Travel All of Space & Time – From Your Living Room

Stories have always been a way to travel without leaving your surrounds–gateways to another place, another time. Is this transportation affected by how we indulge in stories?

Over reading week I was tasked with a reading project, in efforts to recreate a modern take on reading aloud from a pulp magazine to a group. It was an enlightening experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oig_j_sXmU

It was my logic that as some people in the class were setting out to read aloud in an in-person group setting, I would try to recreate the experience over the web. A pseudo-recreation of course, as the people I would be reading to, and interacting with, would not be in the room with me. I tried to adapt in advance to suit this need, showing the document on screen with a picture-in-picture display of my face and the text, in addition to some other features. As often happens with these things, I was unable to anticipate everything.

To start, I set the mood as it were, by playing a “Steamboat Willie” cartoon as my opener. Normally I would do a countdown, but I figured some sort of cartoon would be a cute way to get as close to the 1913 era of the pulp magazine serial as I could. Along the same lines, I queued up a playlist of big band/swing music to play in the background as I read. Part of this was my own fear of reading against silence while in ‘entertainment’ mode, but also in part because I imagined that radios and music would be commonplace enough in historical homes, possibly even through reading stories together. Either way, I set things up, started the stream, and began my very awkward read through of the last part of B.M. Bower’s The Last Stand.

While some in the class read from the original book, the version I read on stream was from the FlipBook version from the Pulp Magazine Project. This led to a number of problems, mainly an issue of readabilty. Partially due to linguistic conventions of the time, and partially due to the layout of the text, the document was fairly difficult to read. I was out of my element, and had not read aloud in a long time. While I had streamed countless times, this kind of entertainment was different. There were no pictures to distract my audience and many, including myself, found things hard to follow for the first while. Eventually things got a bit more melodical, and I was able to get into the rhythm of the narrative. While we discussed this week that the inclusion of full names were a status symbol for the characters, I have to say, that after reading them over out loud countless times, I’m through with people being referred to with their full three word names after the initial introduction.

There were a lot of similarities between the other read-aloud group and myself. Issues in legibility, reading comprehension, etc. I was surprised to learn that they had taken longer than me to read the entirety of the selection, including a ten-minute break as I started to lose my voice. Perhaps it was because they swapped who was reading back and forth, perhaps I read too quickly. Streaming did result in some interesting complications and improvements, however. I found that I was able to make commentary as it happened. I could voice my opinion about the story, the characters, or my fumblings and capture it candidly (as you can easily see in the above video). I was also able to pause at will and address the Twitch chat, or include their feedback into my commentary. Their voices were unobtrusive as the text cleanly popped up on the side. If we were in the same setting, their comments could have been lost or withheld, out of fear of interrupting. This way, they were perserved as they happened, and could be addressed when the timing was ‘right.’ Similarly, this method gave me no marker of my audience. Without facial reactions, I didn’t know if I was going too quickly, or too slowly, unless people spoke up about it. In-person you could gauge your audience and adjust accordingly.

Ultimately, this experience allowed me to reflect a lot on what it meant to read a pulp magazine, but also to read aloud in a group at that time. While I nearly lost my voice (and in truth my throat hurt the day after), I wondered if such a thing would have been passed around in a family setting to prevent such a thing, or if voices would have been accustomed to longer periods of reading at that time. Would pictures have made it more engaging for my audience? For any audience? How would have ‘city folk’ reading this story related to the tales of the wild west?

As we discussed in class, the serial in the pulp magazine, later a book, was one in a series of stories about “The Flying U” band of cowboys and their ranch. I imagine that contemporary readers of this publication would have been much more invested in their stories, and would have taken to binge-like behaviour to absorb more information about the fictional world. With more limited access to entertainment at the time, particularly affordable entertainment, I would wager the audience of the time would have been much more captivated as well.

Ultimately learning more about B.M. Bower also endeared me to her writing further. Like I discussed in Gendering History, an acknowledgement of female writers and of female participation in the Western genre has been sorely lacking, if not ignored, in scholarship. Learning that Bower fell victim to this in her own time was heartbreaking. She was successful after a period of personal strife, yes, but she could have been even more so, had there not been such a fear of being ‘outed’ as a female writer of Western stories. My change of heart, also highlights the importance of taking cultural contexts into consideration when doing academic work. It’s easy to dismiss something you don’t personally like or aren’t interested in, but when doing academic studies, it’s important to look at works holistically–to understand them from as many perspectives as possible.

I’m interested in giving her a second shot. Just because the last quarter of The Last Stand isn’t for me, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be had in the Westerns of the time, particularly such a popular pulp writer as Bower. After all, I love me some Sci-Fi Westerns.

I may just have to avoid reading them aloud in the future…