This is a post off of Andrew's Junkyard Quote I Week V.
The original piece is a comic strip, so I'm going to just give the link.
Here is what I wrote to him:
My first question: Where did you find this? It's, in many ways, intriguing. First of all, the line "Sup dog," is said so many times in today's culture that it's hard to count, but secondly, I have never thought about it being said to an actual dog. I am pet sitting for a friend this weekend and have found myself talking to her animals as though they were people. The cat does not stop meowing and I have asked it many a time what is wrong, as though she'll answer me. The thing that I take from this comic strip is the intrigue as to if animals even understand what we are saying. And, like this dog in the strip, what do they tell us that we cannot understand. What I think you should do from here, is write about that idea. Write about what could be an alternate reality where we do actually understand animals, and what are they really trying to tell us. I think, with your interest in the way words sound, this could become a whole idea on what animal voices would sound like. And maybe in some way, you could use it to meditate upon a whole different idea about humans and society in some fashion. I think this junkyard quote is very interesting and unique to what we are supposed to be finding in a 4210 class. I find myself stuck in the poetic realm and find it refreshing that you can find these comic strips or biology texts that use some language that most would not find “poetic,” and then use it to your advantage with sound. I want to figure out more about sound and the other aspects to language.
Hello Taylor -- my apologies that this reply is coming in a little later -- since seeing this post I've definitely been processing a poem centered around the very idea you extended to me. I initially found the comic floating on my Tumblr dashboard, but the origin of the post is here: http://www.deviantart.com/art/life-387002562.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I was just as sort of shocked as you were, I had never thought of a dog responding in such a manner. It was pretty enchanting. I've seen dogs talk in movies and shows, but to see it represented this way, like a die of a magic 8 ball floating to the surface of an eye was pretty nice for me. I have a non-imaginary cat named Névé, whose featured in a poem I've written before where she came in a sort of ASCII representation with a sort of text box enclosing what she said. She'll be in this one, but I had never thought about the timbre of her voice before, and that's fun figuring out now, so thank you a lot for giving me this focus.
Learning more about music theory and sonics in general has given me a refreshed outlook on how I feel them in poetry and how I craft them in my own stuff. In the beginning, I was very into the imaginary aspect of poetry so I tended to let the sound portion fall a little to the wayside -- I never wrote poems to be read aloud but to be experienced, and now I know that having that sound foundation adds to the experience immensely. Sound is opposed to Sense and its others only to make a point I guess. I was reading a book called Audio Engineering 101 and one person said that to be a sound engineer, you don't have much special training or go to college in it specifically, and anything else one can study can help one's sound engineering and perspective on it in surprising, but beneficial ways. I'd like to help you in the future with finding new aspects to language, so if there's something you want to ask, then I can certainly give an honest try. Thank you again.