
Lecture Notes: the End of the Gramophone Era
Children: when Baldwin succumbed
to the train of thought
which led to him strapping to his head
two palm-sized loudspeakers,
he effectively saved us
from ever again having to congregate
in high-ceilinged,
wood-floored ballrooms, awaiting
the needle’s inevitable run
to the edge of the record’s traces,
at which point
we’d been obliged
to share —
with everyone, anyone who’d asked —
our lives in anecdote,
or whatever
intimations of others’ interior spaces
the music forced us to recall.
The greatest gift one could’ve given
another in such a world
was a perfunctory
hesitation.
We’ve been given back
to ourselves now. We’ve been shown —
clearly, for a change —
the insides of our own skulls.
All others’ sounds have softened
to murmurings loosed from the edges
of earmuffs with tiny magnets, wire,
and compressed cones inside.
Think of these cones as affection
turned inward,
whereas the gramophone’s horn
endeared us to strangers.
Put simply,
consider the mathematical
symbol like an alligator’s mouth
gobbling the greater number.
When the original is
the greater number, it’s as if
the alligator’s eating itself
and prospering.
