May CommQuote

This month's quote is a media-saturated passage from Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. The liminal quality of the saturation is what's interesting. The speaker recalls a phone conversation she had with one of the novels' mysterious poet-protagonists, Arturo Belano. While on the phone with him she watches a movie on TV (the sound is off). She also refers to a novel lying on the table that she plans to turn to once she gets tired of the movie (when, not if). The passage ends with car sounds that she believes are coming from the phone but she's not sure if he's hung up or not; the sounds could be coming from her window.

Susana Puig, Calle Josep Tarradellas, Calella de Mar, Catalonia, June 1994. He called me. It had been a long time since I talked to him. He said you have to go to such and such a beach, on such and such a day, at such and such a time. What are you talking about? I said. You have to be there, you have to, he said. Are you crazy? Are you drunk? I said. Please, I’ll expect you there, he said, and he repeated the name of the beach and the date and the time. Can’t you come to my apartment? I said. We can talk here if that’s what you want. I don’t want to talk, he said, I don’t want to talk anymore, everything’s over, it’s pointless to talk, he said. I felt like hanging up, but I didn’t. I’d just had dinner and I was watching a movie on TV, it was a French movie, I can’t remember what it was called or who the director or the actors were, all I remember is that it was a singer, a sort of hysterical girl, I think, and a pathetic guy she inexplicably falls in love with. I had the volume turned down low, as usual, and while I was talking to him I didn’t take my eyes off the TV: rooms, windows, the faces of people whose presence in the movie didn’t quite make sense. The table was cleared and there was a book on the sofa, a novel I was planning to start that night when I got tired of the movie and went to bed. Will you come? He said. What for? I said, but I was really thinking about something else, about the singer’s stubbornness, about her tears, tears that flowed uncontainably, tears of hatred, although I don’t know whether that makes sense. It’s hard to cry with hatred, hard to hate someone so much it makes you sob. So you can see me, he said. For the last time, the last time, he insisted. Are you still there? I said. For a moment I thought he’d hung up. It wouldn’t be the first time. I was sure he was calling me form a public phone, I could imagine it perfectly, a telephone on the Paseo Maritimo of the town where he lived, what was just twenty minutes from my town by train and fifteen by car, why I started to think about distances that night I don’t know, but he couldn’t have hung up, I could hear the sound of cars, unless I hadn’t closed all the window and what I was hearing was noise from my own street.
--Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives

April Commquote

Media plays a haunting role in this passage from Mary Karr's devastating memoir, The Liar's Club, in not only its failed capacity to make connections, indeed it even blocks them (phone gets returned to its cradle, TVs turned up to drown out a crisis), but they way it is also used as a metaphor for a father's ability to compartmentalize, shut out family emergencies. The narrator describes his inattention to their plight in terms of turning the volume up or down and channel changing. Rather than ameliorate connections media only serve to underscore isolation and miscommunication.

This passage comes from one of the more harrowing scenes in the book. The depressed and alcoholic mother has started a bonfire of the family's possessions, including the childrens' clothes and toys as they helplessly look on. The narrator, the younger of the two daughters, describes the neighbors' and her father's (who is at work) indifference. A Mrs. Heinz peers out her window for a minute, the lets the pink-checkered curtain fall back down:

"The other neighbors have done the same. I feel them all releasing us into the deep drop of whatever is about to happen. Each curtain falls. Each screen door is pulled tight, and every door hook clicks into its own tight eye, and even big heavy doors get heaved closed in the heat, and all the bolts are thrown. I can almost hear it happening all over the neighborhood. TVs get turned louder to shut out the racket of us. Anyone might have phoned Daddy and said, Pete, looky here. This ain't none of my bi'ness, but . . . (The thought that burdens me most today is that somebody did call Daddy to let him know, and Daddy--gripped by the same grinding machine that gripped us--just stayed in the slot that fate had carved for him and said he planned to come on home directly. Or said kiss my rosy red ass, for Daddy could turn the volume on any portion of the world up or down when he had a mind to. I can very well picture his big hand setting the phone back in its black cradle. The men on his unit might have been frying up some catfish they'd caught. From high in his tower, he could have looked out that curved window across fields of industrial pipes and oil-storage tanks, past the train yards to the grid of identical houses--in the yard of one of which Mother was setting fire to our lives--and maybe Daddy just decided to change the channel away from that fire to the sizzle of cornbread-dipped catfish floating in hot lard. Boy that fish smells good, I can imagine him saying.)"

--Mary Karr, The Liar's Club, 2005 edition, pp. 153-154

The Incunabula of Telecommunications

In the latest Communication Booknotes Quarterly Christopher Sterling has put together something very cool, a bibliography of books called "Who's on First? Pioneering Books on Telegraph, Telephone, Wireless, Radio, Television, and Facsimile." The list includes both the first books that appear on a subject and the most important early books, "indeed," according to Sterling, "some of these titles represent the 'incunabula' of telecommunications--at least in English." The bibliography includes such firsts as: the first book on the transatlantic cable, first English monograph on the telegraph, first book on the microphone, first English language book devoted to the wireless, first scholarly history of U.S. broadcasting, first book about the radio audience based on social science, first book on broadcasting law published in English, first college text on broadcasting, first college textbook on television, first book devoted to radio drama, first book on educational radio, first general interest book in America on broadcasting, first American book to discuss the impact of television on society, first book on educational television, first English language book devoted to television, first history of television, and first book about policy aspects of the television business in the U.S. There are 56 titles in the bibliography.

Communication Booknotes Quarterly is available online from the main Library webpage. The quarterly reviews books, reports, and electronic publications on all aspects of mass communications, telecommunication, and the information industry.