A new 2 channel streambox gives a sense of the space of the yard at loughborough junction, a place arising by happenstance at the intersection of routes: train tracks, roads, flightpaths. The overlay of sounds reveals opportunistic inhabiting by different groups in shifting associations - sometimes cooperative; some times antagonistic. different ages associate; with greater and less degrees and kinds of freedom and constraint. you hear the chickens close below the microphones, the beating of hammers muffled in middle distance, the swirl of juvenile and adult starlings, planes above

you're listening to the sounds of starlings, sparrows, planes, chickens, damp moving foliage in the yard at 54 cambria road, loughborough junction, especially the sounds of juvenile starlings - unspotted, ash-brown birds. it s overcast, light grey white sky, sounds emerge under and in the lower layers of cloud, under the planes. calls of rose necked parakeets muted. the song of a woodpigeon barely heard. intense green of lime leaves washed by light rain is full in turn of brighter green parakeets and the soft clumped forms of juvenile starlings. squirrels also move through the canopy, but we do not hear them. you can see them from the upper window - looking down and across the yard. M is on the train to candi to sit a maths exam. each house has a garden allocated to it. the size of the garden was determined when the land was divided into parcels. development followed expansion of tram and then quickly train links to other areas in the city, creating a mass of concentric and radial transit lines. a place such as loughborough junction arises primarily as the random offshoot of planned development in other places. lacking an identity as a locale, ambiguously caught between more established centers, it attracts rapid opportunistic development, where rows of houses are thrown up as quickly as possible and the rows are hastily stitched together. at the end of a row, an opening is left which may be a cut through, access road or a desire path via a remnant of extra land behind 3 rows of houses and a slightly older bigger building. the gardens allocated to these houses are small. where the rows meet, however, the garden of the last house has an extra bit of ground tacked on. this creates a longer wider strip, with a rough square at the bottom. unresolved, this remnant lies fallow and is colonised by pioneer plants, fungi and trees. who allowed this line of flight to become an option? Big Ray. cover develops, an area of woodland is established - a green mass. differing densities and textures open possibilities for exploration and habitation by flows of organisms local and remote. becoming a fragment of the planetary garden, it gives rise to a distinctive soundscape. high seasonal and daily variations are signs of a diverse assembly

10.00:48
M is half way through his exam. remembering this (which you forgot), you experience a rush of concern, as if you had forgotten something irrevocable. yesterday you visited your father in hospital. you saw him lying hands crossed across his chest in grey looking exhausted state. a little after that, he became animated, describing a book he had been reading about paintings. he sat up and swung his legs off the edge of the bed, avoiding the tubes being used to extract yellowish fluid from near his right lung. the doctors are very happy with the colour of the fluid. birds circulate in the trees, chirping and cooing. you are reading about implementing search engines. concern is distributed unevenly in the landscape: scattered, sketchy, distorted, distracted, patchy

10.24:00
actually M's exam was due to start at 9.15, not 9.

10.30:01
to be in time, for us, is to be among vegetation and among other organisms, as heard. this is the place of thinking. it is only from within these locations that we can think, really think. we are not able to have an overview and an overview is not something we seek. when we are unable to actually be down among vegetation and immersed in buildings, foliage, traffic of all kinds, we use remote open microphones and headphones so that our heads and by implication our whole bodies are placed down in these zones, thick with channels, thick with conflicting and overlapping rates and levels: indefinitely, spatially, openly

when we miss a recording we feel an immediate sense of loss. we have truly lost something. it is irrevocable. each thing we have lost, which is to say each failed recording leaves an opening. like the notes for the talks on How to Live Together by Roland Barthes, an incomplete covering, with occasional diacritical marks, indications for further speculation, gaps, aporias, ommissions, inconsistencies, create a porous interface inviting contact across boundaries with thickness. instead of a densely worked rhetorical surface, you encounter a kind of roughly woven holder, something like the sacks woven from palm fronds in Mtwara by people sitting under the trees selling mangos in December. these strangely captivating bags or baskets, made we can say in the spare time of sitting under trees waiting for buyers to pull off the highway, have no intention to be permanent. they are designed to hold the mangos only while in transit. strictly speaking they have no monetary value. for this reason they are preferred to plastic bags by some. some users prefer to purchase a plastic bag, perhaps considering the plaited mango baskets are out of date. for others the plaited container can also be a work of environmental philosophy and first a lure and then tool for halting then creating a foothold for recollection, in that long hot forgotten car ride through dusty red terrain. investment of time creates an object strangely endowed with abilities to dislodge sediments from the flows and pools in passages of time as differentially inhabited by various beings in layered locations - the rain begins! - and expanded auditoria

10.56
M's exam has finished, you think, if it started on time

an insect flies by your left ear - very briefly. birds. children. planes. you were reading paratext 1

'..the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or.. a "vestibule" that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back.'

Gerard Genette, 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge University Press.

para·text exists to promote the expansion of literary contexts. This is the starting point, a threshold of its own. We are grateful to all those who contribute to the project.

http://www.paratext.co.uk/about

cp Clément: the border

you are following paratext, you are learning how to run elasticsearch and kibana. you think of kibanda, that little hut by the w indian ocean. paratext has the effect of opening, in the way of expanded literary materials, in fact. yay. a person pierces the eye of an egg
at another point you are hearing a chicken hop onto the roof and move about with miniscule cries
at the same time somebody is banging at the piano
19.12
19.13
vlc is a strangely guarded app. it does not open to the user. it does work. it works. there is no record button and no indication of whether you are recording or not. the beak of the chicken is very sensitive, we understand, in contact with the feeder.
then the chicken flies down from the roof. it's a low roof on the rabbit hutch. the rabbits are on the ground. the chickens have their feeder on the roof, where the rabbits can't get their food. one rabbit got so fat it couldn't turn around. now it's back to normal weight. they eat hay and greens, and fresh grass in summer.
starlings are called mimics, WH Hudson writes, maybe just because of the range and variety of their voices. their murmurations were seized as a media spectacle but their long songs resist seizure. they do not imititate like the mocking bird, WH Hudson writes. They improvise long sequences, taking an interest in peculiar timbres. at this time of the year they are not singing. they are feeding and calling for food. ash-brown, says WH Hudson: the unspeckled young. he compares them to rooks. they scatter out across the grass like rooks, but quicker. he describes the arrival of a group of 50 rooks in the kensington gardens: how it stirred up the jackdaws. he speaks of the intercommunications between corvids; speaks and moves on; speaks and moves on. he describes the destruction of the rookery in the old trees by the albert memorial in terms of a monstrous cleansing. in fact the removal of the trees supporting the long standing rookery is expressly to make the ground below drier and more amenable for strolling. the energy of the rooks is lost. an interface (paratext) is removed. the paratext is elaborate: it depends on space that is partially filled: with branches, with leaves that turn, with respiring tissues intra-acting with the air: the canopy. we look out on the canopy from high up in the way we dive. we put our faces in the water and dive, as in 'under water', with partially restricted breath, like harmonica players. our partially restricted breath is accompanied by a sense of unfamiliar spaces and unknown communications among: lion fish: sea cucumber; sea stars; brain coral; parrot fish. this is where we are swimming: a kind of playground of the mind and near naked body, characterised with the greatest looseness and barely attention, as you are distracted constantly by new information: a new intonation, the appearance as if from nowhere of a species. a small fish appears with a surplus of markings. if we could point out this surplus, in the way we are sharing the sounds of the starling flock, the inhabitants of the habitat we have been instigating - all this time. all that time when we were doing nothing, so it seemed, neither standing tall nor lying low, but in a state of obliqueness - not banging out tunes. all the time we weren't banging out tunes, who knows: openings were created, maybe. opening arises, to make that point again, from the disappointment of certain expectations: re roles re resources re story. the third landscape arises in the gaps left by the inconclusion of development. it occupies space through elaboration. an insect flying close by the microphone creates a phantom sense of a slight wind brushing the listener's ear. the signal passes over ethernet to the router and the locus sonus server and is heard here in the top part of the house with some seconds delay. you look out over the canopy through a window partially obscured by grime, you see the movements of birds and other organisms in the canopy. some seconds later you hear them. you hear the planes go over through the open window. some seconds after, you hear them again. the live is not about immediacy, Jean Cristófol writes, still less about simultaneity. the live streams are about real time processes which join and split in a double movement. separate and link. the double movement of recall from the canopy, from we used to say oblivion, is a double overhearing of our displacement in | from our place. we cede our place. we re assume a place at a remove, this place at a remove however is a place of real interest for us. over interest. it is our home. not only is it our home, the ground of our ecologies, it is also where our extended diy audio equipment allows us to overhear our own co-presence -absence in the yard. your father is ill in hospital. go visit him again. we hear the yard as if we are not there. at the same time, we leave the yard, as if we are there. the arrière-pays of Bonnefoy is such an ambiguous area of semi neglect. semi forgetful verging on neglect. verging on relation. such a mess, we throw our hands. how can it be, we say, looking around us: how can it go on. we settle down: clumps, patches. phases of aeration. calls. we call out. a new kind of gaudy birds comes in a quick flight and plunges out of sight into the leaves. gradually we begin to make out its contact calls. something is pecking the microphone, you think. something perhaps is tearing fur from the microphone windshields, creating a harsh grating in the right channel. it's stopped. it stopped. you see the time - it's 11.44. what content does that have. like the boy you asked how long would it take to fill the water tank. there was no meaning attached to that question. in that house by the w indian ocean at that time

the recording failed again

reinstall vlc
it looks the same as the old one no record button
nothing to indicate if you are recording or not
make a new recording
try again