telephones to say what we can't say

“we've got telephones to say what we can't say....”
(Graham Parsons, “Wheels”)


why does it seem so crucial to have telephones to say what you can’t say>? Country songs have a knack for getting at the feeling you could only
convey in the direct indirection of the lyric. I think this one runs something
like "How can I miss you when you won;t even leave"; but there's an added wrinkle
to it as well, a wrinkle that is also there in one of my new favorite movies, "Pillow Talk."

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1853882649/

OK it's 1959 and it's Rock Hudson and Doris Day, so you have to wade through a fair amount "witty" chitchat
about women's inalienable right to catch their man and a series of increasingly unfunny double entendres what all those
horny men have on their minds all the time (though it is amusing to see Doris starring as the smart blonde while a serious of dumb
brunettes--and one stunningly dumb redheaded stripper--are brought in as contrast).

The gist of the movie though is that Doris and Rock are unwillingly forced to share a party line-
she needs to use it at odd hours for her interior design business, while he uses it to woo a series of gullible girls--using the same love song, with their interchangeable two-syllable names plugged into the middle of the third line... She conceives a profound hatred for him though she knows him only by name and voice; when they
meet in real life he changes his name and puts on the fakest of all Texas accents to woo her.
Their virtual life together, it turns out, has given him great ammunition to bed her--
but also taught him to love her as he never loved those easy catches (“we've got telephones to say what we can't say...”)

I don’t think I’ve yet figured out every ricochet of this movie—after the the opening credit song, for example,
"pillow talk", why does Doris Day open the movie by humming it just as its chords die away, as if she too has been listening in to the soundtrack of the movie of her life? And when another eavesdropper on the partyline starts to talk to Rock Hudson (who writes love songs for a living, meaning he gives other people the soundtracks of their own distant lives) why is it that she hums back to him the interchangeable girl song, but with her own name (Edna) plugged in? And perhaps the subtlest ricochet of all--
there is nothing high-brow or subtle about it, no sense that it is plumbing the rich
substrata of a virtual life. No its brilliance is that it makes the everyday potentiality of
the telephone (specifically the party line, which has some fascinating affinities to blogs
and e-mail lists, with their lurkers...) visible that it helps you see how in a
technologically saturated environment we all
(without consciously embracing the ideology of the spectacle or the simulacrum) have to assemble a composite, coherent life out of disjointed bits of information--a voice and a name over
here, a hunk of a man from Texas over there.....Virtually irresistible.

And for future reference, an old gospel song Earl Monroe performs (words and music by Albert Brumley, perhaps 1920?)

Turn your radio on
And listen to the music in the air

Turn the lights down low
And listen to the Master's Radio,
Get in touch with God
Turn your radio on.

(signed) Alone in Lamont

In the Undergraduate Library

So, on library days when I get to Harvard square before Widener opens, I sit down in the Lamont coffee shop area. It’s well-lit and noisy enough that I don’t drift off, and between 8:45 and 10:15 I usually hold court there. And by hold court I mean sit ignored, working on an essay and e-mailing, feeling my typing get faster as the caffeine from 6:30 finally starts to work. Unlike the stuffy silence of Widener, this is a social space that doesn’t include me, and that’s definitely one of the things I love about it. People are hailing each other over my head all the time—and meanwhile my computer is pinging me with e-mails, facebook updates and all the rest (if I twittered, no doubt it would twitter) as everyone I know, in libraries, offices and bedrooms up and down the East Coast also feels the caffeine kick in. Lisa doesn’t drink coffee, which probably explains why she never e-mails me at this hour: for the rest of my friends, I think that 40% of all the traffic comes in right in this slot.

The point is, though, that everything that comes through my computer is for me, and nothing that’s said in my presence is. In Widener, actually, it’s the opposite: a studied revenent hush prevails, but I am constantly seeing people I know. Makes sense: we’re all middle-aged and overzealous which explains why we’re in the Phillips reading room. But it makes the facework of the library oddly complicated. I like it, which is why I’m always there by about 11; the contingency of who I’ll run into is always a charming part of it. But I’ve come to enjoy the two hours of electronic back and forth and total isolation among the good old fashioned flirting of the undergrads just as much. I think it’s something like reading for class (say “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk) while watching Friday Night Lights.

Allston-Brighton Man

Allston-Brighton Man; or, When Virtual Worlds collide

I bike over the Mass Pike footbridge that connects Brighton to Allston twice a week. I’m usually listening to The Pixies or the Carter Family out of one earbud and traffic out of the other ear. This morning I passed a 20something with slicked back ear, an elaborately fake plastic/ivory umbrella handle, and both his Ipod earphones in. It struck me as I passed him, ”He’s Allston-Brighton man! Wonder what he’s listening to ? Oasis?” Then it occurred to me a second later, “Yeah, and I’m Brookline-Cambridge guy, equally predictable. Wonder if he guessed I was listening to the Carter family?” And of course below us on the Pike we probably were both walking over some Concord-Downtown lady, listening to NPR…”

My point is not that we’re cocooned, it’s that we actually are and aren’t at the same time. Like Leah Price’s “reader’s block” we’re all happy enough to insulate ourselves in whatever virtual community a cell phone, I pod or gameboy can provide us. But that doesn’t mean we’re not also out there in the real world, face to face, at the same time. The question is, then, what’s going on in our double worlds—how do we keep them both in focus?

For music, there’s one answer, I think—it colors my world without really interfering, because the sound seems completely inside my head, almost as if it were my thoughts. Without lyrics, it becomes (and I think Adam Smith made this point) an intense emotional experience that lacks any direct conduit, so that the emotions are attached to everything I experience without my quite being able to control the suture: you might call this the way that the virtual experience of music Crystallizes onto something verbal. With lyrics—even in German, if I know the back story!—it becomes more like the experience of having a narrative to contemplate (something like listening to NPR on the car radio). A story that keeps running through my head—does it implicate what I’m seeing in the outside world? Probably not directly, but it will certainly affect my mood when I meet someone, and affect the first things I want to talk about in what might be called the Crystallizing conversation (when everything I’ve had in mind precipitates out…)

A phone call is something else; so I guess would a video game be—I think I’ve walked down the street playing bubble wrap on the I Phone and that’s a particularly odd test of split consciousness….