Check it out: David Means’ “The Knocking”
In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled “The Knocking” (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound–particularly on noise. In a nutshell, the story presents us with two neighbors who don’t like each other from first sight: one who lives upstairs and makes noise all day, and one who lives downstairs and has to cope with the constant influx of sound. What strikes me as interesting is that the narrator, understandably annoyed, describes the sounds coming from his neighbor’s apartment as “knocks.” The story, which aims to give us a look into the sad life of the man downstairs who can’t stand the noises coming from upstairs, actually ends up being a study in noise.
“The Knocking” is all about knocks: knocks as sounds and knocks as noise. The story starts out with a perturbed narrator, annoyed by the sounds emanating from the apartment above him. In the first paragraph–comprised of just two sentences–the sentences seem to flow like sounds floating in the wind. But don’t let the sensation fool you, the noises come off as rough and harsh (or at least that is how the narrator perceives them): “I know, as I wait, that the knocking will begin again, if not in the form of his tapping heel, then as some other kind of knocking: perhaps the sound of the hammer he uses to pound nails…, or the rubbery thud of his printer at work…, or the thump of his mattress hitting the slats.” The narrator admits that the sounds are not knocks per se, but that they became knocks over time due to their “mechanistic, reproduced quality.” Noise is clearly in the ear of the beholder, according to the narrator. However, further down, the narrator shows us a deeper understanding of the knocks: “At some point the sweet, even anachronistic, broom swish switched over to knock mode; not so much the actual sound but, rather, the intent behind the gesture had gone from the act of sweeping to the sound that the act made, so that it was clear to me below that what had started out as a normal cleaning routine had, perhaps in response to my moaning and occasional shouts up at the ceiling between sweeps, shifted to knocking.” The noise is displaced from the listener to the one making the noise; if the intention is to make noise, noise it is. As the story flows he understands the sounds his neighbor is making as more than just annoying rapts; he shows us how the sounds gain meaning via the listener as well as the the person making the noise.
Eventually the sounds become a metaphor for what is going on inside of him. The narrator has come out of a failed marriage, and we find out that before he moved to that apartment, he was married and had children. All that is left is an apartment and a fussy neighbor upstairs. The repetition and the lifelessness of the knocking echo the emptiness of his life. The knocking mocks what is left. This is best illustrated when he tries to explain to himself what happened in his marriage through his theory of love:
“Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone)”
It is one of the most beautiful passages in the story, and does justice to the theme of sound in the story. Love becomes sound, and instead of love at first sight, we have love at first vibration.
This story brought together two of my passions: literature and sound. Although I don’t claim that Means is the first author to focus a story on sounds, he did well by reading in those sounds the lives of the listeners/characters. “The Knocking” is short and enjoyable, but it is also meaningful and deep. I did not know about David Means’ fiction until this issue( here you can see the collections he’s published, and here you can read his latest story in The New Yorker), but after reading this story and noticing his attention to sonic detail, I wonder if his other stories are just as mindful. It’s refreshing to find fiction that attentive to sound, even if it brings back memories of my own noisy neighbors.
Bonus Track: read a brief interview of Means in The New York Times by clicking here.
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Remix the Libraries / Collaborative Listening
We’re all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even. At first you try to bottle it in, but what starts as a snigger eventually manifests itself as boisterous laughter. You’re making noise, then: SHHHHHHHHHHHH! Libraries, for better or worse, are quiet spaces, but they are also important third-spaces, social forums and purveyors of an all-ages educational opportunity. Even though we imagine libraries to be quiet, they often distribute music. This blog entry suggests a musical intervention of sorts, a reconstitution of the library as a space of noise. A site of collaboration in the public imaginary where conversations can take place over a splice of Iggy Pop and Tchaikovsky fading from one century to the next. This is no pipe dream, it is a radical rethinking of what tomorrow’s library could be within the parameters of virtual space.
This idea is nothing new, Library Information Science scholars like Brenda Dervin have been arguing since the seventies that libraries should be configured as sites of community and activity, not as tombs of information. There is a fundamental tension still; libraries are a space of study, and most users are more comfortable reading in a quiet space. Virtual spaces offer a way out of this problematic by allowing for a second acoustic space for users to listen in, a space which can be conveniently tethered to social networking software, like Facebook. I am arguing, along with my friend Nathan Graham, that libraries are the ideal setting through which to stage a new social platform of participatory and collaborative listening. Using emergent tools from social media platforms, users can cobble lists for shared virtual listening (complete with edited audio clips) and discuss them in a virtual forum. Because of the library’s institutional history as an educational space, these locally hosted forums can stage a strong argument for collaborative listening as fair use, an integral part of the 21st century library.
Right now this idea is just a seed: we are thinking of the platform, its potentials and its restrictions. Notably, in a not so discreet attempt to get feedback from the Sounding Out! reader base, I want to further entertain the idea of collaborative listening. Collaborative listening is a more interactive form of collective listening – it implies that a conversation between listeners is taking place. Some physical spaces of collaborative listening could be the living room while a record spins on a turntable, the classroom where a group of students discuss a song, a subway train where two people share MP3 earbuds, a car in a parking lot surrounded by kids all listening to its stereo, or even Youtube and Last.fm where people often leave comments about songs in the forum below. It is important to consider open spaces which can push against the impending corporate monetization of music sharing and cloud computing as Patrik Wikstrom establishes in his 2010 book, The Music Industry. Bringing this conversation to libraries helps to smash our prejudice of the library as a tomb of knowledge, it opens up the space and facilitates conversation between a greater breadth of citizens. Hopefully, this platform will help transform the library into a open source hub of conversation and collaboration.
So let us listen silently with earbuds in, to the libraries who might channel noise through the internet, a fantasy/testimony to the hopeful sounds of tomorrow.
AT
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