Last Monday I conducted an interview with a long-time member of the local BDSM scene, my first as part of an MLIS research project on information behaviour and kink. In Newfoundland a few years ago I did a few freelance journo interviews, but this was my first stab at ethnography. It went amazingly well: my subject was articulate and thoughtful, eager to share and had plenty of helpful things to say. Fingers crossed that the next two go so well.
I also got my first taste of transcription over the weekend at my brother’s cottage up north. It’s fortunate that he doesn’t have the internet up there because, as it was, I was lucky if I had a ratio of 4 minutes typing to 1 minute of audio. I could only do hour-long stints without going totally batty, so a 70-minute interview took five sittings to transcribe.
I had thought that the worst part of transcribing would be hearing my own voice. Turns out that’s not so bad and, as friends and acquaintances in radio have told me, you just get used to it. What was really awful was hearing the ums and uhs, stutters, stammers and sentences left hanging. Man, I talk like shit, I’m embarrassed. But it was neat to dwell on the relationship between the spoken and written words. Hearing the words (by either party), they seem banal, airy and haphazard; written, they seem authoritative and coherent.
Also, as a sometimes-aspiring writer with issues committing words to the page, I was pleased to see how much content was generated: 70 minutes of interview equal a hair under 10,000 words, and 18 single-spaced, 12 point pages. Of course, most of it was the interviewee’s doing, but I still wrote all that shit out. It has occurred to me that, if a short novel is 50,000 words, you could just as well talk one out in 6 hours.
***
I’m re-reading Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the cherry. I’m trying to make a point of reading more women authors because the canons I have inherited seem to be sausage-fests. I read Gut symmetries in Korea and found it a bit intimidating – I tend not to go for poetry in writing and was stunned to realize, reading such a poetic and elegant novel, how much I’d been missing. After reading some Russell Hoban again recently (Kleinzeit this time; Hoban is, perhaps, my all-time favourite novelist) I had a hankering for some more sparse, Brit elegance and picked up Sexing the cherry, which I’m now reading again because a) I think it’s worth it, b) I haven’t re-read a book in fifteen years (at least not that I remembered reading in the first place – halfway through The mote in god’s eye, I realized I’d read it as a teenager).
Anyway, on to the quotations:
“Who are you in love with?” said Jack.
“No one. She doesn’t exist.”
“It’s the most unhygienic thing you can do,” said Jack.
“It can’t be. What about people who work in sewers?”
“They wear protective clothing. People in love hardly ever wear clothes – look at the magazines.”
And,
If you’re a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the time, and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy the company of other men, although attractive women are part of the reward.
Way to tell it!
No comments:
Post a Comment