![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In 1977 and 1978, the poets Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff attended two baseball games, pretending to be game announcers and recording their repartee on a newly-released TCM-100 cassette tape recorder. The transcription of first game, between the Yankees and the Red Sox on September 14, 1977, was published by United Artists in 1979 as the mimeograph book Yo-Yo’s with Money. The second experiment, a May 26, 1978, Red Sox – Tigers game, was a ‘failure’, as Schiff puts it, and the audio recording was never fully transcribed. Using readings of tonal shifts in the text, an interview with Schiff, and archival material, including the Beaned in Boston tapes and Yo-Yo’s with Money’s original mimeograph title page and transcript, this essay examines Schiff and Berrigan’s self-reflexive process. I argue that the TCM-100 extends the qualities – immediacy, frequency, and ephemerality – which make the mimeograph so appealing as a production technology to writers and artists, and this moment occurs in anticipation of mimeo’s obsolescence. Furthermore, I suggest that these collaborative works can be viewed as ‘transcribbling’, a ludic form of transcription, enabled by this combination of tape recorder and mimeo.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These states of non-sobriety are induced by pills, primarily amphetamines, and beer.
2 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’, interview by Stephanie Anderson, Phone, 23 May 2015.
3 Berrigan responds, ‘Because it’s been done too many times, broadcasting from box seats. We’re bringing it a new angle’. ‘Yeah’, Schiff echoes. ‘The right angle’, playfully punning. Beaned in Boston, Audio cassette (Boston, 1978), Tape 2A, Harris Schiff Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
4 Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh began United Artists, a mimeograph press and magazine in 1977. United Artists, the magazine, ceased publication in 1983; Warsh continued to run the press until his death in 2020.
5 Tape 1B. ‘Broadcast’, which Schiff emphasises, can be a noun and a verb. ‘Delayed simulcast’, which might sound like an oxymoron, relies on jargon believable to an audience accustomed to ‘the rich aural coverage of Major League Baseball in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s’, particularly the ‘delayed wire service re-creation’ games. See James R. Walker, Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), Introduction and Chapter 10. Simulcasts were broadcast on radio and television at the same time: ‘Simulcast, v.’. OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/180013. Accessed 13 July 2018.
6 ‘Angel Hair Magazine, The Second-Generation New York School, and The Poetics of Sociability’, in Daniel Kane (ed), Don’t Ever Get Famous (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), 90.
7 ‘An Imperfect Diamond: The National Pastime Transfigured in Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff’s Yo-Yo’s with Money’, Interval(Le)s II.2-III.1 (Fall /Winter 2009 2008): 358.
8 Yo-Yo’s with Money (Henniker, New Hampshire: United Artists, 1979), n.p.; Schiff, ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’. Later, Berrigan also refers to ‘all you ignoramuses reading this or listening to it’ (Yo-Yo’s, n.p.), indicating that he’s already thinking of the experiment as successful enough to reach a wider audience.
9 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
10 Beaned, Tape 1A.
11 Schiff, ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
12 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘happening’ as ‘A largely improvised or spontaneous performance intended as artistic display […] widely used in 1960s popular culture’. ‘happening, n’. OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/84060. Accessed 14 November 2022.
13 Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 56.
14 Here I am thinking of his imitations of poets and description of early sonnets in his 1960s journals. Ted Berrigan, ‘Ted Berrigan Papers (Columbia)’ (Journals, n.d.), Box 1 especially Journal 2, MS 0113, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
15 Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Dutton, 1965), 19 and 14–15; Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means; an Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances. (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 8.
16 Schiff, ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
17 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
18 ‘Reframing the New York School: Public Access Poetry and the Screening of Poetic Coterie’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 59, no. 1 (2018): 70.
19 Alice Notley to Stephanie Anderson, ‘Chicago Magazine Project’, 12 March 2010.
20 For a description of mimeograph circulation, especially in relation to readings, see Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 27–56.
21 Kane, 60.
22 It was a time when anyone could become a publisher, and production parties ‘helped galvanize a literary group’. See Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980: A Sourcebook of Information (New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998), 14.
23 Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 35.
24 Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (Bolinas, Oakland, and Berkeley, CA: Avenue B and O Books, 1991), 49.
25 Berrigan, ‘Ted Berrigan Papers (Columbia).’
26 Though Berrigan began experimenting with the sonnet form in 1961, once he landed on the cut-up technique, most of the poems were drafted fairly quickly – Berrigan claims in a two or three-month period. (‘Ted Berrigan Papers (Columbia)’ (Journals, n.d.) and Talking in Tranquility 160.) However, the poems are nonetheless carefully patterned: see Yasmine Shamma, Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 49–50 and Timothy Henry, ‘“Time and Time Again’: The Strategy of Simultaneity in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets’, Jacket 40 (2010): http://jacketmagazine.com/40/henry-berrigan.shtml.
27 In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 191–206, Friedrich Kittler asserts that the typewriter becomes a bodily extension, which Berrigan echoes in Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman, eds., ‘Workshop, July 24, 1978’, in Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (St. Paul, MN: Coffee House Press, 2004), 68.
28 18–19. Ron Padgett asserts that there is a correlation between typewriter model and poem in Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1993), 69.
29 See Kittler, 216.
30 Talking in Tranquility, 70.
31 Waldman and Birman, ‘Workshop, July 24, 1978’, 32.
32 Talking in Tranquility, 155.
33 Prior to his use of the tape recorder with Schiff, Berrigan was interested in Warhol’s ’60s tape recordings, and he disliked Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between media and message, suggesting instead that ‘when it all works right there’s no message, it’s only sort of the media’, advocating for an immersive aesthetic experience. Talking in Tranquility, 20–21. Berrigan’s blunt take on McLuhan is that he ‘was really full of shit’ (33).
34 Mimeographing Techniques (1958), 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYjj62eGwc8; Steven Connor, ‘Looping the Loop: Tape-Time in Burroughs and Beckett’ (Lecture, Taping the World, University of Iowa, 28 January 2010), 6. See also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 210. For an account of how the producer/consumer tape distinction breaks down in surveillance, see Michael Davidson, ‘Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics’, in Adalaide Morris (ed.), Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 103. Here and elsewhere I am grateful to Ben Olin for suggested readings.
35 Connor, ‘Looping the Loop: Tape-Time in Burroughs and Beckett’, 6.
36 Nick Sturm, ‘“I’ve never liked mimeo”: Eileen Myles, Little Magazines, and the “Umpteenth-Generation New York School”’, Women’s Studies (2022), DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2130924; Eileen Myles, ‘Mimeo Opus’, The Poetry Project Newsletter, March 1982; Bernadette Mayer, ‘Mimeo Argument’, The Poetry Project Newsletter, April 1982.
37 Compositional practices belie hard distinctions between schools and movements; the tape recorder was important for works like Kerouac’s Visions of Cody and Ginsberg’s The Fall of America, bridging Beat and New York School conversational aesthetics. Paul Blackburn and his tape recorder were a fixture at Lower East Side readings. See Davidson, ‘Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics’, 104–7 and Lytle Shaw, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2018), 35–70.
38 Walker, Crack of the Bat, 1.
39 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
40 As both ‘the act of recording and the record that is produced’, transcription is a multi-valanced concept and practice now ‘embedded in a wide range of disciplines’. See Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.
41 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
42 ‘By the way if anyone is interested in transcribing this tape / we’ll be happy to take applications’, Schiff says early on. ‘Right! & furthermore if you don’t transcribe it right you / fucking squareoffs we will square you off fully’, Berrigan responds. Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
43 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
44 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
45 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’. Lewis Warsh somewhat condensed these spaces when he typed the stencils for the mimeograph book.
46 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
47 Schiff’s use of white space to indicate pacing intersects with some of the transcription debates occurring (and recurring) in the field of oral history between the early ’70s and 1990s. See Francis Good, ‘Voice, Ear and Text: Words, Meaning and Transcription’, The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks, (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 458–69; David King Dunaway, ‘Transcription: Shadow or Reality?’, The Oral History Review 12, no. 1 (1 January 1984): 113–17; Elinor A. Mazé, ‘The Uneasy Page: Transcribing and Editing Oral History’, Handbook of Oral History, ed. Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (New York: AltaMira Press, 2006); Kate Moore, ‘Perversion of the Word: The Role of Transcripts in Oral History’, Words and Silences: Bulletin of the International Oral History Association 1, no. 1 (1997): 14–25; Michael Frisch, ‘Of Slippery Slopes and Misplaced Hopes: A Comment on Kate Moore, ‘Perversion of the Word: The Role of Transcripts in Oral History”’, Words and Silences 1, no. 1 (1997): 26–31; Raphael Samuel, ‘Perils of the Transcript’, Oral History 1, no. 2 (1972): 19–22; Barry York, ‘Between Poetry and Prose. Oral History as a New Kind of Literature’, National Library of Australia News 9 (1999): 12–14.
48 Box 2 Folder 20.
49 Yo-Yo’s, n.p. Here and elsewhere, I have attempted to reproduce the spacing of the United Artists text.
50 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
51 n.p.
52 The cover of Yo-Yo’s features a line drawing of a baseball player alongside the book’s title and authors’ names; the second page reads “Yankee Stadium September 14, 1977” alone and centred on the page. We return to the date in section III.
53 Berrigan and Schiff, Beaned. Schiff’s papers at Emory contain an incomplete draft of a written transcript of Beaned, typed by Schiff, though it doesn’t not contain the first 11 min, including this opening monologue.
54 ‘transcribble, v.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/204644. Accessed 14 November 2022.
55 n.p.
56 n.p.
57 Yo-Yo’s, n.p.
58 ‘An Imperfect Diamond’, 367.
59 Dunaway, ‘Transcription’, 116–17.
60 See, for instance, Mazé ‘The Uneasy Page’, 239.
61 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
62 ‘What Is Social in Oral History?’, International Journal of Oral History 4, no. 2 (June 1983): 77.
63 Mazé, ‘The Uneasy Page’, 240–45.
64 Oral historians have suggested using such techniques to depict ‘poetic’ rhythm and speech’s ‘almost lyrical quality.’ See York, ‘Between Poetry and Prose. Oral History as a New Kind of Literature’, 13. See also the sources listed in note 9. Poetry, oral history, and ethnography also converge in the theory and practice of Ethnopoetics.
65 For recent work on poetic everyday life projects and attention, see Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
66 ‘About Yo-Yo’s and Beaned’.
67 Beaned, Tape 1B.
68 Tape 1A.
69 Tape 1A.
70 Tape 1A. This language playfully echoes Frank O’Hara’s ‘Poem’ (‘Lana Turner has collapsed!’). See The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 449.
71 Beaned, Tape 2A.
72 Michael North, What Is the Present? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
73 Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (trans.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 86.
74 Beaned, Tapes 2A and 2B.
75 I have been using ‘poetic,’ as Alford does, to sidestep contemporary debates about lyric. See Forms of Poetic Attention, 26. Here I want ‘lyric’ to gesture to lyric shame. See Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The ‘Lyric’ Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2014).
76 For more on what ‘changes in genre over time and what stays the same’ (2), see Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (Columbia University Press, 2017), 2; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
77 See ‘transcription, n’, entry 6. OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/204650 [Date Accessed 14 November 2022].