Other Electricities - Some Extras

Some further dialogue amongst LBC members:

Dan Wickett

Sam's original post also made mention of the radio schematic diagrams - how did everybody view these?  As an integral part of the book?  Just something to break up sections?  Did you try to determine how they related to the stories before or after them?


Derik Badman

The radio diagrams have the appearance of connecting in some way, but I failed to get any satisfaction from them. They all relate to the concept of distance, and thus their discontinuous place in the book
is at least thematically relevant. But in the end I found them an unnecessary embellishment (I felt the same way about much of the front matter: the McSweeney's-esque table of contents, character guide,
etc.), a veering into poetry, that didn't impress as much as the prose. The radio stuff did not capture my interest here or in the title story, so I may be prejudiced.

Matt Cheney

I thought it was nice the diagrams were there, but I didn't pay much attention to them.  I'd look at them now and then, but for me they were decorations.  I don't mind decorations.  Why does everything have to be central and relevant?  I felt similarly about some of the other things, what somebody called the ephemera of the book, the things Derik found McSweeney's-esque.  None of it bothered me, but I also didn't spend a lot of time on it.  I felt it all suggested that this was a book that wanted to encompass a world, and I was happy to travel around through the book giving attention to the parts that most interested me.  In fact, I'm always grateful for a book that leaves that option open.  There's a tyranny to the standard sort of novel that wants all its words (and diagrams) to be important and necessary, and I enjoy the freedom now and then to travel through a book at my own pace, stopping at the tourist attractions that most vividly reward my time, while other people linger elsewhere.

Comments

[Sam]

I read through the diagrams after I finished the book and I enjoyed them a lot. Funny to think they came from a manual -- they look so abstract and decorative. I didn't really look at them when I was reading. I had other stuff to do. I think I was saving them for later. If so, it was unnecessary, since every time I pick up the book I to find something I hadn't noticed before. It's only 150 pages, but it creates a nice illusion of inexhaustibility.

By the way, re the diagrams, why do they speak in the voice of the mother? And who do they speak to?

"Dear, some distances are accidental ..."

And why is the mother dead OR in Canada?

On a different subject, in the podcast Monson talks about how he's imagined the book being produced for the stage -- which is interesting considering there isn't very much dialogue in it. I was thinking film. Of course it's hard to relish that idea given the mess filmmakers typically make of literary works. Then I realized what it really ought to be is an opera or an oratorio -- the poetry, the interwoven themes, the verbal repetitions, the operatic emotions. I can see the stage set now -- all that snow, the frozen lake, the abandoned bus ...

"The radio amateur is patriotic / is well balanced / is attentive / is not a voyeuuuuur, however it might seem ..."

No?

[Kassia]

Because of why I was reading this book, I paid extra attention to the diagrams. I am an impatient reader, always looking for more words, so generally I do skip over images. I might go back and look later, but I generally consider drawings to be so much fluff. Yeah, all intellectual, all the time, that's me.

It is funny (to me) that I didn't read the accompanying comments in the voice of the mother (though now that Sam mentions it, of course that's probably who she is, and it feels like a she). It was a wife's voice, a patient voice, an almost indulgent voice, that I heard. Perhaps that's right as well, considering that the mother Sam hears is also the wife who either dead or in Canada.

[Inversiones en petroleo]

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