lend me your ears – musings on writing and earphones

8/9/2019 Lend Me Your Ears Musings on Writing and Earphones

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Lend Me Your Ears Musings on Writing and Earphones Kevin Anslow

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Monday, January 16, 2006

Lend Me Your Ears

All trades, all pastimes have their tools and their accessories. A plumber needs pipewrenches, spanners and strange plastic disc things for calculating flows and energy

usage; anglers need a fishing rod, tackle, bait, something to keep it all in, and perhaps a

little something to bring with them to past the time - a book, some beer, or even some

knitting. I have an uncle who likes fishing - and knitting - so I add this for

completeness and to help expand your horizons.

Writers are no different, except, these days so many of the essentials can be found in

one device - a laptop computer: A word processor for capturing words, a browser for

ferreting out little known facts and figures to make tales buoyant with realism and

poignancy, a mail program for keeping up with writing chums, a media player for

music to inspire, and a DVD player to chill out in those moments when the brain justneeds to stop chipping away at the literary coalface for an hour or so.

Certainly, my Mac Powerbook does all these things and more. It is, quite frankly, my

15" passport to joy and completeness. But even with a box of tricks as clever as a

Powerbook, many of us, well certainly, I, need only more accessory to be able to write

- a pair of headphones

For me as a writer, headphones are an essential tool. I often cannot work without them.

Music played when developing ideas, capturing and shaping emotions, or just as a

mood setter for a particular piece of writing, is pretty much as important as the words

themselves. And being a well brought up chap, I tend not to like to disturb others withmy tunes at the volume I like them, or, on those occasions when I need to unwind

before embarking on a writing session, those "die scum die" machine gun noises from

computers games like Doom or Half Life 2.

So, I wear headphones while at the computer. I certainly wear them when I am

working on the train, or visiting my grandmother, who, while reasonably deaf, is not

deaf enough to ignore booming orchestral soundtracks making her little Chinese

ornaments shake, vibrate and edge, ever closer, to their final death plummet from the

ledges they have inhabited since the release of Star Wars - and which are exposed,

ordinarily, to the relative safety of Judy Garland being played on a tape recorder with a

speaker the size of a postage stamp.

And there is another reason. Without using my headphones, people would hear me

listening to the same track over and over again, or the same section of the same track

that generates just the right emotion I want to capture for a piece I am working on. I do

this often; I listen to small fragments of music over and over again, searching for a

feeling I need to make an idea complete. Sometimes I look at the play count for

particular song and marvel at figures like 156, or in one case 412 - and that is in less

than a year, and not counting the times I did not finish listening to the track or thought

better of it once I had started.

And then there is the fact that I might, sometimes, listen to a piece of music because a


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character likes it, or something in the narrative demands it as a background. Although I

would probably go up against the wall for my art, technically speaking, I somehow feel

just a touch embarrassed by the thought of others hearing me listen to a single melody

over and over and over again - like an obsessive teenager listening to some hunk or

honey singing the tune that just makes them feel real and wanted and captures theirdream. Except it doesn't; it makes me understand what my character feels, but I am not

them, even if I potentially might have to deal with the same crazed, desperate please-

stop-that-racket thumping on the wall if I were. Even if I am not a teenager, having

others hearing me listen obsessively to music I may not identify with myself, somehow

just brings out the scared conformist teenager in me. It just isn't cool. Well, sort of.

Someone might think I feel something I don't or that someone else does. Cant have

that can we?

It's a bit like this - I want to get into character with Minerva Milton, my Devil's P.A. in

my current novel, but I would not want to wander around in her dresses or wearing her

bra, or answer the front door with my lips bright with her favourite shade of lippie. Itwould mean something to me, perhaps, at an absolute stretch, or were I drunk enough

to not give a rat's arse about my crumbling gender certainties. But it would mean

something different to others something embarrassing probably, and my life comes

before hers... I hope.

In any case, I don't look good in a bra, and I certainly would not look good in the

tattered rags which would be what was left of the tiny size 6 dresses she wears, once I

had tugged and stretched them over my well padded middle aged male frame. And

what exactly an unschooled oaf like me would do with lipstick, is an avenue of

discovery I prefer to leave ever unexplored. All I really know about lipstick is, like

most girly things, it is expensive, expensive enough to eat severely into a man's DVDand computer game budget, and that is a horror I can scarce contemplate.

The thing is, I tend to go through quite a lot of pairs of headphones, because I spend a

lot of time at the computer, and often, frustrated by a passage of writing, or death in a

game I am playing, or those annoying websites that don't let you use the back button (a

crime akin to murder that destroys an entire stream of internet consciousness in a

moment), I get up suddenly and abandon the computer for a time in frustration.

After doing this a hundred or so times, I will invariably and finally yank the headphone

wire from its soldered connection, leaving me with dead, soundless plastic things in

my ears - techno corpses that were once alive with sound. And also leave a forlorn stub

of a connector... no longer connected, left in the earphone socket of the computer.

In the past year I have gone through three or four headphones this way. That is a hell

of a lot of computer game deaths, or sites that disable the back button - but as we all

know there are far far too many of those, and usually they are the naff ones that are

trying to sell you something you don't want, or the ones done by a bonkers teenagers

who knows to code webs sites, but have less acute knowledge of how to compose

poetry that would make getting stranded in their neck of woods worth the frustration.

Recently, by which I mean in the past few months, I got a new laptop, a Powerbook.Notice how I keep mentioning it: It was expensive, I couldnt really afford it, so I am


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still trying to justify my forward thinking and chic to myself. I already have at home a

pair of full ear-covering headphones, which look like the giant ear muffs people wear

when they drive tractors. Not entirely suitable for the train, it has to be said, where

late-night muggers can creep up on you unannounced, or at work, where you are

supposed to only wear one earphone at a time, leaving the exposed ear ready andwaiting for instructions shouted out by the honchos, who might have a client call or

enquiry to swing your way.

When I went to buy some new travel headphones about 3 months ago, I couldn't find

the traditional type I am used to - the ones that are just a strip of bendy metal that fits

over your head and has a left and a right Princess Leia fluffy disc to cover each ear.

They exist, I am sure, somewhere; I see people with them still. They do not, or did not

when I looked, any longer exist in high street stores in my neck of the woods.

The new headphones, the result, presumably of some kind of technological

evolutionally process, are very space age, very stylish, very ergonomically...complicated, but none of them actually seem to fit into my ears. First off, I bought

something that looks like two sophisticated pod devices with giant plastic hooks

attached to them. Needless to say, the moment I opened the packet the hooks had got

metres of earphone cord wrapped around them in Gordian knots I could hardly dare to

tackle and Alexander the Great probably couldnt have handled either. After several

minutes of unravelling, and then experimentation, I had this thing clipped around my

ears, and glorious sound blaring into my right ear, while nothing, or next to nothing

reaching the left.

Eventually I discovered I could press the left hand device and twist it a little at the

same time, and then the stereo image would be complete. This is, well, a solution ofsorts, except it is difficult to type with one hand when the flow gets going, and if you

push and twist at the same time for long enough, you get cramps in your arm you had

not been aware were possible and certainly were not really looking for in that

particular limb, at that particular time of an average day.

I put up with these ergonomic marvels for a good long while on the simple assumption

that I had not quite worked out the knack of them, but finally decided to broaden my

experience with the species. Yesterday I bought another type of next generation, 21st

century earcraft. This one attracted me because it was not two separate devices, but

two ergo-modules that looked like brain probes, attached by the more traditional bendy

metal strip. I had high hopes, but sure enough, within seconds the left hand ergo-

module was popping out of my ear, and once again I was listening to half a stereo

image and writing with one hand on my left ear and one index finger picking out

letters at about 10 words per minute.

Realising there was more to this than simple manufacturing defects I decided to look at

the problem differently - if there was nothing wrong with the earphones, may be, just

maybe, there might be something wrong with me. So I investigated the abandoned ear-

modules old and new, and then the bumps, dips and other contours of my ears and

discovered something I had never realised - my left ear is a different shape from my

right. Like some neo-Neanderthal, who just managed to cut it in the 20th century withthe Princess Leia variety, the 21st century has left me behind. It is actually physically


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impossible for me to wear 21st century earphones. I am a mutant, bereft of ears the

new age earphones will fit into and give equal coverage of left and right channels, I am

immune to balanced stereo images projected by the hip, cool devices of today for

listening to the sounds of tomorrow.

I will search high and low for the old Princess Leia style of headphone, hopefully i will

find them. However, if I cannot, and if I am ever to finish the Devil's P.A. or any other

piece of writing, perhaps I may have to get someone to lend me their ears.

lend me your ears – musings on writing and earphones

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