Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
Posted on

Senseless: One Soldier’s Fight to Speak Against War

Well, how do you like that! We just got ourselves a DVD/VCR recorder, in hopes of upgrading our video library and phasing out the old tapes that are piling up all over the place. As it turns out, the cassettes I shipped over from the US, which had played fine on the machine that gave up the ghost a couple of days ago, are being rejected by the new, regionally coded, high-tech marvel. Is it any wonder I am such an advocate of the state-of-the-Ark, the marvels of old-time radio drama?

On this day, 9 March, in 1940, for instance, playwright Arch Oboler masterfully exploited the potentialities of the medium with his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. As reworked by Oboler, this “most talked of book of the year” relates the experience of a soldier (portrayed by James Cagney) who lost his limbs, his vision, his hearing in combat. More than twenty years later, lying “alone in a room in a hospital close to your city,” having “no arms, no legs, no ears with which to hear, no eyes with which to see, no mouth with which to speak,” he yet learns to communicate what serving his country at once enabled and disabled him to say. He does not want a medal; he wants to speak up. It is a freedom for which he fought with the weaponry that is responsible for its loss.

According to Oboler, Trumbo’s story “has even greater emotional impact” on the air because, by virtue of being “transformed into living speech,” the soldier’s words attain an “almost unendurable reality.” Johnny does not address the audience, but is overheard in his desperate attempt to make himself understood by the hospital staff and visitors, the living beings he senses only through the vibrations of their movements.

Oboler was particularly impressed by the scenes in which the “blind, deaf and dumb soldier learns to recognize the approach of the nurse by the vibrations of her footsteps coming up through the bedsprings and reacting against his skin.” It is a cruel irony that appeals to the melodramatist: a man who nearly lost all his senses now tries to make others come to theirs.

Unlike the 1971 movie adaptation, however, “Johnny Got His Gun” was produced at a time when speaking up against war was neither daring nor idealistic. Indeed, most intellectuals warned against a false peace, whereas to isolationists, who didn’t mind dealing with fascists overseas, keeping out of it was literally good for business.

Oboler was no pacifist; soon he would distance himself from “Johnny” and advocate instead the stirring of “hate” as being instrumental in motivating the masses in wartime. “Do not tell me that the people are disillusioned because of our past sins, our ‘Johnny Got His Guns,’ and so on, and that they need a dream of the new world before they are going to fight,” Oboler argued; “anger is what people want. And they want hate, the hate of a determined people who are going to kill and must kill to win this war.” That mass of “living flesh” in the hospital bed had made his appeal in vain.

New generations of Johnnies are getting their guns. No one hands us a voice; that we have to find for ourselves and raise while we may.

Posted on

“Being Served”: Mr. Humphries, Mr. Dickens, and Me

Well, we’re “free”—all of us. John Inman, the outrageously queer men’s wear salesclerk Wilberforce Clayborne Humphries of Britcom fame, is free of all bodily cares after taking the inside leg of the grim reaper today at age 71. Mr. Dickens, whose words have long been spread somewhat too freely in the public domain, is currently being made free with in a new stage adaptation of Great Expectations, the world premiere of which I attended last night. And I? After having been Internet-free for yet another ten days (four weeks and counting so far this year), I am at liberty at last to go on about Mr. Humphries, Mr. Dickens, and myself . . . sharing the miseries of not Being Served well.

“I’m free!” That, of course was Mr. Humphries’s catchphrase, a phrase to catch his drift with. And while he wasn’t, really trapped as he found himself in that ultra-conservative world of the Grace Brothers emporium—oh, brother, the disgrace of Empire!—watching him sure felt liberating to those who shared his lot. Particular, prickly, and peculiar, Mr. Humphries came across as a none-too-distant cousin of Franklin Pangborn, the Queen of Paramount. You know, the kind of character you are free to laugh at, if only to remain in the chokehold of the stereotypes that brought him into being.

For anyone who, like me, grew up with an anxiety of being deemed abnormal, an anxiety that, to be endured, was best (that is, most safely) wrapped in the cloak of flamboyancy, Mr. Humphries was at once a model and a monster—a grotesque mask you felt inclined to pick up mainly because you lacked the fiber and fortitude to tear down the structure responsible for its manufacture and marketing. No, the likes of Mr. Humphries are never free. Mr. Inman, at least, got to celebrate his coming out, however late in life, by publicizing his “gay wedding,” thereby to dismantle what is the most insidious of all secrets . . . the open one.

Mr. Humphries is a thoroughly Dickensian character: a mores-reflecting surface that is buffed up to speak and account for the unspeakable and unaccountable: a caricature that sanitizes as it unsexes. In the Dickensian universe—which is no larger than a Victorian middle-class closet, a repository of so many readily retrievable garments—it is the figure of Pip that best demonstrates the pitfalls of trading one’s identity for a dangled, ready-made mask—a substitution of which its creator had made a trade. Pip is as much a mask of melodrama as it is an unmasking of its workings and limitations.

Pip’s struggle and ultimate inability of coming into his own become apparent in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Dickens’s story, in which the episodes of Pip’s life are staged with a minimalism that divests the melodrama of its thrills and offers nothing in their stead, a creative “zilch” for which “existential void” is a mere euphemism. A set of loudspeakers is filling in as a Greek chorus, robbing Pip of the only authority he enjoyed—the privilege to relate the tale in which he found yet failed to find himself.

The silhouettes of characters traversing the stage in front of a white screen suggest what is clear from the start of this production: that none of the figures in the play are treated as living individuals, an impression enhanced by the doublings of most of the eight cast members. The avoidance of overt reflexive gestures—a director in search of his characters, perhaps—render altogether lifeless what might have generated some energy as a Brechtian comment on the world Dickens inhabited and peopled, a world whose masks and conventions we have not quite managed to drop, as much as we delight in making a spectacle of it.

Posted on

Greek to Me: Notes on an Identity Crisis

Well, I can relate to it. That black sheep on the brow of the hill behind our house. After well over two years of living in Wales, I still feel very much like an outsider. I’m not sure whether I am too resisting of this new, old culture—which is struggling, with a mixture of self-consciousness and pride, to assert itself against or alongside England—retreating and subsequently fading into the American pop culture gone stale to which this journal is largely dedicated.

My self-confidence and sense of belonging were not bolstered any last weekend, when I accompanied my better half (just returned from London) to a dinner party whose far from rustic guests included a Deputy Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. I did not expect to be conversing about my doctoral study on old-time radio, let alone impart my enthusiasm about the subject. I would have settled for literature, or travel, or dogs (Camilla having ditched the royal Corgies in favor of a Jack Russell like—or perhaps quite unlike—our inimitable Montague). Unfortunately, I did not get to share much of anything that evening. The guests chose, for the most part, to speak in the native tongue, which, I assure you, does not sound anything like English.

Yes, I can relate to the black sheep on the hills. And I sure can relate to the two main characters in the inaugural broadcast of Great Plays. After all, the comedy that evening was Aristophanes’s The Birds, in which two disenchanted old Athenians—Pisthetairos and Euelpides—leave their native soil in search of . . . Cloudcuckooland. A weekly radio program offering adaptations of Western drama ranging from ancient Greece to modernity, Great Plays premiered on this day, 26 February, in 1938. Undoubtedly, it is not the easiest introduction to old-time radio, although the multitude was being accommodated (or patronized) by the deletion of most Greek references.

Pardon me for failing to come up with a rara avis of a metaphor suitable to the occasion, but it sure is difficult to take off for unknown territory and expect to be surrounded there by those who are of the same proverbial plumage.

Nor do I quite understand the recent influx in visitors to this site from China, presently accounting—to me still unaccountably—for over 25 percent of my, er, readership. They are not likely to find much of interest here, aside, perhaps, from my reflections on avian flu in relation to the famed story by Daphne du Maurier. Then again, “China” and “Chinese” have been mentioned in this journal on several occasions, including these essays on The Shadow, Mr. Moto and the passing of Tokyo Rose, and Pearl S. Buck.

In a word, an admittedly somewhat tacky one in this context, I am disoriented. Perhaps, a flight to New York City is in order. A slow boat to China just won’t do.

Posted on

Heavenly Days: What I Get to Watch When I’m Home Alone

Here I sit like a good egg given up for Lent. After having spent much of the week leading up to Ash Wednesday—a period celebrated as Karneval in my native Germany—entertaining two old (make that “longtime”) friends eager to get away from those festivities. The guests gone and my better half away in London, I now have the place pretty much to myself (the pleasant company of Montague excepting). Heavenly days? Not quite; but I did get to watch the movie. Heavenly Days, that is, a 1944 comedy based on the characters created by Don Quinn for his hugely popular US radio series Fibber McGee and Molly (many episodes of which are available online at the Internet Archive).

My web journal tells me that I recorded this film way back in November 2005, during a visit to New York City, my former home. So, it has taken me a while to catch up with Fibber McGee and Molly in their last major movie outing. It takes a day like this to do so without impunity, that is, without having to importune someone else who, despite having humored me by sitting through Look Who’s Laughing (1941) and much else besides, cannot be expected to share my enthusiasm for radio stars on celluloid. Who would?

That said, I have never been a friend of Fibber McGee and Molly; I much prefer the urbane wit of the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, a situation comedy conceived by the same writer, over the middle-America average-Joeness I have neither experienced nor longed for during my fifteen years in the United States. That did not stop me from picking up a copy of Charles Stumpf and Tim Price’s Heavenly Days at the Museum of Television and Radio while visiting Gotham in August 2006.

Messrs. Stumpf and Price point out that Heavenly Days, unlike the comedy team’s previous Look Who’s Laughing and its follow-up Here We Go Again, was not a commercial success. Yet whereas those earlier movies were rambling and largely inconsequential, Heavenly Days attempts to be earnest and socially relevant. Like the radio series, it is in the service of wartime propaganda, sending Fibber and his wife on an educational trip to Washington, from which they return with an awareness of their importance to the nation.

Heavenly Days is at once rebellious and (pardon the anachronism) politically correct. It seems determined to infuse the final months of the Second World War—a period in which fear and fervor made way for indifference and impatience—with the spirit of the New Deal, which, by 1944, was rather old hat. According to the peculiar logic of the sentimental comedy into which he is thrust, Fibber has to learn what it means to be “average,” a label all of the citizen he encounters vehemently reject; that it is neither a shame nor a statistical sham, but an honor and an obligation, considering that being average makes him a representative of the people who declare and elect him to be just that.

Of course, Fibber long had the vote of the people who, by tuning in to his weekly radio program, kept him in the office that was a prominent slot on the air—that realm of statistical averages and mediocrity. After the less than favorable reception of his Heavenly Capraescapades, that slot must have seemed a good place to come home to . . .

Posted on

Who Knows What Heart Lurks in the Evil of Men?

Driving Miss Daisy it ain’t.  The Last King of Scotland, I mean, with which I finally caught up last night at the local movie house. Like Downfall before it, this portrait of a dictator breaks with the conventions of Hollywood melodrama by challenging us to discard with the convenient absolutes of good and evil, the very binaries that clarify much but explain so little. Director Kevin Macdonald—whose next project, a documentary promisingly titled My Enemy’s Enemy, will deal with Nazi Germany and feature archival footage of Adolf Hitler—does not presume to judge his subject, Idi Amin, but to show or suggest the workings of his mind, his joys, sorrows, and fears.

In traditional Western storytelling, be it for stage or radio, for big screen or small, sketches of a certain enemy “other” are often crudely drawn for the sake of ready identification; the resulting picture is not that of an ostensibly evil person, but of evil personified. It is the very stuff of satire and sensational melodrama in which the alleged shortcomings of a dangerous individual may be exposed or playfully defused for the purpose of stirring an apathetic populace or boosting the morale of those stifled by terror. Historical portraits or caricatures of villainy rarely dare to encourage empathy and thus avoid to render their subjects human; they shun any approach suggestive of naturalism—the attempt at a serious and sincere depiction of what is.

Then again, what is? No matter how convinced I was by Forest Whitaker’s deservedly Oscar-nominated performance, I did not once think of The Last King as anything other than a work of fiction, a response largely owing to a lack of knowledge about the historical figure depicted, the culture represented, and the events on which it is based—the kind of ignorance I might pass off as skepticism if I were not hoping to achieve some semblance of naturalism in these soundings of my mind. Years of schooling and pop cultural exposure seem to have made it difficult for me to think of history as anything I sense to be reality. By virtue of seeming real, Whitaker’s Amin became a fiction to me.

My own reservations and prejudices aside, Macdonald’s film raises questions about what, beyond verifiable data, the records that have not been lost or suppressed, should make it into our histories, those stories we (or those acting on our or someone else’s behalf) construct out of scraps of documented facts upon which historians impose the comforting logic of causality. Like All the King’s Men, The Last King documents the corruption of power; yet it is also a corruption of documents. The figure of the young Scottish doctor, through the interaction with whom Amin’s personality is being revealed (for the cinema has to tell by showing), does much to render suspect the historicity of the drama, suspicions that even the facts and figures appended to the film after the conclusion of its narrative cannot lay to rest.

After all, how are we to know what heart lurks in the evil of men? What does it mean to accept that historical figures like Hitler or Idi Amin were thinking, feeling men rather than destructive forces? Perhaps we dread real people in our histories because they make us aware that, given human nature, no tools of social science can prevent us from repeating the horrors of the past.

Posted on

Beyond the Walk of Fame: A Monument for Madeleine Carroll

I don’t quite understand the concept; nor do I approve of such an abuse of the medium. The radio alarm clock, I mean. It accosts me with tunes and blather when I am least able or inclined to listen appreciatively. I much prefer being turned on by the radio rather than being roused by it to the point of turning it off or wishing it dead and getting on with the conscious side of life. This morning, however, BBC Radio 2—our daybreaker of choice—managed both to surprise and delight me with the following less-than-timely newsitem. Twenty years after her death, British-born Hollywood actress Madeleine Carroll (whose life and career are documented in this website maintained by her cousin) returns to the place of her birth as the English town of West Bromwich unveils a monument erected in her honor.

Film stars are perhaps least deserving of monuments—not merely because their off-screen antics rarely warrant praise, but because the celluloid on which their contributions to humanity are preserved are fitting enough testimonies to their achievements. Unless, that is, the achievements lie beyond those captured on film. In Carroll’s case, this translates into a return to Britain to serve as a Red Cross nurse during the Second World War.

The star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent put her film career on hold following the death of her sister during the London blitz in October 1940. Just days prior to this personal loss she had already signalled her intentions by contributing to a Canadian Red Cross Emergency Appeal, which aired on 29 September.

Subsequent parts in American radio dramas echoed her new career. In the late 1930s, Carroll had starred in frothy comedies and sensational melodramas produced by the Campbell Playhouse and the Lux Radio Theater; during the war, by comparison, she was most often heard in propaganda plays written for and produced by the aforementioned Cavalcade of America. On 5 October 1942, for instance, she played an army nurse in “I Was Married on Bataan,” scripted by reluctant radio playwright Arthur Miller. Two weeks later, on 19 October, she portrayed a pioneering female doctor in “That They Might Live”; and on 30 November 1942, she played the title character in “Sister Kenny.”

Unlike so many of her glamorous colleagues, Carroll truly inhabited these roles. It is her humanitarian work that is being remembered today.

Posted on

"Ancient Sorceries" and New: Wales, Witchcraft, and the Wireless

I can’t say that I knew much about Wales before I moved here from New York City. Undoubtedly, I still do not know as much as I ought to by now, well over two years later. Yet, however much I remain attached to America and its 20th-century popular culture, there is no getting away from what is now becoming home. On this day, 15 February, in 1948, for instance, the East Coast edition of the US radio series Escape presented “Ancient Sorceries,” a fantastic tale set in a remote town on the Welsh border, a town “between two worlds.” Having felt torn between two (or more) worlds myself, I felt compelled to listen in . . .

“Ancient Sorceries” was adapted by the aforementioned Les Crutchfield from a short story by Algernon Blackwood. It opens with what has been called the most romantic of radio sounds, the whistle of a locomotive. Aboard the train is Arthur Llewellyn, a Londoner who relates the strange occurrences during a weeklong—and unexpected—visit to a stay on the border to that wild country west of England.

He describes the countryside as “singularly empty, deserted of life.” There is a haze hanging over “the soft hills and the valleys between,” giving the “whole landscape a feeling of enchantment and unreality.” It is a haze I have often seen from our living room window, as illustrated by the above photograph of that very view, a scene that initially filled a staunch urbanite like myself with sensations not altogether pleasant.

Captivated nonetheless by this air of mystery, the Englishman alights, deciding to spend a night in “this peaceful spot,” despite the advice from a fellow passenger not to linger—not, that is, if he places “any value” on his soul. Heedless of this warning, Llewellyn leaves the train and, inquiring about a room for the night, is welcomed by the local innkeeper. Indeed, he appears to have been expected, as if returned to the village rather than visiting it for the first time.

Nor are the innkeeper and his wife the only ones to treat him like this. Who is the beautiful woman who asks him to come back to her? “You belonged to us once,” she insists. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Or loss of memory, perhaps? Can this mystery be explained away by science? However terrified, Llewellyn is determined to find out . . .

Aside from mentions of Swansea and the English town of Hereford near the Welsh border, there is little Welsh spirit in this dramatization of “Ancient Sorceries.” Dramatized in a perfunctory manner and delivered without accents to lend it character and authenticity, this is one of Escape’s lesser efforts. It is peculiar, however, that Crutchfield should have chosen to impose this relocation, considering that the original story was set in France. Was there, perhaps, more mystery to him in the wild of Wales, so little of which he managed to capture. Indeed, the strength of his play lies in what it suggests, rather than tells or enacts.

The awareness that the narrator has yet to find out—to live out—the end of his own story encourages the listener to become seer. The limitations of the storyteller turn us into tellers of his fortune. Having been conducted by a slight sketch and a few aural signposts, our trains of thought are railroaded to that place “between two worlds,” a misty and indistinct border region in which to conjure and scheme like the fates of the ancients. Such are the sorceries of radio.

Posted on

Chalk Circuits: Brecht, the Stage, and the Radio

Well, it rolled into town last night . . . and carted me right back to high school (in Germany, anno never-mind), where I was exposed to it first. The National Theatre’s “education mobile,” I mean, whose production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle I went to see at the local Arts Centre. Despite the publicly staged custody battle at the Circle‘s center, I did not once think of the circus that has become the life and legacy of Anna Nicole Smith. Brecht’s parables of the filthy rich and dirt poor are hardly without tabloid appeal; but instead of drawing parallels between this story and history, I felt encouraged by the production’s interpretation of Brecht’s theory of Epic Theater to contrast the techniques of the theatrical stage with the potentialities of the sound stage, radio being a medium of which Brecht was suspicious at first (given its exploitation in Fascist Germany), but for which he was to write a number of plays.

Communism has always been big business in capitalist societies, both as fuel for wars, cold or otherwise, and as an artistic construct. A carnivalesque appreciation of his anti-capitalist allegories from the comfort of a loge might run counter to anything Brecht envisioned in his organon, but I suspect that such is the spirit in which most audiences take in his works for the stage. They are didactic, all right, but that does not mean theatergoers are ready, willing, or able to be instructed.

Instead, audiences might take in, take on or leave Brecht’s Epic theatricals, only to return to their shopping, to the latest installment of an American television serial featuring the works of Hollywood’s highest-paid plastic surgeons, or to their various modes of right-winging it in style. Episches Theater struggles against the complacency induced by the convenience and relative comforts of a reserved seat in a handsome theater. Theatergoing, after all, is little more than a costly interlude these days, a getting-away-from the everyday rather than a forum in which to face it.

Besides, Brecht’s apparatus seems by now more creaky than a well-oiled Victorian spectacle. Its stage was not the proscenium arch of melodrama, plays of sentiment and sensation that draw you in and, once the curtain is drawn, absolve you from any responsibility to engage further with whatever you had the privilege of witnessing. Never mind that The Caucasian Chalk Circle draws to a close with the potentially high-tension climax of two women called upon to tear at a child rightfully belonging to one of them (the verdict depending on the judge’s—and our—definition of “rightful”). Much lies outside this circle that invites onlookers to stray from the center.

The main principle of Epic Theater is not to let anyone watching get emotionally absorbed in the action. Brechtian drama challenges audiences to observe behavior, action and circumstance, however stylized, in order to assess and draw conclusions from it. Conceived as a theater of estrangement (or Verfremdung), it is meant to provoke thought rather than pity. The play (and the play within) remain an artifice rather than becoming—or assuming the guise of—reality.

In order to create this sense of estrangement, the National Theatre production lets the audience in on the stagecraft involved in the manufacture of realist theater, especially the motion picture variety whose special effects trickery has long surpassed traditional stagecraft. The stage was both scene and soundstage, a set peopled with foley (or sound effects) artists at work in the background and, to highten the effect of alienation, interacting with the performers or taking part in the drama they help to mount. Not since I last attended a production of a radio drama have I seen so many tricks of the trade displayed, from the production of a crackling fire to the imitation of a bawling infant.

I’m not sure whether Brecht would have approved of this interpretation of his theory, which results in a spectacle that was amusing rather than authoritative, a Marx Brother’s production during Karl’s night off, a staging that turned Verfremdungseffekt into an elaborate running joke. This Chalk Circle, replete with a narrator addressing the audience with a microphone in his hand, was a radio melodrama turned “epic” by virtue of being both played and displayed.

On the air, with its techniques obscured from view, it would have come across like the very stuff against which Brecht rebelled with his theory. The eye and the ear were pitted against each other, an “epic” battle of the senses whose enemy is realism but whose victim is engagement. For once, my ears were the channels of realism, while my eyes were instructed to see and disbelieve. Sure, I learned how to set a palace on fire; but Revolution had nothing to do with it.

Posted on

Up to Scratch; or, Giving the Voice the Finger

I guess we have all been exposed to them, no matter how quickly our fingers move to stop our ears. Sounds that drive us up the wall and get us to scream, shiver, and wince. For some, it is the screeching of a piece of chalk on a blackboard (perhaps already one of the “endangered” sounds aforementioned; for others it might be a creaking door swinging on rusty hinges. Fiddlesticks (however annoying they might be), that’s nothing compared to the noise Agnes Moorehead has to endure in the Suspense thriller “The Thirteenth Sound,” first broadcast on this day, 13 February, in 1947.

It is a battle of sounds, mind, considering that Moorehead had one of the most grating voices in the business, which is just what makes “The Thirteenth Sound” (written by writer-actor team Cathy and Elliot Lewis) such a frightfully clever—and cleverly frightful—vehicle for the “First Lady of Suspense (previously mentioned here).

Crime dramas can be divided into head-scratchers and nail-biters; the former being the whodunit, the latter the kind of thriller I shall call the will-they-won’t-they, in which a character, hero or villain, is placed in a shaky situation or shown to be in an unstable frame of mind. Will they get out of it, or won’t they. This is stuff in which Suspense, which started out as a series of detective mysteries written by the aforementioned John Dickson Carr, came to specialize after the success of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” also starring Ms. Moorehead (and featured in one of my podcasts. Improving on both the head-scratcher and the nail-biter, “The Thirteenth Sound” might justly be called a nail-scratcher.

It gets under our skin with a goose bumps inducing sound, a sound that could be the undoing of the play’s central character, slyly named Mrs. Skinner. She—and this is no mystery since we’re in on the act—has bumped off her husband, who doesn’t get a word in, but whose loud snoring and “nervous habit of grinding his teeth in his sleep,” the good woman claims, used to keep her up at night. Upon doing him in, she sleeps soundly for the first time in years.

And yet, in the effort of keeping a guilty secret, Mrs. Skinner’s nerves may not be up to scratch, old or otherwise. However strident, her voice may have met its match in the finger of suspicion pointing from beyond the grave. Like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” before it, “The Thirteenth Sound” presses a stethoscope on a guilty conscience. It is the microphone that makes a public hearing out of the ordeal.

Posted on

"Endangered Sounds"?

Well, let’s see. No, wait. Let’s listen instead. “Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute / toward it.” Walt Whitman wrote these lines. What are the notes to the song of my self? What are the echoes of my everyday? What do these sounds have to do with me?

When I moved to Wales, far from the hubbub of Manhattan, I had to get used to a whole new soundscape. I haven’t quite gotten used to it yet; particularly not to the howling of the wind. These days, there is a new sound in the living room. Yet it is so old, Whitman might have heard it. It is not a Welsh sound, but one made in Brooklyn. It is the sound of our Ansonia clock, anno 1881 (pictured above), which is now part of the ambiance in which I breathe and move.

I have been listening to the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Endangered Sounds.” What might that be, an endangered sound? In my adolescence, I began to wonder about the perishable fabric of my sonic everday. I began to record noises and voices in an attempt to capture where—and who—I was. I did not trust my archival mind as a storehouse of sonic markers of place and time. We tend to make records of our lives in words and images rather than sound. The image seems to be more desirable as a keepsake—more reliable and persuasive. It dominates our senses. Is it any wonder we feel out of touch with the past if we insist on turning it into graphic objects.

I remember sitting in Central Park one afternoon, thinking how serene my environs were. I recorded the sounds of that afternoon and played them back at home, only to realize how noisy that spot had been. The images were so powerful, they drowned out the sounds of the metropolis—the cars rushing by just behind the trees, the buzz of commerce puncuated by sirens. I took no notice of what was out of sight (though hardly out of earshot); I did not hear what the eye fooled me into believing absent. I listen for them now that I am gone. I miss them more than the sights, stored in my mind, preserved on paper, and displayed in this journal.

“Endangered Sounds” provokes thoughts about our changing environment, about noise pollution, about the loss and luxury of silence: the nostalgia for our silenced past, the awareness that, as technology advances, we lose ourselves soundscapes whose sameness is robbing us of our identity—an alienating, Kmartian sub-urbia, a generic soundtrack as mind-numbing as Muzak. For all this, “Endangered Sounds” frustrates as much as it intrigues, especially since it does not resound with many of the authentic sounds it declares to be on the brink of extinction, some of which were recreated in stock recordings, others crushed in musical beats.

Rather than preserving sound, the program serves as a reminder of loss; it is a memorial service for our silenced past. It suggests that, in the near future, technology will permit us to deaden what we do not wish to hear, to create bubbles of choice sound and tranquility distilled from the din of civilization. Manufacturers of sound are hard at work to sell us back what commerce and progress has robbed us of.

Do we really need highly sophisticated computer technology to create our individual sound spheres? When I lived in Germany and dreamed of New York City, I would listen to the sounds of streets and avenues I had recorded while away from what was not truly home. The sirens, the footsteps on the sidewalks, the babble of the passers-by—they provided more comfort than the electronic tunes I merely consumed. Unlike the artifice of those purchased sounds—a sonic anywhere to take the place of the here and now—the metropolitan noises I had recorded were real and concrete. My feet had touched those steps, my shoulders had brushed against those voices, my nose had taken in the fuel with whose burning the traffic resounded. That was somewhere—a there I felt—and I knew I had to go back there to stay.

These days (owing to the electronic blasts of the past, no doubt) I am somewhat hard of hearing; but instead of deadening my everyday in specious phonics or phoney silences—some New Age orchestrations of an assembly-lined existence—I seek and find comfort in sounds whose source I can identify and take in with my other senses—the fire I feel against my skin, the yawning of our none-too-pleasant smelling dog on the carpet, and the clock on the mantelpiece (which, in the picture above, reflects both me and the dog on its surface); and instead of losing myself in the folds of a custom-made soundcarpet, I wrap myself in this resonant quilt and know myself to be . . . at home.