Instructions for the Kind Ones

I’m not an Apple influencer, but a few of you might be listening to this literary podcast on the move—driving or commuting on the subway, many with an iPhone and those AirPods that are sometimes good. And sometimes really bad for certain things. They are good for pushing a heavy beat when you’re running at full speed. But they are not so good for nuanced voices.A song that doesn’t rock in a car because it isn’t mastered properly is a song nobody wants. So, this is the only reason Apple tweaked their AirPods badly enough to drive me crazy. Reversing this tweaking was fundamental this morning in the hacking of that ancient Egyptian serpent the Ptolemaic Greeks named Ouroboros—literally, the tail-eater—and it freed me from countless hours of monitoring. I could finally hear my low end without thinking I was channeling Feodor Chaliapin, the legendary Russian bass performing Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.I have perfect pitch like a piano tuner due to voice crafting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be competitive enough for the scant audiobook auditions. And for years I’ve had to deal with tweaked AirPods as the ultimate standard. If you look at the pictures, you will see exactly how to fix them. Believe me, tweak the b*****d. It is classic Apple—hiding the actual math behind sleek visual sliders and assuming nobody will care. And One More Thing.That Spatial Audio for mono does not work, because I’m supposed to be at your twelve o’clock. And that Noise Cancellation, indispensable while commuting, kills the audio signal too.And again, I am not mad because some of you prefer to read rather than listen to me. That’s the way. But I do this narrator performance not for you, but for the illiterate who cannot read anymore.According to my July stats, I have thousands of listeners, and a few hundred readers. And the idiotic doom-scrollers out there looking for a dopamine fix—with their TikTok-reduced attention spans and shallow discourse—that cesspool, you can keep it.It’s true that sometimes the algorithm tempts you to follow the rule of vanity. I never beat the amazing stats of the podcast on the Shakespearean portrait of Trump as Richard the Third, but I’m not here for the likes.I’m here to write whatever I want and in the way I want. And to read out loud for the illiterate generation we have reaped, who cannot comprehend a sentence longer than ten words unless you sing to the muse. Only a century ago, reading a twenty-five-word sentence was quite normal to get to the point.Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier had sentences of forty words. Marcel Proust had the same average; however, I could cause shock and awe by reading his longest sentence, which stretched out to 847 words in the original French, and 958 in the Scott Moncrieff English translation.You know what? F**k it. I’m so generous today that I am going to celebrate the hacking of the Ouroboros by reading aloud that Proustian sentence—it’s a masterclass in coming out of the closet. Don’t worry, I will fade the narration out... to mellow audiobook standards when I exceed your ten-minute attention span.Let’s have some fun!“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous