Joseph Zitt

Up on the music floor in our store, we can play music either from our iPods (if we have the album being played in stock and if it doesn’t contain offensive language) or with the CD player hooked up to the sound systems. Each provided us with possibilities and problems.

The CD player is a five-disk carousel thing, so we can load in several discs to play in sequence. I’m not too clear on what the sequence is, since the numbers on the tray can’t be read easily. I know that the disc that is in the center position when the tray is open plays first. If I put in three discs, one to its left and one to its right, it will play the center disc then each of the others, though I’m often surprised by which it chooses. Tonight, when I was the only worker on the the floor for the last three hours of the day, I loaded it up with three discs: Kelly Clarkson’s Miss December (OK, no surprises, but I can’t remember much about it not long after); Trio of Doom by John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius, and Tony Williams (amazing pyrotechnic jazz-rock from a trio that lasted about a week in 1979); and the first disc of Sinéad O’Connor’s new Theology (quite good, though her lyrics get clunky when she stuffs in undigested Biblical quotes).

I had an idea tonight, though, that may remove this problem: I’ve burned a CD-R containing an hour of silence. Now, whenever we’re playing a single disc, we can pop this silent disc into any other position in the tray. The person in charge of the music should have plenty of time to get to the player before the music restarts.

On the other hand, I think the player tends not to replay the first disc if more than one are loaded. Oddly, I think I’ve experienced this both happening and not happening, which means that either it’s inconsistent (which is possible) or my memory is glitchy (which is probable). If it does stop after a second disc, having one with a minute of silence would work as well as one with an hour of silence. But I’ll see how this one works first.

Unrelatedly: seeing that the store had gotten a copy of John Cage’s Silence in stock, I kidded my supervisor that I should put up a display with that and some blank CDs. Thinking about it further, though, it seemed like a less crazy idea. So we now have a display with the book, two blank journals, a box of clear empty CD cases, a foreign film called The Silence, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, a book from the Religion section on silence and solitude, and a sign that says “(silence)”. It looks good, and our General Manager says that it’s one of the best displays he’s seen in the store. Running with a sublime, goofy idea works again

As mentioned before, most of my writing effort is happening in The Book of Voices. So hop over to bookofvoices.us to see the ongoing Biblical microfictions. I’m currently writing a monologue for Elijah, which is turning out quite curious: his story in the Biblical text is weirdly repetitive and discontinuous, and putting that together with apocryphal and more recent legends is pointing to some interesting possibilities about his identity.

But now to sleep…