the act will always be a little freakish

Richard Powers on how to speak a book:

Like all good Jetson futures, speech recognition is really a memory. Speak the thing into being: as dreams go, that’s as old as they get. Once, all stories existed only in speech, and no technology caused more upheaval than the written word. In the “Phaedrus,” Socrates — who talked a whole lot but never, apparently, wrote a word — uncorks at length about how writing damages memory, obscures authority and even alters meaning. But we have his warning only through Plato’s suspect transcript.

For most of history, most reading was done out loud. Augustine remarks with surprise that Bishop Ambrose could read without moving his tongue. Our passage into silent text came late and slow, and poets have resisted it all the way. From Homer to hip-hop, the hum is what counts. Blind Milton chanted “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Of his 159-line “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth said, “I began it upon leaving Tintern ... and concluded ... after a ramble of four or five days. ... Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.” Wallace Stevens used to compose while walking to work, then dictate the results to his secretary, before proceeding to his official correspondence as vice president of the Hartford insurance company. (I’ve tried dictating to my tablet while rambling; traffic and birdsong make it babble.)

Even novelists, working in a form so very written, have needed to write by voice. Stendhal dictated “The Charterhouse of Parma” in seven weeks. An impoverished Dostoyevsky had just six weeks to deliver the manuscript of “The Gambler” or face complete ruin. He hired a stenographer, knocked the book out in four weeks, then married the girl.
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