Fun With Words: Common Terms and Phrases in 'Men and Apparitions'
Another experiment in language (w/ a little A.I.). With thanks and respect to Lynn Tillman for inspiring it.
Men, then, act up — actually, act their age.
Americans appear to be artists asked to be bad, who believe in a better body.
A boy with a brain he called "camera,” a child characteristically framed, frolicking in fields of clover.
A cool cultural death we did not especially expect, but his his eyes faced a father who felt female. Gathered around a girl and a guy in grassland whose hands happened to be above the head.
Poor Henry, he was human. Imagined his idea and his kind. New. Now then later, he learned little, let brothers and sisters live.
We looked a lot at Maggie, a saint who met Michael then married. Her mean memory, more than her mother ever objected was. Okay. Once objected.
Her parents pressed her in person. A photograph of her passion at play. Probably what we saw there was a social sense, a society sometimes subject to talk.
Things that were thought took hold and turned white, walked westward while winning.
Those others stood by and watched. Waved wincingly while we asked why.
We meant it to be this way. Symbolically was. Without wherewithal or care with all. Ontologically free.
What women wrote women wrote.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Not long ago I was researching Lynn Tillman’s novel “Men and Apparitions” on the internet and Google spat a compelling word cloud back at me in the process. If you look up book titles using Google it will sometimes return “common words and phrases” in said book. Sometimes, not all the time, and for some books, not others. I don’t know. Or depending on what device or operating system you use. I can’t tell. …. Anyway, I stared at this block of words for a while and they started “sounding” in my head. It was a little like popcorn kernels starting to pop one at a time when you heat the oil in a pan, you know? Yes, this is how it looks when I get interested in something. And importantly, I think: The distraction (I was distracted from my original task by the word cloud) IS the interest. Meaning what most people consider distraction I consider (in the best circumstances) engagement. Hold that thought. Remind me to write something about that later. There is more to unpack there, I think.
I then picked and pulled the cloud apart, each word, I mean — maybe pulling it more like a twirl of cotton candy than an actual cloud — and using my eye, ear and intuition, I started to piece those words together, sometimes connecting with words of my own choice. Essentially sentences, but sentences that don’t adhere to typical sense or grammar and instead follow an intuitive or musical sense I might use in writing poetry (or think improvisation in music), and it has occurred to me that I may actually have been writing poetry. But sentence logic plays too large a role in how I write for me to consider it poetry in the pure sense, of being informed about the technical aspect and historical structures of verse. I don’t know a lot about anything like that, really, I just go. Let’s call it a text with the title: Common Terms and Phrases in ‘Men and Apparitions.’
Without really intending anything in particular, this little text seems to be an early stab at making artistic friends with the AI gremlins rather than running in faux-humanistic horror away from them. It was fun to write, which is all I really seems to care about these days.
ABOUT THE IMAGE
The contact sheet capture above is from the work of my friend Tony Cenicola, who has been a photographer for The New York Times for more than 25 years. As a young photographer Tony was an assistant to Saul Leiter, one of the greatest New York street photographers of all time, and I feel that their relationship was formative for Tony (he can speak more to that himself at some point). Tony has shot his own work for decades outside the Times, and he is a gifted documentary and art photographer in his own right. I have of late taken an interest in his archive, some of which he is preparing for gallery showings in the near future. I consider the posts in which I display his photographic work to be not illustrated texts but creative collaborations between us. You’ll see me credit and sometimes comment on his work in my posts. The previous post with Tony’s photographic work can be found here.