Thursday, May 18, 2023

Whither Telegraphy?

(image from here)

This is going to seem unbelievable, but I recently discovered that the idea for this show came from a very unexpected place. A couple months back I decided to tackle The Sound & The Fury again. William Faulkner's novel begins with a daunting stream-of-consciousness narrative from a mentally challenged 31-year-old man who doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between now & then. The book also has characters who share the same name which requires you to pay very close attention to context. I re-read the first chapter after I read the next two, which are narrated (still rather confusingly) by the first narrator's brothers.

The third brother is named Jason (like his father) & he's a petty man, incredibly racist, indulgently so, who desperately wants to make money because of a lost opportunity from his youth. In some scenes he's at a telegraph office wanting to find out the latest information from the New York Stock Exchange. He has some choice words about how the telegraph is used by Eastern elites to screw the little guy in Mississippi.

& I think that's what got me thinking about the telegraph. It's almost unimportant to the narrative. But as someone who's never sent nor received a telegram I made me think about working in a telegraph office. & that led to today's show.

Which is on from noon to 2pm Portland time on 90.3+98.3fm here in town & online everywhere at Freeform Portland dot org. Lots of music & talk about telegraphy - but this is the last time probably you'll hear about The Sound & The Fury, at least from me.

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