happened.

In line with an agreement hammered out between TCAâ„¢ and Mr Brown’s publisher, all copies of that previous book are be taken from the shelves and replaced by even weightier volumes of The DaVinci Cow*.

What breathtaking secret does Mr Brown reveal in this new and controversial work? Well, all I can say is, that as Christmas approaches you would be well advised to note the Nativity scene and just who else was in that manger on that fateful night…

*The Cow is indebted to jedimacfan for using his considerable influence to obtain for us, at great personal risk, a sneak preview of the cover…

UPDATE: From around the globe, fragments in the puzzle that is The DaVinci Cow are already starting to come to light:

Fragment 1
Fragment 2
Fragment 3

UPDATE (2011): All the above links are now non functional. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

Attentive readers of The Cow will remember how Gould’s Book Arcade played a pivotal and somewhat spooky part in my quest to create a musical work based on Electronic Voice Phenomena.

Although I mentioned that Gould’s is one of my favourite places in Sydney, I glossed over it a little in the EVP post since it had a small part to play in that already lengthy story. But this wonderful literary landmark definitely deserves some dedicated Cow ruminations.

Gould’s is a great sprawling collection of secondhand books, records and magazines that is about five minutes walk from where I live. In my opinion it should be deemed one of Sydney’s National Treasures. The narrow aisles are quite literally crammed with books and it is easy to spend a Sunday morning rifling through the stacks.

In addition to the Raudive Breakthrough which I mentioned in my EVP post, I’ve found some great stuff here over the years. I have no doubt that in among the nooks and crannies of the shelves, pushed to the back and way up high, there are many fabulous gems to be found. Like all buried treasure, you’ll have to work hard for it though – there is a loose cataloguing system in place, but it is less Dewey Decimal than ‘oh, somewhere over there in the back corner’.

The people at Gould’s also understand the magical affinity between books and cats, and whilst the books are important, as is the proper order of the universe, cats have the upper hand.

Bob Gould tells me that he gets lots of tourists that come just to marvel at the massive collection, which approaches nearly a million books. Sadly, he says, most marvel but don’t buy. This is an unfathomable concept for me. If I want to avoid buying a book, that necessarily means avoiding even entering a bookshop.

Gould’s also has an online catalogue, accessible through their website or at Abebooks. But as instant-gratification as that might be, it’s nothing compared to spending a few hours among the shelves.

And for Cow’s sake, buy something!

Gould’s Book Arcade
32 King St
Newtown
Australia

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Try this (you will need about ten uninterrupted minutes):

Tune your tv to a channel that is just static. Make sure it’s not close to any actual transmission – it should be pure static. Turn the volume up to a comfortable level, not too loud. Sit close enough to the screen that it fills up most of your view. Now just watch attentively. In a few minutes you will start to see things. Shapes, movements at first, but then, possibly, faces, figures, objects. Soon enough you will hear voices in the static, and perhaps even music.

Go outside and look at the clouds. It doesn’t take long to find a face or an animal.

Hardly a week goes by these days without a tv report about someone finding a figure of The Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich or an image of Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun.

It’s plain to me what’s going on here – we see or hear a fuzzy enough data cloud and our brains leap in and impose some order on it. I imagine that once long ago when we were all living in the long grasses on the veldt, this capability came in mighty useful in picking out the shape of a hungry predator camouflaged in the shadows.

The whole thing comes unstuck though when there is actually nothing in the data but noise. Given a sufficient motivation, we can find pretty much anything we want in that chaos.

If it’s a case of lying on the grass looking at the clouds and playing ‘Find Elvis’ we pretty much understand it for what it is. Occasionally though, some suggestible people start to believe that it can’t just be randomness and that there is a message there, typically from God or the spirit world, trying to get through to us.

It’s instructive to listen to some EVP recordings without reading what the ‘voices’ are meant to be saying. The CD I mentioned in the last post The Ghost Orchid has a large selection of recordings of alleged spirit communications. The first time I listened to it, I couldn’t hear any sensible words at all in the faint voice-like sounds. Sure, they sound like voices (mostly…), but to my ear, just static-affected grabs of partially tuned radio signals. I could make a stab at what they might be saying, but I wouldn’t wager my house on any of it. Reading the transcriptions, though, like reading the transcriptions in Breakthrough is very instructive. It is clear that most of the content in these messages is coming from the mind of the interpreter rather than anything the voices are ‘saying’. In some cases, what I am being told the voices are saying does not in any way sound to me like what I am hearing.

I like ghost stories, but I don’t believe in ghosts. I think that the fact that large numbers of people are convinced they have been abducted by aliens is fascinating, even though I don’t believe for a moment they have. I find the fin de siecle obsession with Spiritualism endlessly intriguing but I don’t think there is a life after death. I thought the whole ‘Crop Circle’ phenomenon was wonderful, but I didn’t for an instant think that the circles were being made by extraterrestrials. What interests me is not so much these phenomena per se, but the people involved with them.

Human beings are amazing in the breadth of their capacity to be fooled. More than that, we want to be fooled, which is why it is so easy. Ask any magician.

Breakthrough is pretty much unreadable. A small portion of the book is given over to explanations of how the ‘spirit’ voices are captured and to rambling accounts, daft philosophizing and pseudo-scientific jargon about the voices and hypnosis and psychology and acoustics and all manner of other abstruse matters.

The larger part of the book consists of transcripts of what the voices had to say. Here’s the thing that becomes apparent very quickly on reading them: if these really are the spirits of the dead trying to communicate with us, then they have either all gone completely senile, or only the loonies are bothering to keep in contact.

These are some of the things the spirits wanted Raudive to know (the messages were also polylingual, just to add an even more insane dimension to the process):

Nedoma zirgi (Horses don’t think)

Matei sip galva (Mother has a headache)

Golva! Golvas nav! Konstantin, Konstantin, esmu ar tevi vienmer (Head! No head! Konstantin, Konstantin, I am always with you)

Vi koordinati (We are co-ordinated)

Kosta, van, pietiek ar muziku (Kosta, friend, it is sufficient with the music)

Konstantin, streite nicht! (Konstantin, don’t quarrel)

…and on and on and on for hundreds of pages with thousands of other incomprehensible and/or dreary snippets. The voices seem entirely incapable of stringing together more that about a half a dozen words into any semblence of coherence.

Man, and I thought this life was confusing and full of trivia. Heaven comes across as some kind of huge dull and sprawling cocktail party filled with the kind of people you’d step in front of buses to avoid. All on acid.

(If you want to hear some EVP the best all-in-one-place collection I’ve found is a CD called The Ghost Orchid. And if you want to make your own recordings of ghostly voices you can find out how here.)

But I digress. Back to the story. As you will recall, in last week’s episode I had forked out my 7 bucks for a copy of Breakthrough. Now I had some inspirational material for my piece.

What I thought of doing was this: since EVP is a technologically-based phenomenon, I would take the process one step further than plain ol’ magnetic tape and bring it into the computer era (there are now numerous examples of the Dear Departed communicating via computers, but that’s a story for another post, perhaps). My concept was to choose some of the phrases from the transcripts of Raudive’s recordings, and then use the speech function of my Mac to say them out loud. A dismebodied voice speaking the words of disembodied voices. Out of this, I would assemble a soundscape. Nifty, huh?

I typed out about a page of stuff. Then I realized the text was on the wrong computer, so I transferred it across to my work machine… and this is where another bizarre thing happened. Somehow, I have no idea how, the text I had typed out got completely corrupted in the transfer. Not a corrupted file mind you, just a completely corrupted rendering of the text. The document that opened was pages of unintelligible gibberish; fragments of words and bits of punctuation peppered throughout with lots of weird arcane-looking characters that I didn’t even know existed. This had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since.

Then I had a screwy idea: what if I got the computer to speak this stuff?

It was truly eerie. My Mac was speaking in tongues. Long experience has taught me that when an opportunity like this presents itself in the studio, you record it immediately in case something happens and you can’t reproduce it.

So I did. And then the computer crashed. And when it came back up, I could no longer open the text file.

Make of all this what you will. It gave me an interesting track. Like Marie Ann, the Marquise du Deffand once said: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them…”

Here’s how the piece eventually sounded: Incantation [mp3 file]

[To Be Continued]