Blog 03

The musical and visual accompaniment of Scotts performance of blert attaches a completely new perspective to his writing. Without the accompaniment, I found myself generating my own visuals in my head while trying to decipher his text. With the visuals and music, I thought that the performance had more of a set purpose or meaning that Scott was trying to get across. I also found that Barthes concept of grain is highlighted by the content of Scott’s performance. Especially in his solo performance, I struggled to find the meaning in some of his words, which made me pay more attention to his deliverance of them. Something I took away from reading Barthes was the mention of visual or auditory pleasure loosing the motive behind written works. He sums this up in his final thoughts in The Grain of the Voice by saying “Were we to succeed in refining a certain ‘aesthetics’ of musical pleasure, then doubtless we would attach less importance to the formidable break in tonality accomplished by modernity.” (P.509) Although he said this in reference to music, I think this same concept can be observed in Jordan Scott’s performances of blert.

The difference between written and spoken word is one that’s remarkable. Written word allows for one’s own interpretation, while spoken is the object of the speaker’s creation. This truly comes to light in Jordan Scott’s blert – when reading the poetry, it’s hard to picture the meaning of the odd combinations of words and sounds. But when you follow along the reading with the recording, it vastly changes the image of the text. More so, it creates the image – what was once a collection of mostly meaningless words is now a picture of sounds, sounds of, as Barthes put it, “the soul swelling or breaking”(506). The written text has a completely different meaning than the performed, since the stutter of the words gives it a completely different feeling and meaning. The stutter of Jordan Scott brings light to Cavarero’s theme of the “uniqueness of the voice” (521). In Scott’s poem “Two Cheeseburgers, French Fries and A Coke“, the performance and sound of the poem is what truly gives it its meaning, because without the stutter, there is no large significance in “cockeye bob, cocnut palm, cock-up, cocksucker, cock and bull, cock block, cockatoo, cock-of-the-walk, cockpit…” (45). The performance shows the tension that lives within the words and within his own hyoid bone, and shows the true voice of what the author intended, his individuality. The poetry combined with the recording shows his stutter in a positive way, in a way that celebrates the individuality of his own voice.

 

Too often, humans treat poetry (and written pieces in general) as items where meaning can only be drawn through the specific definitions of the words. In my opinion, Blert is a piece of writing where meaning can only be drawn by the combined sound of the words when spoken together, not by the specific meaning of each word. Reading through the book on my own, I struggled to find meaning just through the words themselves. I think this struggle is because I have trouble imagining what it is like to live with a stutter. The two performances completely changed my perception of the book. In the Sound Studies Reader, Cavarero emphasizes the difference between voice and speech. If you treat the book as a set of sounds that come out of Scott’s mouth (voice) instead of as a set of random words (speech), the book takes on a whole new meaning. The book sounds of Jordan Scott’s struggle with pronunciation and speech. It becomes a set of “verbal hurdles.” Furthermore, during the accompanied performance, one can approach the entire poems literally as pieces of music and forget about the meaning of the words entirely. Scott seems to have come to grips with his speech impediment through sound. During the entire solo recording, Scott stutters through some words (most notably in the first 30 seconds: “valsalvas,” “phonemes,” “burger”) much like a runner would jump over hurdles in a running race. The imagery from the words is less important than the sound that the words make. Voice trumps speech. Scott has built the book to test and celebrate his vocal chords and stutter.

While I was listening to Scott read the texts of Blert, I followed along with him. The main point of interest that I noticed is how when I read the copy of Blert; I understood what Scott was trying to tell us. When I listened to Scott’s performance of the book, I became confused because his stutter made the text seem flawed. Listening to Scott made me think of a child trying to learn how to speak. It seemed strange to think of a child when reading all of the sophisticated words that Scott wrote for his books. Throughout the video, it seemed like everything Scott tried to say was said by someone who is trying so hard to get their words out. It makes the whole reading different when you know it was written by someone who can’t read their own text fluently. To Barthes, this non-fluent speaking would not bother him because he cares about “the encounter between a language and a voice.” (p 505) This to him is known as “the grain,” or as he calls it “the grain of the voice when [a voice] is in a dual posture… of language and of music.”(p 505) So, according to Barthes, Scott’s “grain” can be seen as the reason as to why reading and listening to Blert fascinates people.

There is an interesting contradiction that arises after both listening to and reading Scott’s work. The written text uses eloquent language that is perfect in its ability to pinpoint the exact meaning of what he is trying to say. However, the performance of his text is very imperfect. His consistent stutter brings something child-like to the high-level vocabulary that he uses. In his performance, he seems to be forcing the words out of his mouth. There is not the ease that typically comes with a performance accompanied by music. To a few of our theorists, this imperfection of presentation is even more interesting than just the written words. Barthes is interested in the sound that the air of one’s voice makes against the friction of the body. He calls this phenomenon the “grain of music” He writes “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value (the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual…” (p. 509) The ‘grain’ of Scott’s music is what makes the intersection between his performance and written words so interesting.

The way ‘voice’ plays into Jordan Scott’s performances of Blert, both solo and accompanied, is quite different than in most other spoken performances. Scott, like other poets, use their voice as an instrument through which they make art, that is, without a doubt, what he is doing here, however, there is an obstruction, he has a speech impediment that breaks up his performance, and in an art where timing is so critical, one might assume that a stutter would be detrimental. However, that doesn’t really seem to be the case, in the accompanied performance his stutter along with the music and the sound of the waves work together to manifest his performance into something you are no longer listening to, but into something you are now living with him. Meanwhile, in the unaccompanied performance, the entire thing seems less artistic, and less of a performance, the stutter seems more like a imperfection that one should try to ignore. It’s like how Aristotle placed so much value on human voice, because it was intentional and meaningful, looking at Scott’s performance through that lens takes away a lot from his performance, because a stutter is both unintentional and meaningless, but that is clearly not how Scott uses it, he uses it as a means to perform an art.