🎧 Verbal Portrait No. 1 (Audio)
Given this newsletter’s title, I thought it may well be time to incorporate some sound into my emails.
That’s right, audiophiles, without further ado: actual White Noise!
Above: Not my audio setup
If you have been with White Noise from the beginning, you will know that I enjoy dabbling in experimental formats, media, and schema. A perennial favorite of mine and of yours (per Substack analytics) is the Verbal Portrait:
From vivid descriptions of my most minute observations, I attempted to create a coherent verbal “image.” Like the pointillistic brushstrokes of Seurat, my words would obfuscate if read individually, but render clarity when taken as a whole. Hence, the idea of verbal portraiture was born.
A Verbal Portrait is a specific, hyper-detailed description of the reality an individual sees in front of him/her.
I invite you to close your eyes, and visualize the portrait the spoken words paint for you. ⬇️
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Verbal Portrait of a Lady on a Train
Verbal Portrait of a Lady on a Train
She was the bookish type. Meek and slender with a kindly disposition. While I sat across from her, she devoured The Old Capital, flipping its well-worn pages with an uncharacteristic hunger.
She would finish this book, a library book, while we rode the train south. In many ways, she reminded me of the gently-worn, plastic-wrapped book. She was worn, her face showed the lines of past smiles and former laughs. Her spectacles, thin and precise, magnified her steady blue-eye gaze as she quietly rustled like the book's pages. Her brown-orange hair was cropped short—she was too old to be a mother yet too young to be a grandmother. Too old to shuffle exuberant children to soccer practice and too young for the bingo hall. Like the library book, she was checked out in that interminable stage of life where all was present and possible. It was the freedom of young old age.
If you enjoyed this verbal portrait, gaze upon some others: