Thanks :)Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
I said this because I thought Jackyyy suggested, by mentioning the 7 buttons on a car radio, that all seven sentences were taken from different radio stations.
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Thanks :)Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
I said this because I thought Jackyyy suggested, by mentioning the 7 buttons on a car radio, that all seven sentences were taken from different radio stations.
I want to join in to this discussion since its still monday. But I just want to say in advance Im not great at poetry and Im really joining in to find out more so please bare with me.
Its a bit like what you'd get if you were flicking through channels isnt it? I mean game show, news (or possible crime drama?) , weather umm whats WABC? Something else, reality game show, news, adverts.
A scar is just the remnants a trace of something right? So what sort of like being haunted by words after you hear them on tele or read them and how they can appear to mean one thing out of context but in context they make sense?
Not making any sense am I ? :)
I agree and funnily enough I’ve just watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment again and there is a short scene with a disgruntled Jack Lemmon flicking through the TV channels trying to find something worth watching. Most of it is battle scenes or advertising so he gives up.Quote:
Originally Posted by “Nightshade”
WABC must be a radio station.
By including them in the poem (or as the poem), hasn’t he taken them out of context so that we can look at them differently from how we would if we encountered them in their actual context?Quote:
Originally Posted by “Nightshade”
An auto-search finds a station, stops for about one sentence, then hunts the next. When it hits the band limit, it starts over again. After a while, you memorize certain sentences, maybe because they mean something to you. WABC is NYC, and there are too many channels, a cacophony of life, you've heard it all before, so you would rather listen to the auto-search, and maybe something new will pop up. I agree, Wachtel picked these seven to stick to his stone. I hazard we are being offered the protagonist's situation, personality, job, and the next paragraph.
Since these are mostly from American media allusions I can help with two more:Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
WABC - Yes, is a rado station in many cities in the US. Sounds like a voice from WABC in New York in the 1970s.
Another American game show, The Dating Game, also from the 1970s. Three bachelors are secluded away while a young lady asks them questions and she picks one for a date based soley on their responses. Stupid questions, stupid responses. More inane. 1970s seems to correlate.Quote:
Bachelor number three is a sales manager who collects Disney memorabilia.
Any idea when the poem was written?
I agree with that. But in addition, the dislocation from one sentence to another provides the only real poetic charge to the language in that section of poem, other than in the title.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
By including them in the poem (or as the poem), hasn’t he taken them out of context so that we can look at them differently from how we would if we encountered them in their actual context?
Virgil:
You know what, after looking at the poem as a 'flipping back and forth through channels or pages', I dont know that these several sentences are ever taken out of context. He is creating a mode of action where the reader is also able to sense this 'flipping' happening as its happened to him. The context of the several sentences, I think, is secondary because of this line: 'we control the horizontal.' The thoughts expressed in the several sentences seem to be what interest the author, but obviously when I flip through the channels the main ones which interest me are not the ones listed by the author. So then this gets back to 'we control the horizontal' which gets more at us individuals controlling what enters into our mind.Quote:
I agree with that. But in addition, the dislocation from one sentence to another provides the only real poetic charge to the language in that section of poem, other than in the title.
Does anyone want to talk about this line further: 'we control the horizontal.' I'd be very interested to read other peoples opinions. The line seems to imply a specific angle that we control(the horizontal). Then what happens to all the other angles? Are these other angles under our control? Or is this horizontal the only angle we can control? What is this horizontal?
I think you mentioned it in your first post re this poem, 'we control the horizontal'. Its stands out in the crowd, stays in your head, its profound. I want to correct myself earlier, its a 'scan' button, not an auto-search, and he does write 'hearing' or 'reading', so I will not add, roadside Billboards. These seven sentences/messages (which I am assuming is an arbitrary number), out of 100s, were impressive enough to stick. Some of the best literature is sitting on the side of our roads, repeated to us via media-pushers, in a surreptitious attempt to brain wash us into buying something:Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
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.I'll stab a guess: He's middleaged, wife/childs(s), worries about their health and security. Its 48 Fahrenheiht (8-9C), cool to cold - depending on what you are used to, could be Mar/Apr or Oct/Nov. He's thinking about promotion/money and freedom (we control the horizontal).
There was no blood or anything but when I got there she was turning blue.
It's forty-eight WABC degrees.
We control the horizontal.
Bachelor number three is a sales manager who collects Disney memorabilia.
Missing coed found slain.
All this in Encyclopedia Britannica III: American Indians, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, The Reproductive System, Poisonous Animals and Plants, Atomic Energy, The Circus, Abominable Snowman, Napoleon and More…
They are literally taken out of context and placed in a new context – that of Wachtel’s poem. This makes me look at them in a way I wouldn’t if I was just channel hopping.Quote:
Originally Posted by “ktd222”
As I said above, it’s from The Outer Limits; each episode begins:Quote:
Originally Posted by “ktd222”
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits”
Old televisions used to have control knobs known as a ‘vertical hold’ and a ‘horizontal hold’’. You fiddled around with them in order to stop the picture from rolling. The statement has overtones of Big Brother but the important thing is what we think is meant by ‘We’. Is it the corporate ‘we’? The media? Could it even be a reference to the battle of the sexes as a statement made by feminists (the horizontal being the realm of sexual activity – no doubt XC will have other ideas/positions)? In the context of The Outer Limits, it could be aliens. In the context of the paragraph, it has an unsettling effect. I don’t take it as fundamentally different from the other sentences – this one also is another of the ubiquitous, encroaching assertions of a media industry that claims ownership of our souls. Something similar is going on with “It's forty-eight WABC degrees”. – They appear to own the weather.
I'd like to clarify my position a little if I may. I said that I quite liked the poem first and foremost. I also said that I found no deep significance in the lines chosen and I still maintain that position. To me thay are chosen to be a cross section of the kinds of lines seen and heard in American media. I had no intention of being dismissive of the poems worth, I just don't see the choice of phrases as particularly meaningful in themselves.
Of course Wachtel is inviting us to examine these sentences out of context as it were, this is self evident, but that is the extent of his construction as far as I see it, he could easily have chosen other similar sentences and achieved the same effect. He is holding up a mirror to the day to day bombardments of media slogans and formulaic phrases but it is not necessarily a carefully directed mirroir. These particular words stuck in his mind, as he says in the title, that is why they were chosen and not, "Two tyres, that's right TWO tyres for the price of one all day Sunday, every Sunday at big Ed's Tyres!" or "A horse is a horse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course." Either of these could have slotted in seemlessly
Interestingly enough, what do you think of the title of the poem? Isn't it as formulaicly 'poetic' as the other phrases are formulaicly 'mediaspeak'? Do you think that he is asking questions here too? I think he might be. It's interesting that no one has really questioned the layout and language of the title in this thread, seeing as it is almost as long as the poem itself. Surely the contrast between the two sections is more interesting than where he found the 7 sentences?
Acknowledged. The title does a larger job than expected, it could be the para. At first I thought he was putting the cart before the horse, then realized, the would not want to 'do it' any other way. He used the title space to reduce space/wordage, as in, why not make a long title, who says a title can only have x words. The sequence is important,,, and Unnamable asked in one of his questions,,, whey the '...' at the end of the Encycl. advert. Well, I thought at first, the Encycl. Britannica bit could have gone on forever, or simply its part of an advertisement, else.. its the preface to the next para. Why do I think this is a clip out of a book and not a poem?Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
This is where we disagree. Even if the sentences are actual snippets reproduced verbatim, the subtle interplay between them would be lost if you simply swapped some of them with your suggestions. For example, say we swapped the first of yours for “Missing coed found slain” and the second for “Bachelor number three is a sales manager who collects Disney memorabilia”, would there really be no difference? Wouldn’t we then lose something vital to the poem? “Missing coed found slain” is a news item; either it’s the text accompanying a TV news story or a newspaper headline. It is written in the shorthand style of a news headline (I’ll come to style of writing in a moment). But look beyond that – why might Wachtel have chosen to include this particular sentence and what is its purpose in its original context? Isn’t it to entice us into learning more salacious details about a murder? Why is the victim identified (in the sense of given an identity) as a ‘coed’ – the headline could have said simply ‘woman’, ‘female’, ‘student’, and so on. So the very fact that the victim has been given an identity as a young female (by a typically prurient media) introduces a sexual element to it. Doesn’t the word ‘coed’ carry some suggestion of young adult female encountering the world of independence and sexuality? When you see a headline like that don’t you assume that the murder was sexually motivated (and you’d be right most of the time)? Sexual tensions appear throughout the poem (even in the sagging vegetables bit). I can’t see it in your examples. Also, ‘bachelor’ is an interesting label. It serves to identify someone as available in the marriage market. This man collects Disney memorabilia. Why? When I think of Disney, I think of a world of sanitised and syrupy childhood. Does this man wish to remain a child? Is he sexually repressed? I can hear the objections now that I am ‘reading too much into it.’ I’m not saying that the man is sexually repressed but I think the lines invite the reader to take part in exploring the interplay between the different sentences (and these two sentences come next to each other). The world reported by the media includes acts of sexual violence, presumably caused by aberrant sexuality. In what we call ‘Literature’, problematic human experiences are explored in depth – in the modern world they just serve as media bytes. The language in which they are expressed now is the debased language of tabloid journalism or advertising slogans. This is why I think the language of the title is so different from the paragraph of seven sentences. The title belongs to the old world; the paragraph is what’s become of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
I think I can identify another idea that came up several times: time and its progress, or timing. In the first sentence the vegetables are listed in order, I think, of sagginess (in order of length of time after the wedding). The tomato is the firmest and shiniest, the pumpkin looks older and drier though still rounded, and the squash is clearly long a saggy (I'm trying my best to be respectful with these descriptions). So in this sense, the longer it has been since one's wedding night, the further to the right his option would be, and the further he is from the burning 'volcanic' passion that the igneous rock that is his memory used to experience. And in the second sentence "when I got there" and "blue" suggests that who ever got there got there too late. His timing was terrible. There's a pattern here, kind of.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
And then the temperature connects this sentence with the third. And the third sentence is connected with the fourth by the arrogance of commercials.
I fail to see the connection between the fourth and fifth. The fifth and the sixth, however, is connected by another idea that you have pointed out above: sex. Perhaps it is the "sexually repressed" man and his 'childish', perhaps ignorant, ideas of the world that are behind these violent sex crimes. Is there something unhealthy about a sales manager being single and collect children's toys?
The idea of death, or a lack of life, is also repeated.
Is the '...' the end of the poem or of the last sentence?Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
I think that the last sentence might be, possibly, a summary of the greed of the nowaday commerce, which tries to summarise everything regardless of their significance or meanings and stuffs them into bite size information. It ignores the horrific depths of the events that are capable of scarring the author and with great ease and ruthlessness. I mean, finding "the circus" and the "snowman" in the same sentence as "Napoleon" or "Atomic enerygy" is unfitting to say the least; it is almost a mockery. Race, Music, food, history, sex, etc; everything is a subject of this terrible mockery. And this ignorance, in itself, leaves another and longest scar...
I think the '...' might be part of the last sentence to express the endlessness of the list of things, or the author's amazement or ponderousness at this, maybe even his pain..
Please correct
Are you talking about people or vegetables? Okay, I admit – I’m at the pumpkin stage. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
The passing of time is a popular theme for artists. I’m not convinced by the timing idea, though.
So young and so cynical! :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
Okay, but be careful – I don’t think anyone has suggested that there is a linked progression – I referred to the interplay between them. In other words, just because you have established for yourself some pattern, don’t then make the poem fit that pattern. Perhaps there is no connection here but perhaps you were wrong to assume that there should be. Perhaps there is a connection, however. If ‘We control the horizontal’ is some kind of feminist slogan then the sexual repression of Mr. Disney could be the result of his inability to cope with female sexuality. Or perhaps ‘We control the horizontal’ is a Big Brother/Media boast – our perceptions are controlled to the extent that our identity only exists in terms of how we are seen on television or as television. The Dating Game that Virgil mentioned is, I think, the show that spawned Blind Date (UK). When huge media corporations control what we see and what we hear on the basis of maximising profits, this is the kind of garbage we end up with – but it’s all on the surface – the real nature of human sexuality involves slain coeds.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
Obviously I don’t think there always is – but the possibility of what you suggest is there in the interplay again.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
Good question – have they merged? Initially it can be seen simply to imply that the encyclopedia has more to offer but, as you say, it’s possible that it refers to the whole of the paragraph rather than just that one sentence. To me, it suggests that life goes on – to be continued next episode.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
Again, I’d say that in this context it’s unsettling rather than incongruous. The capabilities given to us by Atomic Energy combined with the image of the world as a Circus. Now there’s a thought!Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
What do you mean by ‘Please correct’? It’s a poem not a quadratic equation. There are things I don’t see myself but I’d agree with a lot of what you say and like the way you go about it – with the assumption that someone else had made the effort to think about it. As I say, good on ya.Quote:
Originally Posted by “tn2743”
I was following the comparison that the contestants were supposed to make about their wives' "anatomy". I assume it's a female ...thingIES :)Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Sorry, I forgot about plastic surgery :DQuote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Inspector Unnamable wrote up his top of mind, so if I go along with that:
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.
He is thinking about the condition of the coed's body, after it was found.
There was no blood or anything but when I got there she was turning blue.
He is thinking about an alibi.
It's forty-eight WABC degrees.
Its the public mood, they are hunting him.
We control the horizontal.
He is trying to outthink the police - road blocks.
Bachelor number three is a sales manager who collects Disney memorabilia.
What to do with the coed's stuff, and did he leave fingerprints?
Missing coed found slain.
Confirmation, she has been found, and they have identified the body.
All this in Encyclopedia Britannica III: American Indians, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, The Reproductive System, Poisonous Animals and Plants, Atomic Energy, The Circus, Abominable Snowman, Napoleon and More…
He is desperate for ideas.