October 17, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On a funny and fun poetic voice and character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

Across his nearly 50 years writing and publishing poetry (among other genres), American treasure Langston Hughes went through a number of different stages and series. One of the more unique were the Madam Alberta K. Johnson poems—originally created by Hughes in “Madam and the Number Runner” (later revised to “Number Writer”), published in the Autumn 1943 issue of Contemporary Poetry, Johnson would go to serve as the speaker/persona for nearly 20 more of his poems (all titled in that same “Madam and the” style) over the next few years. Johnson was a confident, no-nonsense Harlem matriarch, a woman navigating with humor, resilience, and serious attitude both contemporary and universal challenges of economics and survival, gender and relationships, race and community, and many more. As with almost all of Hughes’ works, the Madam poems are deceptively straightforward, highly readable and engaging but with significant layers and depth (of literary elements and cultural/historical contexts alike) that reward our close readings.

The one that I’ve close read the most often, as I teach it in my American Literature II course alongside a couple other Hughes poems, is “Madam and the Phone Bill” (1944). Like most of the Madam poems, this one is presented as part of a dialogue, but with the reader only getting Johnson’s half of the conversation. In this case that conversation is with a representative of the “Central” phone company who has contacted Johnson to make her pay for a long-distance call from her wandering (in both senses) significant other Roscoe. The first stanza immediately establishes every aspect of that situation along with Johnson’s unique and witty voice and perspective: “You say I O.K.ed/LONG DISTANCE?/O.K.ed it when?/My goodness, Central/That was then!” Effortlessly using poetic elements like rhythm and rhyme, as well as typographical ones like capitalization, italics, and punctuation, Hughes locates us within his speaker’s voice, in the middle of this phone conversation (or rather argument) in progress, and with an immediate sense of the problem facing our put-upon heroine. The voice and humor only deepen from there, as in the poem’s middle stanza (the 5^th of 10): “If I ever catch him,/Lawd, have pity!/Calling me up/From Kansas City.”

But like all the Madam poems, and as I said all of Hughes’ poems and works period, there’s a lot more to “Phone Bill” than just that fun and funny feel. Certainly the poem offers a glimpse into Johnson’s fraught negotiation of gender dynamics, such as the contradictions between her desire to maintain her status as an independent woman and her worries about what “them other girls” might offer Roscoe (perhaps especially while he’s hundreds of miles away in KC). Written in the shadow of the recently ended Great Depression (a frequent Hughes topic), the poem likewise reflects the fraught dynamics of an individual’s conversations with the corporations who could with a single bill (or instead with an understanding waiving of that bill) profoundly change their economic situations. And I would say that it’s particularly relevant that the bill in question is a phone bill—the period’s increasingly ubiquitous telephones, and more exactly evolving technological possibilities like long-distance calling, symbolized at once greater social and communal connections and yet another way in which individuals were beholden, to grasping corporations and distant but still needy significant others alike. Like it or not, Alberta, those are debts we’re all “gonna pay!”

Last famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 16, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On five pop songs that call upon this technology.

1)      “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (1972): One of the more interesting lost elements of telephone technology is the role of the switchboard operator, that unseen middle person on whom callers relied for decades to make their connections. While I believe that role had significantly lessened by the 1970s (I certainly never had to speak to an operator to make a phone call), both of my first two songs use it in a compelling symbolic way, with Jim Croce’s 1972 ballad featuring a speaker who spills his emotions over a breakup to an apparently quite sympathetic operator.

2)      “Switchboard Susan” (1979): Nick Lowe’s speaker addresses the switchboard operator even more directly and spills some emotions as well, but in a quite different tone than that of Croce’s ballad. In an attempt to pick up this “greater little operator” with whose “ringing tone” he “fell in love” immediately, that speaker resorts to a series of increasingly desperate telephonic double entendres, including (apropros of the week’s inspiration) “When I’m near you girl I get an extension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.” What more is there to say about that?

3)      “867-5309/Jenny” (1981): As operators faded away, wannabe callers could dial their desired numbers directly—but this former teenage dialer can confirm that it’s not always easy to go through with the call. That’s one telephonic lesson of one-hit wonder Tommy Tutone’s 1980s smash: with the line “I tried to call you before but I lose my nerve” he succinctly sums up that painful experience of ending a call mid-dial. But Tutone’s song also illustrates another side to the topic I talked about with Scream yesterday—the way the phone can connect us to strangers. In horror films that’s a threatening proposition, but as “number[s] on the wall” like Jenny’s suggest, it can be an enticing one as well. 

4)      “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” (1996): Sometimes the phone lets us down, though. I’m sure there are other pop songs which also use the distinctive (if perhaps now outdated) sounds of telephone calls falling to connect, but I don’t know of any off-hand. And in any case, this Primitive Radio Gods track with one of the longest titles in pop music history is a true original, in sound and sound effects as well as in lyrics.

5)      “Telephone” (2009): Music videos were of course already a thing in 1996 (and even in 1981), but over the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more fully a genre unto themselves, as illustrated by that hyperlinked short film for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone.” To be honest, that video is far more interesting than (and quite fully distinct from) the song. But I did want to note that even in our cell phone/smartphone age, the trope of a phone call (answered or unanswered) to represent the highs and lows of a romantic relationship remains very much in force in pop music.

Next famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 15, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The Scream Films

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On one thing that’s really changed since the first Scream, and one that hasn’t.

I wrote about the most important conceit of the Scream series of horror films, their metatextual commentary on the tropes and traditions of the horror genre, in this 2020 post. I think that element relates closely to the way the films use phones, so I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for this related topic.

Welcome back! One of the many, many many many, horror movie tropes on which Scream (1996) was commenting was the external yet intimate threat posed by horror monsters and killers, a threat exemplified by Halloween’s Michael Myers looking into windows but also captured quite nicely by a threatening phone call (whether or not it’s “coming from inside the house!”). There’s a reason, after all, why Scream begins with the sound of a phone ringing followed by a young woman’s screams, before the audience even sees the specific, threatened young woman (Drew Barrymore) who will unfortunately answer this call and provide her own screams. But it’s pretty telling that that call comes in on a landline, and one without caller ID at that—if Barrymore’s Casey Becker and her family had that technology, and/or if she had a cell phone with caller ID as well, she’d likely not pickup a call from a strange number, eliminating the entire premise of the killers toying with her over the phone.

Yet even as the Scream series has evolved into the smartphone era (with both 2011’s Scream 4 and, even more fully, 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI set in that brave new world), a time when virtually everyone has both a cell phone and the ability to see and screen our calls, it has apparently maintained this central trope of the killers calling on the phone (I haven’t seen any of those films, so as always I welcome corrections and comments of all kinds!). I’m sure the filmmakers have found specific ways to explain how these smartphone-era killers are maintaining their anonymity (even in the original Scream there’s an elaborate plotline about a cloned cell phone, for example). But to my mind, the more important point is that the scary phone call trope endures, and perhaps has even deepened in the smartphone era—I know for me, almost every time my phone rings these days (unless it’s my kids calling to say goodnight when they’re with their mom) it feels at best unnerving and at worst potentially threatening. It doesn’t have to a psycho killer on the other end to make the phone an external yet intimate and potentially invasive technology, it turns out.

Next famous phone calls tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 14, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The Great Gatsby

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On three phone calls that illustrate the classic novel’s thoughtful portrayal of Modern technologies.

When you teach a book as often as I have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), you start to focus on different layers each time. Along with the dialogues with other authors/works like Nella Larsen’s Passing that I talk about in that hyperlinked post, in my last couple times reading and teaching the novel I’ve thought a lot about just how many early 20^th century technologies play central roles in its story. That’s especially true of automobiles, of course; not only in the book’s climactic events (which I won’t spoil here for the few people who managed not to read Fitzgerald’s novel in high school), but in the central presence (geographically as well as symbolically) of Wilson’s gas station and auto repair shop. It’s true of Hollywood film, both in presences at Gatsby’s parties (and Fitzgerald’s career) and in the novel’s underlying themes of surface and depth, illusion and reality. But it’s also certainly true of the still relatively new technology, particularly when it comes to the idea of every household having one, that was the telephone.

As we meet the novel’s main characters in the opening few chapters, Fitzgerald uses a couple key phone calls to present mysterious and ambiguous sides to them. In Chapter 1, as Nick Carraway visits the beautiful home of his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom for a dinner party, Tom gets a mysterious phone call; Daisy suspects that it’s his mistress on the other end, but of course can’t know for certain to whom he’s speaking. In Chapter 3, as Nick attends one of the lavish parties at his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Gatsby gets a mysterious call; other partygoers suggest that it’s a criminal business partner of Gatsby’s on the other end, but of course no one knows for certain to whom he’s speaking. These calls reveal both men as defined by secrets, dynamics that precisely because of their ambiguity are a source of intense speculation by those around them. And those secrets can only be maintained in these scenes because of the technology of the phone, without which their conversants would have to visit in person (or write a letter, which of course would be far less immediate).

[Serious SPOILERS in this paragraph.] At the end of the novel, after all the aforementioned climactic events have unfolded, Nick has his own, quite different phone call. He is trying to organize a funeral for Gatsby (or maybe James Gatz, since his father who knows him by that name is one of the few who attends that tragic event), and manages to speak with Gatsby’s elusive business partner Meyer Wolfshiem on the phone. In one of the novel’s only moments where a character says directly what he’s feeling and thinking, shares what seems at least to be the unvarnished truth (even when Gatsby and Nick have their heart-to-hearts, it’s always an open question whether Gatsby is telling the truth), Wolfshiem confesses to Nick that he can’t possibly be seen at the funeral, that it would be far too destructive for his reputation and relationships. This is the side of the telephone that allows us to be more honest, more ourselves, in its conversations than we might manage to be if had to face someone and something in the flesh. Just another layer to how Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the technologies and contexts of its rapidly evolving Modernist world.

Next famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 12-13, 2024: Contested Holidays: Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day

[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to this special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]

On one way my thinking has significantly evolved in the last decade, and one thing I’d still emphasize.

In all but one of the posts this week I started by asking you to check out a prior piece of mine, and so it’s only fitting that in this weekend post I do the same. Back in October 2015 I wrote for my Talking Points Memo column about how we might reinvent Columbus Day, and I’d ask you to check out that column if you would and then come on back here for a couple layers to where my thinking is nine years (!) after I wrote that.

Welcome back! 2015 was right at the start of the movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and nine years later I have to admit I am thoroughly convinced that such a move (which has officially taken place in a number of communities) is the right one. As I hope has been clear throughout the week, and hell throughout this blog’s nearly 14 years, I believe we can and must remember as much of our history as possible. But commemoration is a very different thing (as Michael Kammen knew well), and given the countless impressive and inspiring Americans on whom a collective holiday might focus, I just can’t justify dedicating one of them to someone who never set foot on the continent and who was a pretty thoroughly despicable dude to boot (getting to talk Columbus Day for Junior Scholastic magazine remains a career highlight). In the TPM column I noted the turn of the 20^th century reasons why Columbus Day became a thing (make sure to check out that great Guest Post on th subject from my friend Nancy Caronia), and those are certainly still worth remembering as well; but a holiday commemorating Columbus is, to my 2024 mind, a no-go.

Another part of my proposed solution back in 2015 was to add commemorations of a pair of other Spanish arrivals to the Americas, Bartolomé de las Casas y Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. While I’m not sure we should try to commemorate them at the same time as Indigenous Peoples Day—one collective holiday dedicated entirely to Native American histories seems quite literally the least we could do—I remain dedicated to adding both of those figures to our collective memories in any and all ways. While there are various reasons for that commitment, at the top of the list is that these two figures, in very distinct but complementary ways, exemplify my concept of cross-cultural transformation, of perspectives and identities that entirely and inspiringly shifted when these individuals from a particular cultural background came into contact with other communities and cultures. Perhaps no individual holiday could quite capture that complicated process—but perhaps one could, because as I hope this whole series has illustrated holidays can be (and have always been) whatever we want them to be. And if we were to commemorate transformative American stories, we couldn’t do much better than las Casas & de Vaca.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 11, 2024: Contested Holidays: “The War on Christmas”

[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to a special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]

Three voices who can together help us see through the “War on Christmas” canard (which as of this writing Donald Trump has recently resuscitated).

1)      Steven Nissenbaum: That excellent hyperlinked book of Nissenbaum’s, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday (1996), does a great deal of the work I was originally planning to do in this post, specifically in framing the fact that Christmas in America has always been contested and even attacked, and indeed in places like Puritan New England was far more so both of those things than it is in any aspect of our 21^st century society. Moreover, Nissenbaum helps us understand that many of the elements of the holiday we now too often take for granted (like the “fact” that it celebrates Christ and/or his birth) were likewise entirely contested throughout much of American history, indeed for far longer than they have been seen as settled parts of the holiday. Bottom line, if there’s any truth to the idea of a “War on Christmas,” it’s a historical truth, not a contemporary one; feel free to share that with your Fox News-watching relatives, and you’re welcome (from Nissenbaum and me).

2)      Vaughn Joy: Among the many aspects of Joy’s excellent Film- and AmericanStudying work that I highlighted in that post, one of them in particular, her Comparative American Studies article on Miracle on 34^th Street, illustrates the ways in which she uses both Christmas and cultural representations of it to make a number of thoughtful and significant analytical points. She does so precisely because, as she argues in that article and a great deal of her other work as well, Christmas has always been one of the most contested and evolving symbols of (among other things) American identity and ideals, rather than some fixed or consistent celebration that could reasonably come under attack. And as Joy’s work particularly exemplifies, those shifting and competing meanings have been frequently (if not indeed always) constructed and reconstructed through cultural works, adding one more layer to the fundamental silliness of some overarching “Christmas” that could be warred upon.

3)      My Mom: That’s how a couple of the best scholars of Christmas histories and culture can help us challenge the “War on Christmas” canard. But I’m not sure any challenge is more telling than a reminder of what the holiday season meant in America just a few decades ago. My Mom has shared quite a bit with me about the experience of growing up Jewish in 1950s and 60s America, and specifically about how openly and single-mindedly public schools celebrated Christmas, with nary the slightest reference to hanukkah or any other holiday or tradition (despite, again, the presence of Jewish kids like my Mom in those schools and classes). In those schools and eras, as I would argue for virtually all of our history (or at the very least all of our 20^th century history), it was Christmas that waged war on far too many Americans—and if we’ve gotten slightly better at defending those individuals and communities during the holiday season, that’s simply an inclusive way to live up to our ideals.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 10, 2024: Contested Holidays: Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning

[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to a special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]

On two ways we can be thankful while mourning.

Gotta go four for four with asking you to read other pieces at the start of this week’s posts: two years ago I wrote for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on Wamsutta James and his lifelong efforts to reframe Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. Once again I’ll ask you to check out that prior piece if you would, and then come on back for some further thoughts on how we can put these two contrasting commemorations in conversation.

Welcome back! I don’t want to minimize any of the specifics of the National Day of Mourning, which I think was and remains a vital addition to our collective calendar. But I do believe there’s value in an occasion which presents us with an opportunity to be thankful, and would say that the combination of these two commemorations can add importantly to that perspective as well. For one thing, I’m hugely thankful for the activists who throughout our history have pushed us to better remember our hardest and most painful histories, a list that most definitely includes countless indigenous activists, from William Apess and Zitkala-Ša to the American Indian Movement and Wamsutta James and up to so many in our present moment. When I make the case, as I do frequently, that critical patriots embody the best of American ideals through their recognition of how we’ve far too often fallen short of them (and their concurrent desire to push us closer to them), it’s precisely folks like these about whom I’m thinking, and remembering James on Thanksgiving would thus commemorate our best as well as respect the legacy of his National Day of Mourning ideas.

That’s a collective point, and the more important of the two I’ll share here to be sure. But I have to add a more personal and I hope understandable complement: how thankful I am for the lifelong opportunity both to learn about such figures and communities and to do my part to help make them all more consistently and fully part of our collective memories and conversations. I don’t want to pretend for a second that any aspect of my work equals or even parallels that of activists like James—but the chance to help connect more of my fellow Americans to him and his voice and ideas and efforts and effects is not only not one I will ever take lightly, but also is genuinely one of the aspects of my work (in the classroom, in writing and scholarship of all kinds, and in any and every other way I can think of) for which I’m most thankful. I try to remember that as well as Wamsutta James and the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, and I hope you all will as well.

Last HolidayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?