Exchanges

When you think about it, the obsolescence of the old telephone exchange is a sea change in the history of communications. The advent of the language cortex lies on one side of the equation and teleportation on the other. Remember Dante's famous opening to his Inferno, "Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost." That may have been the worlds of Rhinelander. Regent, Monument, Trafalgar and Filmore. You look at pterodactyls, one of the legions of reptilian giants felled in the Ice Age and you begin to get a feeling for the passing of an age when a telephone number represented a place. Do you recall jealously calling the landline of someone who was cheating on you? Remember how you rang and rang, as a way of inhabiting his or her inner sanctum--even when they were perhaps locked in the arms of another lover? Modernity is nothing if not efficacious. However in the process it eliminates the sensations that comprise a nascent nostalgia.Think about it! You can no longer imagine an empty apartment or room which is the repository of your futile hopes.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and listen to "Every Little Bit Hurts"by Brenda Holloway