when pat suggests raymond

here's a home recording from the 1940's that i've been somewhat obsessed with since it arrived in a lot of 1940's "wilcox-gay" recordio discs.

it's a pretty simple minute of sound from a birthday party of young "pat", with everyone in attendance saying happy birthday.

this beautiful litany brought to mind raymond queneau's exercises in style, a book in which he tells the story of a simple incident in 99 different ways (dream, narrative, anagrams, spectral, passive, telegraphic, etc.)

the sound and the book, both strive towards a perfect evocation of a single event, and at the same time become evidence that imperfection and all its wonderful disconnects is the stuff of life... no two similar things are ever exactly the same.

there is no perfect "happy birthday pat", any more than there is one perfect way to tell queneau's story; but each individual iteration of both is something pretty gosh darned wonderful to behold.

there's a great quote by louise bourgeous that i could not find in this mess, regarding stone carving and the repetitive nature of such a process, the repetition of the action and trying to get something right.

in some ways, the repetitions in queneau and "happy birthday pat" become a similar kind of meditation... repeated sutras towards a kind of enlightenment, similar indeed to carving a stone, as one hammers away at it until something, within the stone, is revealed...

click here to listen