When Dorothy and I had dinner the other night with Emily (see Dorothy’s post for more), we talked about listening to audiobooks. I simply can’t do audiobooks. My mind probably wanders too much to listen while driving. I have had this experience far too many times: I am driving my usual route to campus, through the winding back roads of western Connecticut, and I will take a corner and realize that I have no idea where I am. For several miles, my car has been driving itself, and when I am recalled to my legal duties as the operator of a motor vehicle, I cannot tell where I am. Which curve is this? I think frantically. Then I see the big oak tree or the small pond, and I realize how far I am in my commute. Because of this, I know that I could not listen to audiobooks in the car as Dorothy does–I would miss huge chunks of the plot. Wait a minute, I would think, someone died? Who? What happened? Why are they all crying? I don’t get it!
The main reason, though, as Dorothy pointed out, is that I have trouble hearing voices on the radio. When I listen to music, I keep the volume relatively low, but when I listen to NPR, I have to crank it up to understand the voices. As Dorothy further pointed out, I have trouble understanding song lyrics. Other people sing along with the songs they like. I sort of hum and make singing noises but don’t actually sing because I have no idea what the lyrics are.
I have always had this trouble. When I was six or seven, I ordered a book of ghost stories from the Scholastic catalog at school. The book came with a little 45rpm record of some of the stories in the book and some silly ghost songs. One of the songs was something about a ghost named John, and one of the lines asked, rhetorically I hope, “Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?” For some reason, I decided that I needed to write out the lyrics, and my mom discovered my transcription and still (34 years later!) teases me about it. I heard “Wooden dippy jelly with no skin on,” which, granted, makes no sense. But I was six, and a lot of things made no sense to me. The world was simply full of things that make no sense. Sadly, it still is full of things that make no sense. How else could one come explain this? This man is our president?
So listening to audiobooks would be a complete loss for me. I could imagine myself listening to all of Dracula, only to find myself wondering, at the end, why everyone is so scared of baseball referees. The audiobook would make no sense, and I would be six again, sadly realizing that the world makes no sense, and these damned newfangled authors with their damned postmodern ideas are writing pure gibberish.
The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 
Maybe this is related to that time your car was making a noise that only Dorothy could hear and you were confounded by it.
Also- Isn’t writing pure gibberish sort of the point of postmodernism?
“Have you seen the ghost of John?
Poor old bones with the flesh all go-o-o-one
Ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh, ooh ooh
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?’
I haven’t thought of that song in years, and I have no idea where I heard it when I was a child.
I think I could not listen to audiobooks while driving either, unless on a route I know by heart and with little or no traffic. I need too much concentration for the driving. This is why I like riding my bike so much: it is much slower and thus it leaves me enough of my brains to ‘read’ audiobooks or listen to podcasts.
(note that when I ride my bike in downtown traffic, again the benefit is lost).
Becky–that’s the song! I’m glad you know it, too, otherwise, I might think I was making it up and had lost my mind.
Believe it or not, that DOES happen to me with audiobooks sometimes. Someone is suddenly dead, and I have no idea why. And it’s so frustrating to try going back to find out what happened, because, no matter what the audiobook says, each track on the CD is ALWAYS longer than three minutes, which means I usually have to listen to something over again, and then my mind just might start wandering again… Unfortunately, I can’t claim it’s because I have troubel with lyrics. Then again, since I’m the one who at around age six or so thought the lyrics “Ain’t too proud to beg” were “Aunt Jemima, Babe,” (I loved my pancakes and syrup at that age), maybe I can. Still, I’m learning to like audiobooks more and more.