Conversation 3, Q&A

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Time to Hang Up

First post and replies | Last post by Rebecca Cullen, 4 years ago

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Dear all, Thank you so much for your posts and comments as part of conversation 3, which has been wonderful to attend to. I look forward to seeing you, if you are able to make it, at the Final Call at 6pm today - just time to make a cup of tea or point a glass of wine before dialling in! The symposium finishes today, so there is still some time to make any final comments. Very best, Rebecca No - you hang up...

By Rebecca C... 4 years ago

Welcome to Conversation 3

First post and replies | Last post by Annabel Williams, 4 years ago

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Hello all, or perhaps 'hilloo, darlings', to Conversation 3. This conversation starts with a warm welcome to these four stunning papers, connecting different points in literary and telephonic history. In Jordan Moore's paper, lengths of wire trail across the 'waste lands' of David Jones's World War I poetry, and we 'mind the wire' accordingly, while telephones are instruments of connectivity and disruption within a spectrum of attention in Jessica Gray's exploration of telephones in Woolf's Night and Day. Matt Helm takes us to interwar Berlin to reposition the aurality of the telephone, plac...

By Rebecca C... 4 years ago
@jess Hi Jessica, I very much enjoyed your paper, through teaching Woolf this year (lots of phones, and fragments of missed conversations, implied messages) and also from having spent some time in the late 80s working as a telephone operator myself. I was a 192 (directory enquiries) and 100 switchboard operator, dealing with general queries from the public and the emergency call lines. I've also spent some time trying to sell double glazing by phone; the most successful telemarketers I encountered were those who are the best listeners. They mirror the customer's own tone and register in ways t...

By Rebecca C... 4 years ago
@jordanamoore Thank you so much for your paper, Jordan; I don't know Jones's poetry and will look it up, so my notes are of a general discursive nature. I was thinking about the word 'buzz' and telephones in particular, and the shape of a phone as a receptacle for an ear as a pollination of discourse. (Many apologies, I write poetry). But your paper talks about the physical buzz as the message moves down the lines - and may pass in ways that Rose points to in her post. More contemporarily, the term social media 'buzz' as a mode of communicating seems far more random and swarm like. Are the mes...

By Rebecca C... 4 years ago
@matthelm – this comes quite late in the conversation, so it could be taken as an observation rather than a question, though I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts! I was fascinated by your discussion of the possibility of a queer erotics of connection in Goodbye to Berlin, as part of Isherwood’s broader political investments, and as figured for example in the telephones at the Lady Windermere. I wonder if you’ve been looking at Mr Norris Changes Trains in relation to all this, as it seems to me the telephone there is particularly important in indicating the underground political activit...

By Annabel W... 4 years ago
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