Stephen Ratcliffe Reads 1000 Page Book in 10 Hour Recording

Are you flying to Brazil for the World Cup? Maybe taking the Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco this summer? Other long travel plans? Well, you can do worse than listening to Stephen Ratcliffe read one of his 1,000 page books in a single go. Brought to you via Jacket2, you can listen to C o n t i n u u m in one hour segments. Al Filreis introduces the piece:

C o n t i n u u m, written between January 5, 2011 and September 30, 2013, is the fourth book in Stephen Ratcliffe's ongoing series of 1,000-page books, each written in 1,000 consecutive days.

Listening to Ratcliffe reading the words of the day on the page as it turns from one day to the next, one hears the poem's acoustic 'shape': the length and pitch of its syllables and words (plus those silences between them) sounding the air. What one doesn't hear is its visual 'shape': words set in Courier, font of equivalent spacing; the nine lines on the page divided into four stanzas; first three lines all the same length, followed by two pairs of indented lines (both first lines the same length, both second lines six spaces shorter), followed by two final lines (back on the left margin, both lines also the same length)

Read on, sit back, listen, and enjoy!