Scott and Clabough Responses

In “Colors of Hardware” Scott writes: “Well, I walked into the room of today and couldn’t figure out why I was there. So I walked into the room of yesterday to jog my memory” (45). The piece is intriguing because it does not follow a straight pattern, and it resembles poetry more than anything through the use of enjambment. It starts out in second person, and then switches to first person a few lines down. The repetition of “I walked into the room…” leads the reader on a journey where they are walking in the room with Scott and see what he sees; feels what he feels, etc. I enjoyed all of his object descriptions like hinges, door knobs, locks, and vintage glass. The piece is fragmented almost to the point of incomprehensible, but certain lines shine clearer than others. Scott proclaims in that same section, “the tubes that exchanged fluids and machines that spoke in languages” (46) which is clearly personification. Machines that seem to speak to him in languages show how perceptive the author is to what is going on around him. It is not exactly clear where the piece takes place, but it reminds me of eloquent poems or prose that is vague and ambiguous. He could be in a hospital room with a dying loved one, maybe a parent or sibling or partner. But that’s not what is important. What’s important is how he gets the feeling across; one moment in his life where time stops and all he can see are the doorknobs and hardware starting at him from across the room. That is my perspective of it, anyways. In the Claubough piece, though many other people dissected the gender variable or the skeleton and its purpose, I thought that the most interesting part was on pages 63-64. The scene where the narrator goes to the dissection lab at the Medical College where he observes and describes “genetic mutations: a dozen infants and fetuses afloat in large, clear glass containers of formaldehyde” (63) I would freak out if I actually came face to face with a real-life fetus, (actually I did once in a museum in LA where I saw a mummified fetus and it was disgusting and eerie…) so I am amazed at the boldness of the author as he states, “I suppose they did look monstrous and terrible, but I was never afraid of them. They were my friends. If they could have smiled at me, they would have. And I would have smiled back” (64). The statement, “And an instance of doubling to balance this cyclopean collapse: an infant possessed as one body and two heads, the result of duplication of the neural tube. What would these heads have said to each other? What would they have thought?” (63). This line reminded me of Luigi and Angelo, the Capello twins from Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. They are normal twins in the novel, but are conjoined twins in his novella called: Those Extraordinary Twins where the Capello brothers are two men sharing the same body, or the same pair of legs, and they do actually speak and argue with each other. -Sienna