Archive for the ‘Gregory Whitehead’ Category

On this, the day that the Mayan calendar runs out of time, I am pleased to enter into the subtle and timeless acoustiplasm of Silence Radio with a new voice castaway, In The End.

Silence Radio is a project sponsored by l’Atelier de création sonore radiophonique , a Brussels-based independent public-funded organization founded in 1996. ACSR’s main purpose is to help beginning producers and artists with their first projects in the realms of creative radio and audio. ACSR is also responsible for a festival named Radiophonic, whose last edition was in 2007, yet with a welcome resurrection promised for November 2013.

SilenceRadio was initiated in 2005 by sound artist-engineer Irvic D’Olivier, in collaboration with (among others) Etienne Noiseau, who writes:

To the attention of Netarterians: the extraordinary work of Karinne Keithley Syers, an artist-philosopher in the very best of senses; that is, one who uses all her senses.

While doing a bit of ruminative slogging through the dense sediments of the web several years ago, during one of those many times when I had the impression that creative brain activity on the planet earth had ceased, I encountered Keithley Syer’s Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal. After listening to the entire series I still wanted more, but the basement went dark.

Perhaps a wired bird reached her ear with my request, for it seems Ms. Keithley Syers has recently renewed her mole cabal excavations, available for a very modest fee:

For an illuminating interview with Ms. Keithley Syers, carry on to Desperado Philosophy for Severe Harmony.

On this, the John Cage Centennial, I offer Netarterians Leave it or Double it, a bit of radiophonic fungus produced on invitation from Transmission Arts, with its premier broadcast on WGXC a few days ago.

In fruiting the fungus, all I knew from the outset was that I would aim for a duration of 33:33, and that I would use translated excerpts from the Turin newspaper La Stampa as source material – reviews regarding the 1959 appearance of a young American composer named John Cage on a very popular Italian television quiz show, Lascia o Raddoppia. I was careful not to practice or rehearse the texts in any way, but to confront them in a single take, with no way to correct mushroom pronunciation mistakes.

My most extended personal conversation with Cage transpired in 1989 at an unlikely location: Skywalker Ranch. I noticed that Cage was not eating the catered food; he had his own little dish of brown rice and mushrooms. This led to a fantastic comic conversation about mushrooms, and I have since come to believe that his foraging expertise and his fascination for these strange organisms offer fresh ways to understand Cage’s philosophy of composition.

The performance he gave at Skywalker (How to Get Started) used the decompositional process of voicing a passage, then playing a recording back into the room while voicing a second section, and so on, gradually creating a rich fungal compost of words, ideas, and decay. The Skywalker auditorium was thus gradually transformed into a mush-room. This would be my structure as well, though performed in private, only made public through the radio broadcast. Each little mention in La Stampa receives its own generation, regardless of length.

Additional tracks are improvisations played by me on bowed cigar box guitar, plucked psaltery and gently thrummed turntable. I kept post-performance shaping to a minimum, and let myself be guided if not by the I Ching than by the whispers of Hermes, and by the forager’s disposition, so present in the art of John Cage.

I first came across a sampling of Sharon Charde’s poetry completely by chance, while browsing through a local women’s magazine. I was instantly struck by the disarming directness and documentary detail in poems that dared to articulate the unspeakable loss of her son Geoffrey while a student abroad, under circumstances that remained obscure, with no known witnesses. At the bottom of the page, there was mention of a forthcoming reading at a library nearby, which I attended. As Sharon read, I was once again moved by the calm precision she was able to bring to the most terrible scenes, and by the rich polyphonies that gave subtle dimension to such a raw wound:

stanza from MOTHER'S DAY AT THE MORGUE

That evening confirmed my sense that her poems, written across three decades, comprised an important body of writing that deserved a wider audience. Fortunately, Sharon agreed to the idea of a BBC radio adaptation, and generously provided me with Geoffrey’s own journals, photographs and documents, as well as many supplementary stories and recollections, some of which I then incorporated into the script. Since her writings obliterate the idea that grief unfolds in tidy linear stages, I became increasingly committed to the fundamental truthfulness of an unresolved narrative structure, where the traumatic moment of the fall remains vivid, through to the very last sound.

We considered many actresses to give voice to the play, though my first choice was always Anne Undeland, who brings an open spirit of brave simplicity and deep insight to everything she does. I knew that Anne had recently performed a one woman show based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and she has worked with me on a number of other radio plays, including The Loneliest Road. As it happens, she also lived in Rome during the 1980s, and knew the Trastevere neighborhood where Geoffrey had lived, which helped bring the story fully into the present.

GIVING VOICE TO THE WOUND

For music and sound design, I had in mind the image of a precious Roman mosaic that I had let slip from my hands, and thus it was left for me to piece it together again. There would be jagged edges to be sure – imperfections – and sometimes the edges might cut fingers. To achieve this acoustically, I improvised to recordings of Anne’s voicings on mandolin, bowed psaltery and a cigar box guitar, and then added a variety of sounds to the mix, including the snapping of twigs and the crushing of dry leaves.

I knew Geoffrey liked Simon & Garfunkle, and that he had used a quote from the song “Old Friends” in his High School yearbook. Though I never actually play the song, those chords and rhythms were certainly on my mind as I slowly assembled the final montage.

The play will air on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, June 29th. The first three minutes are excerpted here.

The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul. Margaret, in Richard III

In a brief statement first published on Edge in March, 2005, dramatist Richard Foreman released an impassioned cri de coeur into the flow:

Cathedral-like Old Structure

The notion that hyperconnectivity creates a diminished subjectivity and reduces the depth of individual intellectual experience has been taken up by several others, most notably by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows, in which he persuasively outlines how web-based discourse and enquiry impacts our neurobiology: flattening cognition and emotions, thereby hollowing out our capacity for moral judgement and empathy. In what for me is the most significant passage in the book, Carr references the important work of Antonio Damasio, whose experiments suggest that such judgements and evaluations are inherently slow. As Carr writes:

In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain – when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your brain activate almost instantaneously – the more sophisticated mental processes of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain “to transcend immediate involvement of the body” and begin to understand and to feel “the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation”.

In Too Big To Know, David Weinberger argues that our traditional conceptions of authoritative knowledge, and of Foreman’s complex inner density, all derive from qualities and limitations intrinsic to the printed page and book, and that as we pass into “the expertise of clouds”, the nature and structure of knowledge production fundamentally changes. Thus we must rethink our understanding of intelligence within the context of networks, “where the smartest person in the room is the room.”

I have no argument with Weinberger, as far as he goes. Indeed, his skillful discussion of how networks dissolve traditional power structures within academia and bureaucracies strikes me as accurate and illuminating. Yet strong as he is when discussing the impact of the web on scientific knowledge in particular, he evades the deeper dimensions of Carr’s critique, particularly regarding the “nobler instincts” of moral consciousness.

House of Pancakes: New Structure?

The worm of conscience needs a rich and dense soil to sustain its penetrations; the lifelong self-examination that is essential to our humanity. What sort of soil does webbed intelligence offer to the worm? Is the network Too Big To Gnaw? Weinberger’s final chapter focuses on those qualities that make for good netizens, urging us to open access; provide hooks; link everything; include everyone; teach everyone. Laudable as such normative behaviors may be, what about those pesky ancient questions of virtue, justice and wisdom; the conduct of a good life, and the character of a civilization? Or perhaps the new structure of knowledge production is “too smart” for such old fashioned aspirations?

Towards the end of his book, Nicholas Carr writes:

What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our hunanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere”.

It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.

Returning briefly to Foreman and his theater: Over the years, I have had several occasions to witness the feverish lumberjacking taking place inside the darkened chambers of Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric theater. Several of the devices used by Foreman to clear cut the dead wood of previous achievements from our assembled sensoria, including rapid and sudden changes in the intensity and volume of light and sound, all too closely resemble the sort of brutal wood chipping of existential platforms developed by the CIA (among others) within the Total Theater of “no touch” psychological torture.

On each occasion of my own attendance, I left Foreman’s theater of sensual and cognitive disorientation feeling exhausted, rather than illuminated; pacified, rather than provoked; flattened, rather than engaged. Come to think of it, I left his theater as less of a person, and more of a pancake. Could it be that the Ontological-Hysteric theater anticipated and represented for its audience Heidegger’s frenziedness of technology, the final stage of which Foreman now decries? The gods pound on our heads, and play with us all.

Total Theater: Wake Up Mr. Sleepy

By the rules of Grandmother’s Basket, whereby each new item must begin with the last letter of the previous item:

John Pike pepper sprays Elizabeth Warren

who pepper sprays Nancy Pelosi

who pepper sprays Imogen Heap

who pepper sprays Paloma Picasso

who pepper sprays Obama

who pepper sprays Angela Merkel

who pepper sprays Larry King

who pepper sprays Gretchen Morgenstern

who pepper sprays Neil Diamond

who pepper sprays Donald Trump

who pepper sprays Peter Pan

who pepper sprays Nancy Sinatra

who pepper sprays Andy Murray

who pepper sprays Yasmina Reza

who pepper sprays Amy Grant

who pepper sprays Tiger Woods

who pepper sprays Sarko

who pepper sprays Oliver North

who pepper sprays Harry Belafonte

who pepper sprays Eugene Ionesco

who pepper sprays Oscar Wilde

who pepper sprays Ernesto Che Guevara

who pepper sprays Andy Warhol

who pepper sprays Linda Blair

who pepper sprays Ron Paul

who pepper sprays Lou Dobbs

who pepper sprays Steve Wozniak

who pepper sprays Kim Jong

who pepper sprays Gareth Bale

who pepper sprays Eunice Wong

who pepper sprays Gwyneth Paltrow

who pepper sprays Wen Jiabao

who pepper sprays Oprah

who pepper sprays Her Majesty

who pepper sprays Yoko Ono

who pepper sprays Omar Khayyam

who pepper sprays Me

And cheers to all Netarterians for the coming year, which promises to be another wild one.

I have a deep affection for a format that diminished to the brink of extinction during the early years of the digital age, yet a format now happily making something of a comeback: the audio cassette. My first studio consisted of two Superscope cassette recorders and a cheap Sony microphone, rigged up to create lengthy odes to phonic decay, bouncing tracks between the two machines while simultaneously adding mike voices or noise until I reached a satisfying reduction of entropic mud.

Most of these early experiments have been lost to posterity, and possibly that is all for the best, but this rare surviving fragment should give the general idea. Since most radio stations were rather hostile to the notion of broadcasting such cryptoacoustic ephemera even during graveyard hours on a Tuesday night, the notion of “cassette radio” (prototypical podcast, but with more soul) became widely circulated, enabled by post office intermediation. Every day, strange packages would appear stuffed into my rather cramped loft mail box in NYC; packages that would often be adorned with bits of cloth, or hand cut stamps, or wrapped in ribbons, or even (once) chicken wire.

The packages themselves were often fabricated from recycled shoe boxes or other consumer flotsam. I became friends with my neighborhood postman, a friendship which undoubtedly saved some of the more aggressively undeliverable packages from the Dead Letter Office. Inside the packages, there would often be more layers of wrapping and concealment, and then finally, the cassette itself – hand colored, painted, smeared, scratched and  sometimes unplayable.

By 1990, all  of this networked activity and output was referred to by Robin James as Cassette Mythos, but it would be wrong to retroactively impart too much conscious coherence to the scene. The dispersed, casual and even random quality of the exchanges (mostly barter) was a large part of what made it so appealing, as did the raw sensual nature of the artifact.

Hand made cassettes may have lacked commercial mojo, but they possessed an abundance of character, and cassette culture was thereby populated by a lively assortment of appealing characters whose ideas and aspirations did not quite conform to other channels. Some of these characters produced labels that celebrated the cassette aesthetic, though they also often

released vinyl as well. Among the vast array of enchanting untergrund labels, one in particular caught my ear: Banned Production, under the direction of a prolific, generous and brilliant individual (male or female I did not know) who for many years I knew only by the initials AMK, though his cover has been blown for at least a decade: AMK, aka Anthony King.

In any event, it seems that for some people, downloading audio pancakes from itunes just does not cut it, with cassettes one again beginning to appear along the vibrant edges of the electroacoustic universe.  Banned Production appears very much in the thick of the renaissance, assembling an enviable stable of contributors, a veritable Who’s Who of Legendary Audio Experimenters you might never have heard of.

I titled my most recent radio castaway Potato God Scarecrow, billed as a freely associative radiophonic disorder in the approximate shape of a beaver lodge, and now also available as a Banned Production cassette. Like beavers, cassettes are paradoxical critters. Both have experienced near extinction, yet survived against the odds precisely because of their oddness, and their remarkable ability to complicate monocultural flow, whether riverine or digital. May they both live long and prosper.

Dipping too deeply into the viscous gunk of L’Affaire DSK might threaten to clog the Netartery and provoke cardiac arrest, yet having performed a bit of scrabble anagram research on the lettric sequence D,o,m,i,n,i,q,u,e,S,t,r,a,u,s,s,K,a,h,n,  it would be churlish of me not to share my findings, as I am quite certain that DSK will eventually live up to his full nomological potential:

Squanders Inmost Haiku

Something le grand seducteur does with apparent regularity.

Outrank Maidens? Squish.

Internal IMF memorandum sent from the desk of DSK to all male employees.

Unromanised Squash Kit

Uncircumcised description of DSK’s genitalia.

Honkie Marauds; Squints

DSK on the French Riviera without sunglasses.

Squire’s Damnation Husk

DSK’s hindquarters after six months of hard time.

Quirkiest Shaman Sound

A speech given by DSK’s bon ami, BHL.

Antiquaries Mosh Dunks

DSK’s favorite activity at his Club Privé .

Unhandiest Squirm Soak

DSK in the shower, on Riker’s Island.

Squished Murk Sonatina

Music selected by DSK for his third wedding.

Qua Disharmonies Stunk

Reaction of guests to DSK’s wedding music.

Suitor Quashes Mankind

So long as they are female muslims from l’Afrique Noir – pas de problème!

Tarnished Squamous Ink

Residue left by DSK’s pen, found on carpets inside the world’s best hotels.

Humanoid Snake Squirts!!!

Typical NYC tabloid headline during le Joli Mai in the year 2011.

© Gregory Whitehead 2011

A few days ago, the publisher of the excellent print journal PAJ invited me to contribute to PAJ 100. The question: what do you still believe in, through all the riptides of the past decades? Since I doubt there is much overlap between the readers of PAJ and Netartery, I thought it might be of interest to post my response here as well, with a few ancillary web links.

My first major radio play Dead Letters* had its premier broadcast in 1985, offering public radio listeners an hour of voiced bodies or ghosts of bodies that are hard to figure, hard to name. The broken memory of an ancient war story bleeds into the Elena Makropulos paradox of immortality while the crazed smear of Hitler’s bunker signature dances a jitterbug with the blackened phantom fingers of a young pianist, and while the hand of Judy Garland singing You Go To My Head reaches out to touch Napoleon’s dried and withered penis, the private property of a New York urologist.

Taken by themselves, such stories may seem fated (fingered) for the Dead Letter Office, unable to be delivered or returned. Yet when rubbed up against each other in consort, the bits and bites create a colloquium whose keynote themes are discovered, rather than announced. No preening host, and no smarmy theme or sentimental pretense. Simply an invitation to drift, ruminate and make connections where a split second before there had been nothing but bafflement and darkness. Utopian aspirations, to be sure, but I still believe in the pure power of free association, and since Dead Letters still receives copious airplay a quarter century later, perhaps there is something to it.

In those early days, I embraced analog broadcast radio as my ideal creative home because the airwaves seemed to vibrate with the same qualities I sought to capture in my own plays, and in my own thinking: indeterminacy, fragility of signal, random access, tension between public and private, ambiguous borders, modulating rhythms, complex polyphony, and a pulse rate set by a wild heart.

Such qualities drive the digital data miners nuts, and the assorted masters of corporate media would love to see the stubbornly unruly spaces of analog broadcast foreclosed upon, and eventually demolished, like the communal squats of Kreutzberg. They will fail, because for every data miner with an ice pick, three radio pirates are born into the airwaves. Nonetheless, for the past decade or so I have certainly been conscious of sending work into a space that many have forgotten, written off, or even condemned.

Potato God Scarecrow, completed only a few weeks ago, offers up a media philosophy quite resonant with Dead Letters, though this time shaped into the acoustic figure of a beaver lodge. I am fascinated by the neurosensual implications of the North American beaver, an artist engineer whose creative capacity is not centralized within its tiny brain but dispersed from head to tail.

To my mind, such capacity has significant implications for narrative structure, and somewhere in the middle of the intricately beavered wetlands, along one of those rich edges where a few loose blazes suggest bright neural pathways cutting through dense limbic muck, a voice says, We have these many many many many mysteries and it’s mainly the mysteries that enthrall me when I’m walking along. A few things I know where they came from, most I don’t.

It is still mainly the mysteries that enthrall me, too, and I still believe in the poetic vitality of edges, which is where the mysteries reside. Edges between eros and thanatos, seduction and oblivion, order and chaos; between sense and nonsense, facts and fables, the living and the dead; between the lover’s whisper and the warrior’s scream. Friction among all these edges still creates ample energy to float my canoe among the beaver lodges.

And yes, I still believe in the power of radio to create community, even for an hour or two, and to feed the imagination with nutrients not offered elsewhere, and I believe that offering such a feast remains a worthy mission for public broadcasting in particular. Diversity is always desirable, and that includes poetic and aesthetic diversity. When we drop these qualities to the bottom of the pecking order, we crush our capacity to imagine a viable future for our mysteries.

A few days before I am writing this, a body codenamed Geronimo was scrubbed clean, wrapped in a white sheet, zipped into a bag, and slipped into the Arabian Sea. A few days before that, another body was scrubbed clean and wrapped in white as well, but this first body pursues a destiny as distant from the codenamed corpse as Buckingham Palace from Fort Sill, Oklahoma . With these two bodies in play, the essential question for the poet, the playwright and the philosopher remains: how do we get from the first white sheet to the last?

*  A complete transcript was published in PAJ 41 (1992). Though I conceived Dead Letters as a new kind of radio play, the source materials were gathered via documentary interviews, including one with PAJ editor Bonnie Marranca, who contributed her interpretation of the voice, hands and body of Judy Garland.

Gregory Whitehead is a writer, sound poet, playwright and radiomaker. Potato God Scarecrow will be broadcast as part of Radiophonic Creation Day 2011.

Radiauteur – a new web magazine dedicated to radio art is now live online.

Intro:

Dedicated to radio art, the transmission of conceptual sounds and voiced thoughts, Radiauteur was launched to become a web magazine for academics and artists from all over the world to publish their work. In addition to this, Radiauteur aims to become an online platform for the dissemination of past, present and future praxis – an Ariadne’s thread for radio art to reach an audience as wide as possible.

Radiauteur is a non-profit initiative kindly supported by the Centre for Cultural Studies and the Department for Media and Communications of Goldsmiths, University of London.   http://www.radiauteur.com

Transmissions:

We have included radio stations (and podcasts) which either broadcast radio art or are radio-art-friendly, and open to contributions. Please feel free to suggest any other stations you might know of.

Artists:

We are currently still updating our database of radio artists. If you would like to be featured on our website please send us a short bio, a link to a personal website/page and a sample of your work.  We are also working on setting up an online radio playing exclusively radio artworks. If you would like your pieces to be featured please send them in mp3 format to info[at]radiauteur[dot]com

Call for papers and radio artworks:

The subject of the first issue of Radiauteur is ‘Freedom’. Abstracts and proposals for artworks (found sounds, field recordings, radio experiments and installations, collages, readings, interviews, etc) should be submitted by the 31st of March and final articles and pieces by the 30th of April.

The first issue of Radiauteur will be published online on the 1st of June 2011.
All queries should be sent to:  info[at]radiauteur[dot]com

With the proliferation of audio webstreams and all sorts of digital smart boxes calling themselves radios, we need to ask, well, if these streams are becoming ever more fluent, then what space is being drained? When someone asks me, as they do, often, if I love Pandora, well, what sort of bugs are they asking me to love?

As any biologist will confirm, edges are very often the key to the vitality of an ecosphere. Without edges, exchanges of energies (be they hoots, howls or body fluids) are rapidly and perhaps terminally diminished.

When I bemoan the lack of poetic or aesthetic diversity on public radio (whether CBC, NPR, BBC or wherever), I am bemoaning the lack of edges. Instead of program streams that celebrate lively & liminal qualities such as fluid ambiguity and slippery murk, qualities that give heart and truth to the medium, we hear nothing but tight and tidy pitter patter, which in an infinitely messy cosmos (well expressed within the human species) serves up the ultimate deceit.

Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC reports that the daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Princess Elettra, has been shocked by the derelict condition of her father’s former factory in Chelmsford, England.  Once providing a makeshift studio for the very first radio broadcast intended purely as entertainment, the factory has now become a local shooting gallery and residence  of last resort — undoubtedly still offering an abundance of cross corporeal transmissions.

Guglielmo was evidently quite fond of the name Elettra, giving it to both his daughter and his yacht, which doubled as a floating laboratory for his lifelong investigations into the vagaries of maritime wireless communication. SOS, as in Save Our Ship or Sink Our Ship? History has heard plenty of both.

The first entertainment broadcast beamed forth on June 15, 1920, featuring the voice of Dame Nellie Melba, who gave her name to toast and to a peach dessert. Opening with a rendition of “Home! Sweet Home!”, the broadcast was confirmed as having been clearly received from as far away as Newfoundland, and was even recorded by wireless enthusiasts in Paris.

A quite entertaining video documentary of Melba’s performance can be found here. From all accounts, the broadcast was a great success, the one complaint being that the strength of the signal obliterated all other wireless transmissions in the vicinity, a strength that contrasts notably with Marconi’s first attempt at transoceanic wireless on December 12, 1901, centering around the infamous letter “S”, dot dot dot. Did Marconi actually hear the S, up there on Signal Hill, or did he hear what he wanted to hear, amidst the crackle of cosmic interference?

In any event, one wonders what is to become of the derelict factory, given that Elettra, for all her horror at the state of decay, does not appear eager to twitch a single noble finger towards purchasing the property. I suspect that the market for luxury flats is not exactly on fire in Chelmsford, and of course, the English, like Americans, don’t really fabricate much of anything anymore, not even Melba toast. But whatever the future brings, it is clear that the good ship Marconi at Chemsford has been forever dismasted.

But what’s the message?

A few years ago, I co-produced a documentary for BBC Radio 3 that set out to follow the watery migrations of bits of Gospel tossed into the ocean by bottle evangelists.  Like the bottles themselves, we soon found ourselves in deeper waters, and the program gradually shifted into a more global meditation on the planetary postal delivery system formed by intersecting ocean currents:

A retired oceanographer named Curt Ebbespeyer has become possibly the world’s foremost expert in reading the strange and unruly texts that wash ashore around the world each day. By tracking various categories of flotsam and jetsam, he is also able to guage the relative health of the postal conveyor belts, the sub currents that together remind us that we are all truly connected via the flows of Okeanos.  Over the years, Ebbesmeyer has tracked everything from vast flotillas of Nike sneakers to potentially lethal depth charges.

Now let’s shift focus to the two large floating dump sites for discarded plastic:

Needless to say, these enormous globs severely gum up the flow of global mail, with consequences that remain unknown.

OK, so with the stage set, let us imagine that the oil gushing forth in the gulf is a sort of cosmic ink, and let us further imagine that it enters the postal delivery system via the Gulf Stream, an event that may only be a few weeks in the future. Finally let us imagine that this vast quantity of ink eventually finds a suitable surface upon which to leave its mark: the twin sheets of plastic garbage.

The resulting text creates the world’s most spectacular dead letter, an ominous message that cannot be delivered nor returned, a text as strange, violent and inscrutable as the hulking corpus of The White Whale.