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– Benjamin Samuel is the Online Editor of Electric Literature. If he had three wishes, one of them would be for world peace. Probably.

by T. S. Eliot

Faber and Faber & Touch Press

$13.99/iPad

In our culture of distraction, in which I find myself unable to sit through the entirety of a one-minute video of a dog taking tiny steps on its hind legs to flamenco music before wanting to click on to the next thing, poetry occupies a strange purgatory of time-commitment. While less active reading time is required than, of course, a novel, or even your average short story, in my experience most poems require several re-reads, a ponder, a reconsideration in a different mood. And it’s hard to find that perfect moment to return to the poem when there is an ever-growing pile of headlines, posts, emails, and alerts pouring in.

I was curious, then, to explore The Waste Land app for iPad (published by Touch Press), to see how it addressed this issue: how would it adapt a rather long, rather difficult poem for the medium on which I recently caught two scenes of Tron: Legacy over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me on the subway?

It turns out the The Waste Land was not an arbitrary choice for an upgrade. I learned, via the app, that part of Eliot’s inspiration for the many voices in the poem was the new technology of his time, the radio. As Jeannette Winterson said in a brief commentary video, accessible by orienting the iPad horizontally and turning on the “Perspectives” feature, the radio is “the beginning of us being in a very noisy world… where there’s at least six conversations happening, and you’re always eavesdropping.” In the 90 years since the poem was published our eavesdropping has increased exponentially whether we like it or not, the clamor in our heads comprising not only the voices of radio, television, and bloggers but the woman on the bus yapping into her cell phone, the incessant mundane status updates beamed to every ready device.

O restless fingered, O serial clickers, fear not, for you do not have to spend much time sitting still listening to scholars and writers expound on Eliot (though Seamus Heaney’s memories of encountering the poet for the first time are worth listening to): in addition to the full text of the poem, the app easily allows users to flip between the final version and T. S. Eliot’s manuscript, scrawled upon by Ezra Pound. I have very little tolerance for Pound’s work, but, as a compulsive reviser who feels nothing she writes is ever good enough, I couldn’t help but admire his slash-and-burn edits across Eliot’s typed pages.

When you’ve finished exploring and are ready to dive into the poem, several guides await you: Eliot himself, reading the poem at two different points in his life (1933 and 1947), Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen. While Mortensen’s reading was a little subdued, turning the poem into a bedtime story (well, not that bedtime story), Hughes’s reading was surprisingly lively. One pleasure of having so many readers to choose from is switching between them, and at this task the app is wonderfully smooth. A small icon on the bottom releases the menu of names; tap on a line of the poem wherever you’d like Aragorn to begin reading. I was quickly caught up in listening to the same stanza over and over, toggling between voices to compare their Cockney accents in “A Game of Chess.” Eliot didn’t feign congestion when reading the cold-stricken Madame Sosostris’s predictions, but actress Fiona Shaw does an admirable stuffy nose.

Shaw’s filmed performance of the entire poem, set in one of those peeling houses so beloved by the Anthropologie catalogue, is surely the centerpiece of the app. Gorgeously shot, entrancingly acted, Shaw’s reading gives the poem real theatricality. And my arbitrary decision to play around with the app for a little while before settling in to watch the performance was fortuitous: having reviewed the manuscript first, having seen Pound’s note that “demotic” should replace “abominable” to describe a character’s French in “The Fire Sermon” made the word leap out when Shaw pronounced it. In that moment the poem had a new dimensionality. Not depth, mind you—that was there from Eliot’s earliest drafts—but history, shape, a path it had travelled over the past near-century.

You can get lost in watching Shaw’s facial expressions as she reads, by holding the iPad horizontally, or turn it upright and watch the lines of the poem scroll by under the video. This, ultimately, is the app’s most important, well-designed strength: no matter how many times you tap onto something else, turn the voices on or off, switch between manuscript and final mode, you’re always coming back to the poem, never straying from Eliot’s words. The multimedia does not detract, it enhances, and gives reading an intimidating poem the joy of exploration, of discovery. Would that other difficult texts receive such treatment. Let’s get one for Ulysses next, with readings from Bloomsday events and Joyce’s letters with his wife. Or Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, with clips from the Kurosawa film. Reading is a balm for the unquiet mind, especially texts that are long, and difficult, and don’t inspire flash mobs. No matter how much you play around, there comes a point when it’s time to settle in and read, and that’s something we could all stand to remember.

—Nora Fussner has an MFA in fiction writing from Brooklyn College. She now teaches English at Brooklyn College and Kingsborough Community College, and is working on a novel.

Editor’s Note: If you’re looking for more distraction, here’s a video tour of the app from publisher Touch Press

His real name was Serge.

He used the name Francois when he was doing sex work. He was all over the Internet.

He was pretty but he wasn’t that good a fuck. Junkies never are. They want to get high. Not have sex. Sex is what Serge did for money.

He wanted into Cinematheque. He was a talented artist but I didn’t think he could turn his life around.

“There are too many twelve-year-olds,” I tried explaining. “I just don’t think I could expose them to an addict as committed to heroin as you are.”

We negotiated. Negotiating is what junkies do.

I would let him into Cinematheque’s art program but he had to clean up his act. He went into a treatment center and he tried. I know he tried. I know it was hard. But I had to be hard, too.
I had never kicked anyone out of the program.

In fact, I wasn’t the one who kicked Serge out. The other boys did it themselves. I was amazed at how angry they were with him.

We were in Amsterdam then. He relapsed. It happens.

Eavan was the first one who came to me. Eavan is a junkie himself. They don’t have HIV for nothing.

The propaganda rhetoric calls them boys at risk. “Serge is using.”

My eyes to the sky.

“I will talk to him,” I said.

“You better do more than talk to him.” Eavan walked away.

“Don’t walk away from me, Eavan.” But he kept on going. And the New York Writing Remoras think they’re arrogant. They haven’t met Eavan. They might someday though.

Now, Eavan was writing, and had stayed away from junk.

I was going to have to wade into it. I try to stay out of all their convoluted stuff. It is not always possible.

I knew Serge was close to Remy. But I did not want to know much more than that. Remy is young. But Remy is old in ways that defy sanity itself.

“We’re lovers,” Remy tells me. Remy is defiant. It’s just his way.

The Amsterdam loft was becoming complicated. Paris had been.

There is only one reason Serge would be sleeping with Remy. Remy’s family has money.

‘Remy, are you bankrolling Serge.”

He bites his lower lip.

Shit.

“Il a un fusil.”

“What kind of gun.”

“Silver.”

Remy knows nothing about guns.

Probably a revolver. A relapsed heroin addict with a gun. Just what I needed.

Serge was gone a lot. Amsterdam beckoned. I wondered if he’d been doing tricks. An adolescent with HIV as a prostitute. None of this was good. I had worked so hard with this boy. He was in his room asleep.

I crawled into his bed.

You are thinking sex. Yes, you are.

I crawled into his bed with my clothes on. I crawled into his bed because I wanted his attention. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a failure that has haunted me for over a year, now.
He was not surprised that I was in bed with him. I knew him to his core.

“Tim…”

“It’s three in the afternoon, Serge. You need to get up.” His room was a wreck. His works and his gun were in the bed with us.

He wasn’t hiding anything.

“Get up. We’re going for a ride.”

“I want to sleep.”

I pulled him out of bed by his hair. He didn’t weigh that much. Food just doesn’t interest junkies. I pushed him up against the wall. I hit him in the face with my fist. Several times. His lip was bleeding and his eye was going to swell.

He was naked.

He just took it. “What the fuck, Tim.”

“Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

There is a beach in Wilhelmshaven. The drive there is nothing.

I needed to walk on a beach. The sea was cold and mean.

He was having trouble keeping up. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you!” He screamed. I left him there.
In the cold. Getting back would be his problem.

That night, they kicked him out. They took a vote. It was a done deal.

I just sat there with my head in my hands. I knew what this was going to mean. I knew.

I do not think the twelve-year-olds had any sort of awareness about what kicking Serge out was going to come to. Or mean. How could they. But he scared them and this was their chance to get rid of it.
“Are you sure,” I asked them. They were resolute. Even Remy.

He didn’t fight it. He just left. We heard he was back to his usual tricking in the Pigalle. The red light district of Paris was not unknown to them.

A few days later, Eavan is in my room. He had been on the Internet. “Serge has blown his head off.”

That was all.

You have them when you have them. You can’t save them all.

Bullshit. I want to save all of them.

The train ride to Paris and the funeral is one of those memories I only have in fragments. It was my fault. I could have talked them into letting him stay but I did not do it.

My head was coming off.

Eavan put his arm around my shoulders. “Just sleep.”

We arrived in Paris and I could not go on another foot.

“We were all he had.”

“They don’t need you to bury him, Tim.”

We took the train back to Amsterdam.

All the way back to Amsterdam, I kept hearing him scream at me. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you can!”
Set at naught. Defiance speaks to me. It always has. I fail all the time with them. The wolves are always at the door. The voices are articulate and come from oblivion as if pulled by horses. No, you can’t keep up with me. Egress is just a man and a boy upon this beach and you have drained me of redemption. Go to hell.

I am hearing voices.

http://twitter.com/vook1

http://www.facebook.com/people/Tim-Barrus/100000080077064?

http://vook.tumblr.com

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=210147378670