March 9, 2012: David Suisman: The Slowness Of Madame De T - for Radio Boredcast

DAVID SUISMAN: THE SLOWNESS OF MADAME DE T – FOR RADIO BOREDCAST

On the face of it, “The Slowness of Madame de T.” is a tale of seduction—a seduction all the more intense for being drawn out, “in all its splendid slowness.” On closer inspection, it is something more: a rumination on memory, on the intimate relationship between remembering and forgetting, slowness and haste. We keep some experiences with us, others are lost; the question here is not why this is so, but how. The text come Milan Kunera’s novel Slowness. Accompanying it are sounds by David Toop, Nino Rota, Helen Gurley Brown, Karen Dalton, Henry Flynt, Frederic Rzewski, Gasoline Stew and the Dump, The Stooges, Kinski, The Mebusas, Delia Derbyshire, Dudley Simpson, Brian Hodgson & David Vorhaus, Bernard Purdie, Julie London, Wizz Jones, Janet Cardiff, Åke Sandin, Slap Happy Humphrey, Michael Harrison, Blossom Dearie, Henry Jacobs, Scott Tuma, and Jacques Tati.

David Suisman is the author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music and associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. For several years, he hosted a freeform radio show called the Inner Ear Detour on WFMU, where he still occasionally DJs. He teaches history at the University of Delaware and lives in Philadelphia.

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