^ 8 Comments...

1. Meneldur
   December 30th, 2009 at 12:06 am

   Congratulations!

2. JMarc
   December 30th, 2009 at 9:00 am

   Thanks

3. GammaBob209
   January 6th, 2010 at 3:25 pm

   and so it ends…..
   very well done
   and now that its over I gotta ask….did Ray REALLY love Ruth? Since he had already figured out who Roslyn was (from the very first letter I’m guessing) did he deliberately say what he did to provoke Ruth into action or did he really mean it?

4. JMarc
   January 7th, 2010 at 9:20 am

   Thanks GammaBob, and good question. It’s hard to know exactly what was what from the information that’s given to us in the story, so I can only offer an opinion. I think Ray loved Ruth. At the start of the story, he was almost numb inside, drinking too much, bitter about everything, and not interested in making new music. Ruth came along and made him feel even more miserable with her snarling radio broadcasts. But soon Ray realised that she had made him feel something, anything – i.e. anger, – and he had not had that sensation for a while. She was also a young woman who seemed to be a little bit too interested in Ray’s career and he wondered about her. When he got the first letter from ‘Rosyln’ and the photo, he thought it might have been Ruth. He wouldn’t have been able to prove it, but he was pretty sure. Then, as Ruth and he opened up to each other in the letters, he realised he was in love with Ruth, and she was in love with him. In answer to your question I’d say that Ray was probably trying to guide Ruth a little, but he really did love her too. He probably didn’t think Ruth would take his song and record it and release it, but I think he would have been flattered that she made that effort. This puts a bit of a different slant on the scene where Ray comes to Rastus’ office and finds Ruth there, and she tells him she’s staying there as his guest. I am sure he would have been mortified that she had chosen sleazy old Rastus over him.

   For Ruth, love is also pretty complicated. She probably didn’t realise she was in love with Ray, or wonder why she was so interested in his career. Ray probably figured out that she had suffered some psychological wounds as a child, from both the photo and the letter, and the seemingly baseless bitterness of her radio broadcasts. (True, the photo wasn’t taken by ‘Uncle Charlie’, but I don’t think it’s normal behaviour for 12-year old girls to take photos of themselves naked on graves!) The infamous S&M scene seems on the surface to be just a cheap shot at Ruth, whom the audience really does not like at this point. But I think Townshend was trying to show in that scene that Ruth had some wounds which stopped her from being able to have a normal relationship with a man, and seeks men who will dominate her, punish her, degrade her. Ruth’s wounds could have come from abuse, or they could have been from a negative self-image she had from her witch’s teats, or both. We can’t know, though. (What a cruel name ‘witch’s teats’ is. It means the owner of them is a ‘witch.’ Imagine hearing that when you’re five years old, and your idea of ‘witch’ is ‘awful, ugly, evil hag.’)

   I could well be reading into this too much — Pete said himself that the characters were ‘comic book stereotypes’. However he’s a highly intelligent writer who’s given this subject a lot of thought, and he’s also prone to putting himself down sometimes.

5. GammaBob209
   January 10th, 2010 at 11:38 am

   Wow!

   You HAVE put a lot of thought into this……far more than I did
   I pretty much believed the surface perceptions we experienced from the dialogue; I honestly believed that Ray intended to do Grid Life regardless of whether Ruth attacked him or not. I’ve always perceived Ray as following his own agenda and once he figured out who ‘Roslyn’ really was he simply used that to make himself popular again and further the project (albeit making himself look sleazy in the process).
   As for Ruth, I really didn’t think she had any romantic or sexual feelings for Ray even after the revelation. The message she leaves on Rastus’ machine seems to indicate that she’s thrown by it and later her purely sexual antics with Rastus led me to believe she was trying to show Ray that she wasn’t interested (somewhat irrationally since she knew that Ray didn’t know she knew about it). By the end of the story the two were maybe friends but I couldn’t see them as lovers.
   Having said all that, tho, I love your interpretations of the storyline, especially the little moments that weren’t hinted at in the dialogue (Rastus’ various dalliances during Ruth’s broadcast and her message on his machine for example). Not only did you give me a second way of looking at the story but you also helped clarify a few things that I wasn’t quite able to figure out from the narrative.
   2 more things to ponder:
   In the scene where Ray is talking about the picture, you have him speaking to Rastus. The other person always sounded like someone else to me; actually it sounded like Pete Townshend!
   And was it actually Ruth who recorded ‘Flame’? If so it seems like there’s a frustrated singer inside of her who finally broke out!

6. JMarc
   January 11th, 2010 at 4:40 pm

   In the swimming pool scene, I think it’s Rastus that Ray’s talking to, mainly because Ray explains to him (and the listeners) what witch’s teats are, then later during the S&M scene, Rastus sees Ruth’s witch’s teats and he realises that she is Roslyn. However your comment reminded me of a short story by Pete Townshend called ‘Ropes’, which appeared in his book Horse’s Neck. In it, characters named Ray and Rastus interact with the main character, a rock star who is based on Pete.

   I think Ruth sang the radio version of ‘Flame’. It was either her or a session singer she hired. But in the scene where Ruth and Rastus listen to ‘Flame’ on the car radio, Rastus says, “So he wrote your song, then?” Ruth answers, “That would be telling,” which doesn’t answer the question of who sang it exactly, but I think it was her. The logistics of Ray’s letter-writing to Roslyn were a bit complicated. He would have been sending letters to one of Ruth’s friends in San Francisco, who would have sent it or faxed it to Ruth in London. Ruth would then send her reply back to her friend in San Francisco, who in turn would then send it on to Ray.

7. JMarc
   January 20th, 2010 at 9:53 am

   An interview that Pete Townsend did with Barry Barnes in 2005 has been posted at Youtube in three parts. There’s some really interesting stuff there, about what Gammabob and I have been discussing, and more. 5.20 on the 3rd part is particularly interesting:

   Part 1
   Part 2
   Part 3

8. JMarc
   August 18th, 2010 at 12:26 pm

   Psychoderelict has been collected into a handsome, full-colour book. It costs 16 Australian dollars, and that price includes postage. Go to J Marc’s Shop to get a copy. You need a paypal account, but if you are not keen to use paypal, email me and we can work something else out.

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