Poem: “TED Talk - 3/7/09”

[robertsona]

Okay so um (this is a great way to start)
I grew up in Brooks City-Base, Texas,
which is a military base located a
little ways away from San Antonio.
I don’t know if you know what military
bases are like but they are very insulated
and bizarre communities whose halfway
attempts at non-insulation and -bizarreness
make them even more insulated and bizarre
(like for example there were Burger Kings and
other such fast food chains in Brooks City-Base
but they were all weird Military Base-esque Burger Kings
with focus group-tested menu items
and American flags hanging everywhere).
The military-run school system there
and on all other military bases is very strange
in an almost self-parodically militaristic way.
Like for example one day one of the teachers
was teaching us about nuclear explosions and he took out
a map of Texas and then another one specifically
of the San Antonio area and started drawing concentric
circles around Brooks City-Base with a protractor,
saying that if a nuclear bomb were to be dropped in
the area then everything within these circles would be destroyed.
You can start at your house and draw increasingly large
concentric circles, engulfing all of your friends’ houses
and all of the Military Burger Kings and then also the public
pool from which the families of two teenagers were permanently
banned because the two teenagers were caught
covertly trying to **** each other underwater while surrounded by
old women laboriously swimming laps and kids wearing
one-piece suits stuffed with swim bubbles (the parents of
one of the teenagers never forgave him, moved away, founded an
experimental company predicated entirely upon the nebulous mission statement
of “ideas worth spreading” while their kid was left to enlist in the army),
and then you can keep drawing these concentric circles even
outside of the state of Texas. You can keep reaching outward
until you reach even here, in Palm Springs, California,
where I am speaking to you all, you in business suits and ties
and me in a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants; you all shuffling in your seats
and looking at your shoes and me standing up here on this stage, almost
robotically still; I am speaking to you and you are all clearly not listening
so goodbye.





----


i bet the spacing messed up a shitton

[robertsona]

aw cmon like a bunch of people have read this at least say something. even just say it sucks. no dont say that

[ScylaX]

Do you have to be american to get it.
Because I didn't. Is it meant to be rapped or something ?

[robertsona]

no

although if it helps here's info on what a ted talk is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_%28conference%29

theyve been getting very very big lately

[25thhour]

I also didn't really get it. Is it supposed to be a TED Talk?

[robertsona]

the narrator is supposed to be speaking at a ted talk yeah

[robertsona]

i literally dislike the idea of "explaining" things like this so much that i'm gonna put it in spoiler tags. not because it's "above explanation", i just dont like writing explanatory things i guess because yeah part of the poem is just its weirdness which may be ruined by this but whatever

there's no real deeper meaning to the poem. i just wanted it to escalate in awkwardness and have an almost foreboding sense of nearly peaking on insanity. and i thought the forum to best convey that would be a ted talk, which is sort of a really formal exercise in intelligent discourse or whatever. i just thought of the idea of someone going on a ted talk (where 99% of the material is really "smart" or at least coherent speeches on a given subject) and just spewing very weird very creepy bullshit about themselves was interesting.

i also intimated towards the fact that the narrator is one of the kids who was caught ****ing in the pool and that his parents ran off and formed the TED company/conference thing. as in, his parents left him after being embarrassed after the pool incident and forced him to join the army, and now he's here, giving a talk at the conference his parents made. a nasty talk all embittered by the memory of what happened. the speech format also sort of maybe explains why the poem isnt really "poetic" at all and uses a bunch of asides and speech idiosyncrasies and likes and ums and what have you

idk

also the title should be "2/7/09" because i think thats when ted talks happen

[who_cares973]

a link to the talk would be cool

[robertsona]

i'm not sure if you're being facetious but this isn't an actual ted talk lol

although i guess i see how the format of the title makes it seem like an actual event

[gnr61]

lmfao you guys cmon

this was really entertaining, thx for sharing. the choice to use lines for this sort of thing is interesting but i guess makes sense as far as being good for bringing out the Tonal Progression of the whole deal

[robertsona]

i guess it just makes it sound more disjointed? idk it could probably go either way (line breaks or no line breaks)

[who_cares973]

didnt actually read it until now rofl. cool stuff

[ScylaX]

I don't have a literary sensibility to anything that isn't french because I'm no good with languages sorry

[andy-o24]

I don't really see the line breaks as adding much to the poem. I feel like a paragraph would have been sufficient seeing as though it is, or is at least based upon, a speech or speech format. Your explanation is pretty much what I thought it would be, but who the speaker is was kind of a stretch (at least I thought) based on what is given in the poem. I suppose I can see it, but I wouldn't have connected that I don't think.

Overall, I can see what you're trying to do with this (the disjointed thoughts and kind of fun-making tone of the speaker). Not sure the whole meaning, but I can see what you have here on the surface.

-o24

[Cavernio]

sorry robertsona, but I just read the wiki entry about ted talks since I had no idea what they were and I can't help but talk about that rather than your own work which is very modern and I wouldn't call it a poem but is kinda neat but not really my thing, but damned TED talks sound like a ****ing joke for rich people to pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they're smart and make them feel above everyone else who can only convey their great ideas cheaply via friends and internet forums where we ultimately see that it's not revolutionary ideas that change the world but individuals who want to make a ton of money or who crave fame and they manipulate society into getting these not by revolutionary ideas but by taking advantage of societal constructs

;-p

[Hakulyte]

I thought it was an attempt to use ombrilism to explain a perspective of military life.
Oh wait- Google doesn't know ombrilism and I learned that at school in french like last week rofl..

The concept of ombrilism is to create a context to explain stuff and instead of getting to a point, you use that context to create another context to explain something else related to the precedent context etc.

Now we have military life and context that gets actually gets somewhere since there's a point so, that's interesting I guess.

I like the idea of drawing circles and going in circle.