The Electro-Library (Episode One): Storytelling
[Rough Transcript. This may contain errors; please confirm accuracy with recording.]

NARRATOR: What do we do when we tell a story? What happens when we listen to a story told? Is storytelling simply an offer of entertainment, or a deeply empathetic act that connects us to what it is to be the human animal? Is it a vanishing art, or is it something that will always define who and what we are? And could infinite monkeys really tell a tale from Shakespeare given infinite time?
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From the Stonehill College English Department and Creative Writing Program, itÕs The Electro-Library. A podcast, a literary neural network, a philosophical space-time remix, a kaleidoscope of consciousness on electromagnetic waves. Each episode explores a single theme across time, cultures, and disciplines. The Electro-Library: a cabinet of curiosities for your ears. Episode One: Storytelling
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AMRA BROOKS: So, Joan DidionÕs The White Album opens with this quote that sheÕs probably most famous for, which is: ÒWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.Ó IÕm going to read the first paragraph of ÒThe White Album,Ó and then talk a little bit about why that quote is so important to me, and why I teach this book often:
ÒWe tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ÒinterestingÓ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit more mortal sin, or is about to register a political protest, or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priestÕs clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ÔideasÕ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.Ó
I think this is so true. We try to make sense of the world around us, which is full of situations and events that donÕt make any sense at all. Everybody, whether theyÕre a writer or not, is constantly creating narratives to try to make sense of our own histories and our own experiences and the events of the world. We tell the story a million different ways and go with the one that feels like it makes the most sense at the time, but things change our perspectives, the information we are privy to, and therefore the story is always evolving no matter what it is. To be telling the story is what it is to be alive. ItÕs a vital part of our existence, no matter who we are. So in a sense, weÕre all writing all the time in our minds, but I think itÕs quite an essential part of being human.
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DARIA LABOUTINA: My name is Daria LaBoutina and IÕm a senior. The poem is called ÒCitizen.Ó
Citizen means naturalized. It means I stood up with people I had never seen before and pledged allegiance to the flag. It means the words were on a piece of paper, but above all, they were at the tip of my tongue etched on the roof of my mouth, retrieved every morning at school. It means IÕm allowed to disagree. It means that when I do, I join a chorus of other voices, not a void a fear. It means I can be an English major in a Liberal Arts college headed for the nonprofit sector. It means IÕm an individual. It means you honor my privacy. It means the eyes in public transit donÕt sear, judge, curse. It means ÒExcuse me?Ó and ÒHow are you?Ó instead of ÒExcuse youÓ and ÒWhat do you want.Ó It means it injustice in the headlines instead of corruption in the mousetraps. It means there are words for compassion, misogyny, integrity. It means anti-bullying and mental health awareness are terms in my vocabulary. It means this is ours and you canÕt take it away. It means overwhelming testaments of humanity next to crushing atrocities. It means Òme tooÓ and not Òwhat, her too?Ó It means ÒWhat boyfriend? What are you talking about?Ó not ÒWhen are you getting married and having kids?Ó It means this isnÕt perfect. It means it gets so much worse than this. It means this is the home we chose, this is the home that makes choices we didnÕt choose, but this is home, this is home. This is the home we chose.
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LYNDA BARRY: If you think about it, if youÕre reading a book, in a funny way youÕre writing it. A book thatÕs just sitting on your table, thatÕs full of paper, it has a formula for an experience in it. The formula happens to be in alphabet and words. But when the writer says ÒI walked across a crowded intersection,Ó the intersection that youÕre seeing is your intersection. In fact, he or she could be so more and more and more specific and you still would be seeing your intersection. So I always think if you can read a book, you can write a book, because youÕre having to imagine all of the stuff and in fact, thatÕs why youÕre reading it. My feeling is that storytelling is as natural to people as-- in fact, IÕm starting to think of the image world as kind of our external organs. When people say Òoh, I canÕt write great stories,Ó or Òmy drawings are so ugly,Ó I love to say ÒWhat about your liver? Do you like your liver, is it good looking to you?Ó ItÕs your liver! It doesnÕt have to be cute. ItÕs an organ thatÕs performing a function, and you wouldnÕt want to get rid of it.
JARED GREEN: IÕm not sure IÕd want to show it to too many people either.
LYNDA BARRY: IÕd wear my liver on my forehand if I could just to see what would happen.
JARED GREEN: That question of ÒwhatÕs the truth of an event?Ó versus Òwhat is the narrative structuring of event?Ó
LYNDA BARRY: Oh absolutely. I always add an element of surprise and chance whenever IÕm going to work. So for example, say I wanna write a story about a car for whatever reason. I donÕt just go Òhmm, which car should I pick?Ó I set a timer, I have to write down the first ten cars I can think of in ninety seconds, and then I look at that list and I look for the one that seems to be vivid. It could be vivid because itÕs a cool memory, it could be vivid because thereÕs no way in hell I wanna write about that right now, which lets you know thatÕs exactly the thing youÕre gonna write about. And then, I ask myself all those questions about whereÕs the light coming from, where am I, and as I ask those questions, the story starts to show up, and then when itÕs time to write, I always write for a very specific amount of time. ItÕs what I do for my students, too. The first foray into it is seven minutes, and at four minutes - I usually set a timer so I know thereÕs only three minutes left. People worry about knowing how to edit or not edit, but if youÕre talking on the phone to a friend and maybe youÕre talking about somebody you hate, and you both hate this person, so itÕs kind of a delicious conversation. And then you realize that you thought you had five minutes to go over how awful this person was, and you realize you only have two. Everybody knows how to edit it. The storytelling Ð which has become this sort of exotic thing for people once they hit adolescence or afterwards, they think thereÕs a way to do it Ð is just naturally part of our lives. I have found that over and over again, working with little kids, little kids are the ones who really can wail on the storytelling guitar.
You know what, speaking of which, I have my composition notebook here and I wrote this piece two days ago. This is just a little, short comic. You wonÕt be able to see the pictures, but it wonÕt really matter, where I just start with a question. ItÕs a question I had because of my students who are on their phones all the time and donÕt look up. So we talk about what you miss when you donÕt look up. I love to start with the question, the question is Ð and itÕs the title of the comic Ð ÒWhat is there to see?Ó
ÒWhat is there to see? Sometimes people say this about their hometown. But the kid in you saw a lot. The three-year-old in you saw everything. You may not remember that level of fascination with the world, but you know that it happened. There was a time when alive and not alive were hard to tell apart, because they were not apart. I remember being seven and waking up in the middle of the night, and then, scared out of my mind by a shirt. It was on a hanger facing me and I swear I could see it breathing. I knew it was just a shirt, but I also didnÕt know what it wanted from me. You probably have a memory of something like this, something that seemed alive to you, alive enough to scare you sometimes. It was a spooky but lively world, and I miss it, whatever it was. When I watch people interacting and when I tried to draw them, I feel scared in that same way, like someoneÕs watching me, thinking IÕm a weird lookinÕ old lady with Willie Nelson braids and hating me. And then I look up and I remember, no one looks at each other anymore. I can stare at them all I want. The short answer to the initial question, Ôwhat is there to see?Õ the car door, the street lamp, roof of the parking garage, the spinning wheel.Ó
So thatÕs a comic that I wrote. I think I probably gave myself twelve minutes to write that, and thereÕs just something about that time limit that allows you to tell a story. And itÕs fun so read something out loud that no one else has seen, and I donÕt think they ever will actually, you guys might be the only ones who see that.
JARED GREEN: Everybody whoÕs listening to this conversation can all imagine your liver.
LYNDA BARRY: Yeah, imagine my liver. And remember, the first syllable is live!
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LIN CHEN: This is a poem by Lin Chen, and the title is ÒNames.Ó
ÒMy younger brother gives his name, nothing common like John or Steve. But a talk show host has that name, and itÕs English, so itÕs American enough. By the fall, they know heÕs a first gen, one of two, but ignore the semantics. They donÕt ask where heÕs from, they just press onwards. I give my name, third or fifth most common in China, easy to spell, to say, to be foreign. By default, IÕm the question mark. IÕm the first first gen, but itÕs the harder answer. They asked if I hail from the country of Asia. My É[unclear]. I answer, they ask again, third timeÕs the charm, though it really should be the first.
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ÒWindowsÓ by Charles Baudelaire.
JARED GREEN:
He who looks in through an open window never sees as much as he who looks at a window closed. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more É[unclear], more tenebrous, more dazzling, than a window illuminated by candle. What one sees in the sunlight is always less interesting than what happens behind a pane of glass. In this gap, black or luminous, life lives, life dreams, life suffers. Beyond the swells of the rooftops I glimpse a middle-aged woman already wrinkled, poor, always bent over something, never going out. With her face, with her clothing, with her gesture, with almost nothing at all. I refashion the story of this woman, or rather her legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself while weeping. If it been a poor old man, I would just as easily have refashioned his, and I go to bed proud of having suffered as others than myself. Perhaps you will say to me: Òare you certain that this legend is true?Ó What this is matter what reality might lie outside my own if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?
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TIMOTHY WOODCOCK: Okay, so weÕll talk a little bit about the so-called Infinite Monkey Theorem, which says that if you were to place a monkey at a keyboard and let it start striking keys randomly forever, for an infinite amount of time, then you would expect that eventually, something profound would turn up. For example, Shakespeare or, anything. But infinity is a long time, so this is sort of theoretically correct, but practically speaking, that is something close to impossible. I would sort of take this back down to a relatively simple example, and that is of the apocryphal story by Ernest Hemingway that says six words:
ÒFor sale: baby shoes, never worn.Ó
Now in that story there are thirty-three characters that appear, including letters, space, comma, period, colon. If we imagine to get a sense of how unlikely it is that a monkey would be able to type that randomly, we could set up the following way: suppose that weÕre gonna give the monkey a keyboard with thirty characters. WeÕll just stick to lowercase letters.
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LetÕs see. The number of possible sequences of length thirty-three, where youÕve got at each step thirty possible characters, is thirty to the thirty third power. YouÕve got thirty choices for the first space, thirty choices for the second character, thirty for the third, and so on. So the multiplication principal in mathematics says that ultimately the number of total possibilities will be thirty times thirty times thirty. That is, to say, thirty to the thirty third power. Now, to put that in maybe more familiar context, that is something like ten to the forty eighth power. So in other words, to envision what that is, it would be a one and then forty eight zeros following after that. That is the total number of thirty-three-character quote unquote stories, most of which would be nonsense. Using these thirty characters that I mention, thereÕs a lot. But the chance that a monkey would actually produce, among those ten to the forty-eighth possibilities, HemingwayÕs story is essentially nonexistent. Imagine the monkey is really fast. Suppose that instead we simulate this monkey with modern computer. A modern computer can process, if you programmed it to do so, about a billion such ÒstoriesÓ in one second. That is to say, these thirty-three-character sequences, a good computer could run through about a billion in a second. It gives us some sequence in a natural way of, without repeats, do a thirty-three-character sequence, and another, and then another, and then another, and so on, eventually till all ten to the forty eighth or so possibilities. So itÕs running about a billion of these per second. In the course of a year, a little calculation shows that thereÕs about thirty-two million seconds. This computer, if we just let it run, in the span of a year can cover thirty-two million billion possibilities of these sequences of letters and spaces and colons and et cetera. ThatÕs a lot, right? But in comparison to the total number of possibilities, which is ten to the forty eighth or so, itÕs not a lot. For example, to count how many years then it would take this computer if we just started up and let it run and see if Hemingway story turns up. So again, the number in the year is about thirty two million billion, to try to count year by year thirty-two million billion for the first year, the same number for the second year and the third year, and eventually get to the total number of possibilities Ð if we generated sequences of thirty-three characters one by one Ð weÕd be talking about ten to the forty eighth Ð that is the total number of possibilities Ð divided by how many we can do any year Ð thirty-two million billion. That is on the order of ten to the thirtieth power, something north of that. ThatÕs a lot, a lot of years, tenth to the thirtieth power. Now, to try to turn this into some sort of probabilistic kind of thinking, we could imagine that if the computer was generating these potential stories, again thirty three characters in a random order but without repeats, then HemingwayÕs six word ÒFor sale, baby shoes: never wornÓ this one of these, it would be equally likely to turn up in any of the ten to the thirtieth years that we would be letting this computer run for. So the chance, therefore, that it would be turning up in the next year on our computer, that we would see it in within one year of this computer actually running this process, would be one over tenth of the thirtieth power. Assuming that none of the stories get repeated, that somehow the computer is able to do each one individually in a random order. One over ten to the thirtieth power is, in other words, in decimal form, .000000000000000000000000000001: twenty nine zeros and a one. That as a chance is essentially nothing, very close to zero that this Hemingway story could turn up from this computer working very quickly in the span of one year. So then, to take a little bit further we can say well, what if we wanted to understand the chance that HemmingwayÕs story would turn up in the next millennium. Then weÕve got a thousand years to work with instead of just one. The probability would convert, that the story would be there, to one thousand years out of the total number of years; that is to say, ten to the thirtieth power. One thousand over ten to the thirtieth is one over ten to the twenty seventh power, that is to say, .000000000000000000000000001: twenty six zeros followed by one. And thereÕs our probability that our computer would generate that story in the next millennium. Effectively the answer, the furthest probability, is still zero, itÕs a very very low chance.
And to make it even more dramatic, maybe one last case is to say that itÕs expected that the sun would burn out within a number of years below ten to the tenth power. So, four and a half billion years or so until the expected lifetime for the rest of the sun, in that ballpark, thatÕs below ten to the tenth power. We can say that, well if our computer somehow could run at its operating speed of a billion stories per second until the end of the solar system, whatÕs the chance that HemingwayÕs six-word story again would appear? ItÕs not much. How we could figure that out is we could say, well, an overestimation of the probability would be ten to the tenth power, the number of years weÕd be watching, over ten to the thirtieth power. Well, to simplify that fraction, that becomes one over ten to the twentieth power, that is to say, .00000000000000000001: one with nineteen zeros in front of that one. As a chance, for all intents and purposes. that is still equal to zero. Again, to emphasize this point, the chance that this very profound but compact story of six words, thirty-three characters, would turn up by a computer, a monkey, working at a pretty exceptional speed of about a billion potential stories per second, under the assumption that none of those get repeated as we look at them in sequence again and again and again and again, the chance that this one HemingwayÕs would turn up by the end of the solar system is vanishingly small. As I said at the beginning, infinity is a long time, and if you really had an infinite amount of time then you would expect that anything short or long, profound or otherwise, would turn up by this random keystroke process. But the reality is, in the practical terms and the time frame of the solar system, for example, itÕs essentially impossible, or itÕs unlikely to the point of effectively being possible.
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ÒThe StorytellerÓ by Walter Benjamin.
DANIEL ITZKOVITZ:
ÒFamiliar though his name maybe to us, the storyteller, in his living immediacy, is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us, and something that is getting even more distant. Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him. Just as in a rock, a human head or animalÕs body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision. This distance and this angle of vision of are prescribed for us buy an experience which we may have almost every day. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often thereÕs embarrassment all around when the wish to hear story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. The generation that has gone to school on a horse drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds. And beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, human body.
JARED GREEN:
One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value, and it looks as if it is continuing to follow into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which we never thought possible.
DANIEL ITZKOVITZ:
If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share on the state of affairs. Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now, almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling. Almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation, as one reproduces it. The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
JARED GREEN:
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places, the activities that are intimately associated with boredom, are already extinct in the cities, and are declining in the country, as well. With this the gift for listening is lost, and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.
DANIEL ITZKOVITZ:
One can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsmanÕs relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may perhaps most adequately be exemplified by the proverb, if one thinks of it as an idiogram of a story. A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story, and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall. Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel, not for a few situations as the proverb does, but for many like the sage, for it is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime. His gift is the ability to relate his life, his distinction to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller, he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of the story. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.Ó
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NARRATOR: YouÕve been listening to the sounds of The Electro-Library, a production of StonehillÕs Digital Lab. In this episode. we listened to Amra Brooks read from Joan DidionÕs The White Album, Daria LaBoutina read her poem entitled ÒCitizen,Ó and Lynda Barry discuss storytelling and her liver with Jared Green. We also heard Lin Chen read his poem ÒNames,Ó and Jared Green read his translation of ÒWindowsÓ by Charles Baudelaire. Timothy Woodcock helped us ponder the infinite monkey theorem, and Daniel Itzkovitz and Jared Green read from Walter BenjaminÕs ÒThe Storyteller.Ó For more information and to subscribe to the podcast, visit theelectrolibrary.org. Join us next time for more stories, poems, interviews, fragments and noise bursts. The Electro-Library: reading at the speed of sound.
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