From Matthew Lotti to John Simone:
The Answering Machine Fragments
Overview
This project was initially conceived by Matthew Lotti in 2005 so that the poetic fragments written during days when he was supposed to be "teaching" students in middle and high school would be transmitted via telephone to John Simone's Answering Machine - during select break periods, during lunch duty and, on occasion, during class time - and recorded as sound files on the computer.
Because the phone system at the school district does not provide the clearest connection - and the noise of the students in the background is hard to block out - the words in the poem fragments are sometimes garbled and hard to hear. With no hard copy of the fragments available - the scraps of paper with the pieces written on them were immediately disposed of in the schools - it isn't easy to decipher the entirety of the messages, although a portion of the calls share the themes of sexual desperation and anxiety over social acceptance.
Since the arts are either pushed aside or ignored altogether in public schools, both Lotti and Simone see the project as a protest against the politics of the American education system as well as a statement about the potential distortion in the transmission of a 'message' from 'sender' to 'receiver' in this age of cell phones and endless communication.
Some of the files are available for download and more will be added later:
- Excerpt From Don DeLillo's "Mao II" (1:09)
- Untitled (Carbine Rifles) (0:33)
- Notes From a Vietnam Veteran (0:39)
- Do All Brits Fuck With Their Socks On? (0:47)
- If Not Now, When? (1:04)
- Journalism (0:31)
- Untitled (The Skin of Others) (0:25)
- Untitled (We Got Only So Far...) (0:44)
- When I Try to Sleep (0:53)
- Excerpt From R.D. Laing's "The Politics of Experience" (0:53)
- For Nina and Her Eyes, Sept 27 2005 (0:27)
- Untitled (Is It Too Much...) (0:36)
- Untitled (The Silences of a Lifetime) (0:32)
- John, We Are Animals! (0:30)
- The Judas Iscariot Rhyme (0:21)
- Excerpt From Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class" (* read in the middle of Drama I class) (0:59)
- My Dream Girl and I (0:39)
- The Winter Sirens, Nov 29 2005 (0:37)
- Advice For a Young Writer, Dec 21 2005 (1:13)
- Despair Disintegrates Into Pop Music (1:01)
- Bodies in Fabric, For Jenna, May 10 2006 (0:38)
- How Many Blondes Does It Take to Kill a Man? (0:33)
- The Queen's Ladder, For Miss R., Mar 5 2007 (0:45)
- The Thing You Are Is Secret, For Miss R., Mar 6 2007 (0:42)
- The Process, Part One, Dec 20 2007 (0:46)
- The Process, Part Two, Jan 11 2008 (1:09)
- The Process, Part Three, May 15 2008 (0:53)
- The Process, Part Four, May 27 2008 (0:52)
- Untitled, For Michelle, Sept 25 2008 (0:49)
