Is this something to do with American culture or lifestyle???
Married life maybe...
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Is this something to do with American culture or lifestyle???
Married life maybe...
Maybe even more specific: the individual.Quote:
Is this something to do with American culture or lifestyle???
Well, TN it sounds like lines from TV shows. The first one I can almost bet was from The Newlywed Game, a TV game show in the US back in the 1970s. The show asked friviolous questions to newlyweds and the spouse had to match the mate's answer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Yes, the question is asked in way that will allow the person to lend their viewpoint. What shapes the viewpoint of each individuals response? To me all three vegetables seem too similar for me to tell the difference. Is their an option 4, 5, 6, 7...?Quote:
Gentlemen, which of these three vegetables: tomatoes, pumpkins, or squash, will your wives say most represents the part of their anatomy that has come to sag the most since your wedding night
Let me explain further:
Maybe when I interpret the same poem as say, Unnamable, or Virgil, or Jackyll, or Petrarch, or Xamonas, Im working with the options 1,2,3; But Unnamable is working with options 1,2,3,4,5,6,7; and Virgil with options 2,3,4,5,6,7,8. These are different sets of options each individual has to work to shape their interpretion on 'something.' I don't have option 4 to interpret with but Unnamable and Virgil do, so I reject interpretation with option 4 because I don't have an understanding of it, even though it exist and may be more apt to interpret 'something.'
I know this may be going too far, but what I'm getting at is that everyone
may, indeed, interpret with different viewpoints(options available). A word can mean something to one person and something different to another person. Who or what is responsible for our viewpoints(interpretations)?
Any other ideas?
To some degree I agree but some of us are older and have more experience at it. When I was your age, there was no way I could interpret as well as you do. Some of it is experience built up through college and reading and some through personal experience.Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
He compared his memory to a piece of rapidly cooling igneous rock and sentences from television shows are the slender scars on it...Hm
So this must have happened just after a volcano. The salamander surely is the TV, who somehow turns lava to rock (hence, life into memory?) with TV shows, and in the process leaves on the rocks sentence-scars.
Igneous rock, salamander: sex life?!? So TV ruins his sex life? Or maybe it ruins his passionate marriage! ...? Yeah, I know, I'm way off.
Anyway, we all know that television isn't good for our health. At least I'm right about that :p
Here are some of the things that I pondered when first encountering the poem. I’ll try not to give my own answers to the questions I asked as I think the questions themselves should help everyone formulate their own responses and it was by working through such questions that I arrived at my own ‘reading’.
1. Why is the title so long? Why is it written in that way? The language of the title is very different from the body of the poem. Is the title meant as an endorsement of or a challenge to what follows?
2. Why are there seven sentences? At first, they all appear to be unrelated – are they?
3. How can we identify/characterise each of the seven sentences? I don’t know ‘The Newlywed Game’ but I’m sufficiently familiar with this type of inane game show to be able to identify the kind of host speaking the lines here as well as the kind of show he’s hosting. He begins with ‘Gentlemen’ and then asks a question that hardly seems consistent with the host’s supposed perception of the contestants as ‘gentlemen’. Why is there a full stop rather than a question mark at the end of this first sentence?
4. What is the context of the second sentence? Who would speak like this and in what circumstances?
5. What is the difference between 48 degrees and 48 WABC degrees? I assume that WABC is a radio station.
6. In the next sentence, who is ‘we’? The line comes from the opening credits of The Outer Limits TV show – a bit like The Twilight Zone.
7. The next sentence returns us to game shows – in the UK there was a similar show called ‘Blind Date’. Is the poem itself like a session of channel hopping? Are we flicking between different aspects of our culture as represented through the banality of the media industry? The title says “Seven Sentences Which Have / Entered My Memory Via Hearing Them / or Reading Them”, so they aren’t all TV moments. What is the significance of the fact that bachelor number three collects Disney memorabilia?
8. Is the next sentence a newspaper headline? It could also be the onscreen text during a news item. Why is the word ‘coed’ used rather than say, ‘student’?
9. Is the list of things in Encyclopedia Britannica III simply random or carefully chosen?
10. Why does the poem end with ‘…’?
11. How can we group particular ideas in all of this? For example, there are a number of mentions of cold temperatures – ‘turning blue’, ‘48 WABC degrees’, ‘Abominable Snowman’.
12. What is the cumulative effect of these seven chosen sentences?
I think the sentences themselves are the salamanders.Quote:
Originally Posted by tn2743
[QUOTE=The Unnamable]Here are some of the things that I pondered when first encountering the poem. I’ll try not to give my own answers to the questions I asked as I think the questions themselves should help everyone formulate their own responses and it was by working through such questions that I arrived at my own ‘reading’.[QUOTE]
I looked at the poem asking myself this question: Whats missing/present in each of the thought expressed in each of the several sentences? Over the next few days hopefully my understanding will become more refined.
Boy, do you know which line is haunts me? 'We control the horizontal.'
Why does the title not have punctuation but the several sentences are filled with it? I think there is something important in this.
Thanks, Unnamable! The above lead to my thoughts below.Quote:
Is the list of things in Encyclopedia Britannica III simply random or carefully chosen?
Quote:
Why does the title not have punctuation but the several sentences are filled with it? I think there is something important in this.
This is very telling to me for some reason. A sentence is the expression of a complete thought; and yet there are several complete thoughts expressed below the title, Some DO, to me, seem unrelated and somehow my mind is reconfiguring, trying, to produce a connection between all several sentences. Does our mind need to try to find a connection between unrelated things?Quote:
Boy, do you know which line is haunts me? 'We control the horizontal.'
I really like this!Quote:
Originally Posted by tn2743
The Newlywed Game Show made Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newlywed_Game
And here's their web site:
http://timstvshowcase.com/newlywed.html
Inane is the perfect word to describe it.
I believe that Ktd222 hit the nail on the head.
This is precisely what our brains always do and what they are especially good at doing, finding connections. Whole religions have grown up out of the perceived connections spotted by our ever questing brains.Quote:
Does our mind need to try to find a connection between unrelated things?
To me this poem(?) is nothing more than what the title proclaims it to be, a cluster of phrases that have stuck in the author's mind run together into a paragraph. It is the reader that imbues these phrases with anything other than randomness and Mr Wachtel was quite aware of this when he prepared this piece. I imagine that he would be quite amused to read this thread or any of the reviews and analyses of this work that must exist.
That doesn't mean that I don't quite like it, but I won't be wasting any of my time looking for hidden meanings.
I was going to ask this on my first post on this poem. But then I thought that it was because the author was simply quoting back. He's describing the scar on his igneous rock and reporting its shape and size, but he's not actually asking the question. He doesn't want to ask the question. Am I right?Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
As I was reading the seven sentences, the word 'scar' keeps entering my mind. These sentences all have different lengths and depths, and shapes too, like scars.
I agree that the salamanders are the lines themselves. This changes my perspective completely. Well then, as the title has informed us, each sentence has at least one thing in common: they all have left a scar each on the author's memory in a way that a salamander would on an igneous rock. This relationship is still unclear to me. I keep thinking that I must understand this key of the title before I can understand fully the seven sentences.
I also thought that the seven sentences might not have been written in a completely different style from the title's. The difference is that the author had to use sentences already written. So the only thing he could do was to arrange them. He did not even choose them, because it was the sentences who left scars on him, not him who chose to remember the sentences. So, in a way, he's painting (or building) rather than writing. And the way that he has arranged them might not be all that different from the way he writes. Am I making sense?
'...': this one is a long and undefined scar?
I have a question: could he have read, or heard these sentences all from the TV? I read many things on TV...
You might be right. But what if he did have other meanings? Out of respect for poetry, we can't take the risk of missing them. I wouldn't mind being laughed at by the author, but to dismiss a piece of writing without consideration is to be disrespectful to the author. And I think he might respect us for respecting him, in any case, don't you think?Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
I believe it has a meaning, a moral message, and GrumbleGuts is correct to not read more into the seven, other than there are seven. These are typical 20th century footprints, that end up being genetic footprints because they shape humankind. He could have picked other footprints, even bootprints, but he picked these because they are kind of random, but inside the same media packet. As a distraction, I just happen to think there are seven because his car radio has seven buttons on it, which is strange because usually modern cars come with even numbers, so maybe its an old Mustang, and he is being kinda nostalgic. Seven could be, he is feeling lucky. I'll go one further, The Magnificent Seven.Quote:
Originally Posted by tn2743
I didn't use 'meanings' only to address moral messages, I meant also the use of words and the skills of a poet that he might have employed. But Grumbleguts refused this, or at least that's what I think he did by saying that they are simply a list of random things.
They are just random? So you are dismissing all the questions as to the relationship between or the arragnement of these sentences? It's a risky assumption to make unless the author has instructed us in this direction; I don't recall reading the word 'random' anywhere in the poem. In fact, he stated clearly that this is a paragraph made up of setences which have significant structural meanings to his memory.
Well, aren't we here to answer the questions that this poem raised? I'd go along with the questions that Unnamable raised to start with. I think that there are relations between the sentences, and there is a deeper relation between the sentences and the title. And I think that these sentences have been arranged in an order of some kind (at least of time or something as basic as that). There must be more to a poem than just moral messages.
How could he have 'read' these lines from a radio?
I don’t think there is a direct connection – they strike me as things that the poet could easily have actually heard or read. I think the significant connection is that they all tell us something about the nature of the world we’ve constructed for ourselves through the discourses of modern media. I said earlier that they have a cumulative effect but this isn’t quite right – it’s more that they interact with one another and cumulatively produce a rather disturbing picture of the modern, media-saturated world.Quote:
Originally Posted by “ktd222”
Possibly, I don’t really know. I would agree that the punctuation is used to comment on the lines rather than simply to transcribe them in a grammatically correct way. Look at the subject matter of the sentence. It’s supposed to be funny in a rather juvenile way but it’s about the loss of sexual vitality. Examine the diction –“part of their anatomy” (nearly always used as a suggestive reference to genitals in this context), “sag” (need I say more?) and “wedding night” (when the desire was fresh and the apparatus was willing :lol: ).Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
It isn’t a question because that process actually is happening with the passing of time – their physical deterioration is not a mere possibility but a fact. This is the kind of observation that we would be unlikely to stop to think about in the context of the show itself but here it is.
Yes, I think so. I agree that the sentences aren’t intended to be lines composed by Wachtel himself but something he’s stumbled across. I don’t know if they really are verbatim transcripts that Wachtel has read or heard but I can accept that they are for the sake of the understanding his purpose in including them. As you say, he arranges them. Isn’t that what artists do? They take the materials of everyday life (the kinds of materials we seldom think about in a way that is beyond their immediate purpose), and make us look at them with a fresh eye, from a different perspective. What I meant by asking question number 1 above was that the title seems rather grand and overblown compared to the very ‘ordinary’ and everyday nature of the seven sentences.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
There is an amusing Billy Collins poem with the title, Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles. The Collins poem includes a great example –
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem."
Wachtel’s extremely long title reminds me of these sorts of poems as well as of the kinds of chapter prefaces you find in Swift and other eighteenth century novelists. Is Wachtel therefore suggesting that there are two linguistic realms – that of the past world of elevated literary expression and the rather debased and inane expression that saturates the world around us today? Even here in Thailand where I am immersed in a different culture, the same synthetic images of kodachrome perfection and eternal youth still ambush me around every corner. It seems that the topics of a lot if not all of the sentences are of the same stuff that poets have always written about – love, death, decay, relationships and so on. This is why I prefer to think of the sentences as actual transcripts – they then serve as a comment on the difference between the world as it is described through Art and the one in which we live.
I think they probably could, with the exception of “It's forty-eight WABC degrees” (that must be a radio announcement, surely?) and the last bit which reads more like a print advertisement to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
I have to disagree with you here, GG. I think there is far more conscious crafting going on than you suggest. I don’t think of this poem as having ‘hidden’ meanings, just meanings. It seems perfectly coherent to me and this coherence has, as tn2743 said, been arranged. I’d be interested to see if you change your opinion as the discussion progresses.Quote:
Originally Posted by “Grumbleguts”
I like this attitude. Good on ya.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
And then you go and let me down! Only joking. But if you look at the title, he does say “Via Hearing Them / or Reading Them.”Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”