Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing." by Justin St. Clair (review)

Teaching the history of sound recordings to college students, especially within the broader context of bibliographic instruction, often involves glossing over or omitting certain "sub-" or derivative formats. Flexi records, eight-track tapes, and MiniDiscs surely had their charms but did not influence the music industry like albums bearing 78-rpm shellac discs or 45-rpm vinyl singles with B-sides. The irony is that most of these smaller or less popular formats can reward the curious researcher with diverting and sometimes meaningful forays into the so-called weeds of music history, as exemplified by this title. Following Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening (New York: Routledge, 2013), Justin St. Clair offers the first book-length study of the soundtracked book, defined as "a physical, print publication or its digital analogue for which a musical soundtrack has been produced" (p. 2), with recent popular examples including Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000). Using R. Murray Schafer as a departure point, St. Clair introduces the concept of schizotemporality to describe the temporal bifurcation presented by the soundtracked book: the readtime of a printed text versus the runtime of a musical recording (p. 6).

Given that sound recording history remains relatively compact (at least in contrast to that of music printing technologies or manuscripts), this flyover survey of one century spans Harper-Columbia's Bubble Books for children from 1917, the Columbia Legacy Collection of musical ethnographies from 1954 to 1972, adult market soundtracked fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, and digital developments around the turn of the millennium (mostly focused on House of Leaves and Poe's album Haunted (Atlantic 83362-2 [2000], CD). The peculiar nature of soundtracked books almost invariably requires one to interact with actual physical formats for materials published before the mid-1980s (to set some sort of marker), hence the discussions of Bubble Books and the Columbia Legacy Collection using 78-rpm discs may prove somewhat more "theoretical" to the modern reader who may not have access to a phonograph. Conversely, Michael Nesmith's The Prison: A Book with a Soundtrack (Carmel, CA: Pacific Arts, 1974), L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982) and its companion album Space Jazz (Applause APLP 9000 [1982], LP), as well as Le Guin's aforementioned Always Coming Home and its audiocassette Music and Poetry of the Kesh (1985) are at least closer to the current cultural zeitgeist and thus potentially easier to experience and appreciate. A smaller overall corpus of extant soundtracked books necessarily causes high selectivity in identifying examples for discussion, but there is surely something "singular" about the writers who have embarked on this endeavor: Nesmith as "the quiet Monkee," Le Guin for speculative fiction, and the less said about the other one, the better.

Naturally, the digital realm is where the notion of soundtracked books could become quite interesting, at the very least because of potential changes to schizotemporality with the broader world of accessing digital books and sound recordings. Leaving aside fundamental differences between reading a printed book page and the exact same content on a digital platform, the ability to manipulate recorded music without the intercession of stylus or magnetic head or even physical play button can result in a more cyclical (and possibly less linear) listening experience; some might argue this means deeper understanding of the content, but that mileage is most definitely variable. St. Clair first considers Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates (New York: Grove Press, 1996) and its matching album by the Mekons (Quarterstick Records QS36CD [1996], CD); however, much of Acker's idiosyncratic...