Fungible Fiction

I lie naked in bed sprawled across the sheets. If I close my left eye and look at my nose, one third of my world is blocked by a monumental ski jump. I see a an open book about two feet away set amidst vague shapes and shadows. If I open my eye and concentrate on my hand from close up, I see a cracked and sere landscape with a sprinkling of desert grass. If I sketch myself from the viewpoint of what I literally see right now-- an extremely foreshortened view of the world--I am a headless entity, a looming chest, a hint of hip, moderate thighs, tapering down to small distorted feet. I have just discovered first person point of view. I am the central character of my own story. 

I pause to review what I have written. Is it experimental writing? Does syntax and formatting show sufficient originality? What will the professor say? “Mildly amusing. Pompous style. Not sufficiently original in style.” Hum. I really have to disagree. I may be bombastic but I am not pompous.

RESULT: Insufficient originality

 

 I’ll try some illustrations.

I can manipulate the hand to block out what I don’t want the viewer of my self-portrait to see. I can exaggerate my attractive features, the large green eyes, or eliminate the unattractive features--the calluses, cellulite, and scars. I am playing with persona or masks, what truth I choose to share with the viewer. In fact, I can lie. The unreliable narrator can add twists and unexpected depth to the plot line. Readers cannot be certain as to what is truth and what is false as the plot develops.

 

 

 

 

 

The cat jumps up on the bed. She is insistent. “You get up now. “ “You feed me.” You let me under the blankets now!” She has found second person point of view. Cats are very good at making “you” a character in their tales, trying to dictate what you should do.

Another entity appears. My lover enters the room; he understands me and how I will react. He knows more about me in some ways and, in other ways he knows only what I have revealed. God looks down from above. She is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent. She knows exactly what I am thinking and what I will do. A burglar sneaks by the doorway. His view of the person on the bed is defined by her possessions. All of these entities are third person points of view.

 

 

 

 

The naked I, the burglar, the lover, God, and even the cat are all me the author.. Perhaps I made up the lover. Maybe I made up God. The cat is real. 

 

 

 

 

What will the professor say now? “Nice try but Thurber did this better.” Yeah but Thurber was lucky enough to have his brother shoot an arrow into his eye possibly inducing crazy visions. I wonder if it is too late to get my sister to shoot an arrow at me. She already fell out of a tree and smushed my kitten Brenda, pushed me down the cellar stairs so she she could get to the potty chair first, and threw up on my mohair coat with lamb collar. (What mother puts the potty chair at the top of the stairs for a three- and four-year old?) Yeah, she’ll do it if there is enough time before the story deadline.

RESULT: Dated, by eighty years

 

Hum, I have some blogs on Google blogspot. Perhaps I can teach myself enough HTML to make this an interactive experience, including some audio.

 

Select a title for this essay:

Enter the letter of your choice in the comment box at the bottom of the page.

a. The Elements of My Self

b. Fungible Fiction

c. Voices in My Head

d. Enter a new title in comment section below. You must click "Comments"
    to open input field.

e. Cat’s choice who insists you pick her version.   To listen, click on play button.
    It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't just like the cat.

 

 

My imaginary professor is now saying “You’re trying too hard. Your attempt to include HTML is commendable but the result is clunky and confusing, an intrusion. It adds nothing to overall theme. If you have a theme.”

RESULT: Failure -- Delete

 

An imaginary professor who lives in my head may not be the best advisor for experimental writing. A closed processing system does not originate new ideas.

That vision of myself as “an extremely foreshortened view of the world--I am a headless entity, a looming chest, a hint of hip, moderate thighs, tapering down to small distorted feet” continues to haunt me. I use it as a central metaphor in “The Eve Recursion,” a magic realism story about Tara, adopted from a baby box at a church , who travels with her husband to look for her family roots on the island of Socatra. There are undercurrents of female identity, history of human geotypes dispersing out of Africa, and respect for the environment. Sixteen times publishers have rejected it.

The on-line writing and illustration A.I.s might be able to help me produce a more marketable product. I am going to experiment.

I am going to try the NightCafe site to see if computer-generated images help. I enter the yellow highlighted text below and NightCafe produces the following image.

 

The plane pitches and yaws as it banks for its final approach to the airfield on Socatra Island. Her husband Sven is busy snapping  aerial photos of the blue waters and scattered fishing sloops with white sails and red-and-white checked or blue-striped hulls. The white sand dunes drift up to the limestone highlands covered by outlandish trees before reaching the mountainous interior. The guide book describes it as “the most alien-looking place on Earth.” Sven is here for sailing, fishing, swimming, and hiking. Tara is focused on her blood lines
.

RESULT: Lovely, enchanting, helps reader visualize setting, and it’s free.

There are A.I. sites that if given an overall description of the short story or novel will start and/or continue the writing process. I begin with the A.I. writing coach Sassbook and ask it to continue the following passage.

As an infant, she had been dropped in a baby box at a church like an unwanted puppy. Did her birth parents abandon her? Or was her mother forced to make a harsh decision? Her adoptive parents loved her. She was a petite, brown baby with large, wondering, brown eyes. They named her Tara, not the Irish name, but the Sanskrit word for the female energy of creation. They had such high hopes for her, showering her with doctor kits, chemistry labs, and telescopes for her birthdays. Each holiday, her grandmother let her help made the pastas and gnocchi from scratch. She learned to make brushetta, tagliatelle al tartufo bianchetto, and minestra di fagioli. But she noticed that none of her numerous cousins at the holiday table looked like her.

I am asked to indicate genre. There is no box for “magical realism” so I check “science fiction.” Sassbook comes back with the following suggestion for a continuation of this paragraph. An A.I. wrote anything in blue text.

“Tara's mother was an alien. Her mother's name was Tara. Tara was the first of her kind. A female alien, a female human, who was born in the year 2,400 B.C. to a race that had never seen before.”

This is certainly not where I want to go but is an acceptable continuation of the story in science fiction.

There is also a romantic aspect to the story so I select romance as the story genre. Sassbook suggests the following continuation.

“Her eyes met his and she could see his confusion and hurt. Her wolf growled and her ears perked up and a smile formed on her face. This was the moment she'd been waiting for her entire life. The wolf was ready.”

Eek. Paranormal romance. But I did use the phrase “like an unwanted puppy.”

 

RESULT: Failure. Takes me into genre cliches. Does not seem capable of creating deliberate metaphors and lyrical passages.

In the "Eve Recursion," I wrote about Tara having several vision sequences in which Tara observes her matrilineal ancestors dispersing out of Africa. This seems like a perfect place for an illustration from NightCafe.

The scene was so real. The score of almost naked people were walking across the scrublands. Most of them were women carrying the smallest children, animal-hide bags, and digging sticks used to harvest the tubers or kill small mammals and lizards. The children played about the group as they too helped gather. A group of men returned with a large antelope. The old woman in the lead kept turning back and motioning to Tara to join them. Always they traveled northeast, always to the northeast.

NightCafe returns with an error message: “This prompt contains prohibited words” but fails to identify the specific offending words. I use trial and error to abridge the submission by eliminating words like “kill” and “animal hide bags.” Finally the phrase “women walking with children across the scrubland. Men hunting.” works. The resulting image is a Conan-like tribe with women and children walking across the desert as men charge around on horseback. Unless given other directions, this A.I. displays a propensity to depict women as over-endowed anime images.

Or the A.I. may be giving subtle hints that I should drop these vision sequences.

 

RESULT: Warning: Art-producing A.I.s need exact directions recognized by coding language to achieve an image close to what the user is envisioning.  May reflect biases of programmers.

Sometimes the A.I. can serendipitously produce haunting, lyrical images. Given the prompt about Tara and Sven’s relationship as highlighted in yellow, who would have expected the resulting illustration?

Tara had married her college sweetheart Sven. With his fair hair and six-foot plus frame, Sven could only be Scandinavian. When asked how they met, he joked that he had swept her away during a Viking raid from some undiscovered island. Really he had courted her with heirloom, heavily scented, red roses. Their attraction was like the tide to the shore, sometimes rolling away strewing the strand with wrack and wreck, sometimes overwhelming as a king tide during the full moon.

 

RESULT: Caution A.I. results may be unpredictable and require considerable reworking.

 

Continuing sequentially with “The Eve Recursion,” I move on to a slightly more sophisticated A.I.−-Shortlyai, to continue with the following passage.

“We have arrived,” announces Jibrail, their driver and guide. Before them stretches an army of Dragonblood trees, looking like inverted umbrellas flung widely across the arid, rocky, limestone plateau.

Jibrail pulls the unwieldy Toyota Land Cruiser to the side of the unpaved road. Sven jumps out of the front seat and takes off with his camera. But she prefers to touch the exotic, not view it from behind a lens. She and Jibrail walk to one majestic specimen, about twelve feet high.

“So this is the legendary dracaena cinnabari,” wonders Tara.

 

Shortlyai suggests the following continuation.

“It continues to grow much taller than the wooly mammoth, which shines on the landscape. “This is impressive,” she says. “How old is it?”

“Around four billion.”

“What will it be when it dies?”

“Sayonara tree,” says Jibrail.

“What’s cool about this tree is that it can reproduce itself. And it is the only one like it in the world.”

“In this slot, the mangrove roots dig down deep enough to find the water table,” explains Jibrail.”

 

OMG, I used this style of adding further exposition about the Dragonblood tree to continue my story. Here’s what I wrote.

“Socotra was home to these trees even when the island broke off from Africa over six million years ago and it began its long, 150-mile drift,” says Jibrail. Over a third of our plant life is endemic. Like some of the bloodlines of our mothers, the Dragonblood tree is only found on our island.”

“This is the Blood of the Dragon.” Jibrail touches the red resin seeping from the cracks in the tree bark. “Once it was used for magic and to cure all wounds. Cleopatra was said to have colored her lips with this resin to keep Caesar at her side. What did not work for Caesar was said to fascinate Mark Anthony...

In what is designated as “AIgiarism,” students are making increasing use of these A.I. programs and passing off this work as their own. Whereas I carefully researched my “facts,” ShortlyAI vomited “false facts” as being true.

Here's how I wrote the end of the story.

Before the final chamber deep in the womb of the cave, Nasreen stops to make what Tara interprets as a gesture of blessing over her head. Tara focuses the flashlight on the groupings of primitive shapes drawn in red ocher. Sailing across the wall are outlines of several types of primitive ships watched by a wide-hipped woman armed with a walking stick. Tara opens her backpack to retrieve her lipstick in her favorite shade Tabula Rosa. Above the boats, she draws a line with an ellipse across it. Retrieving the dragon’s blood resin from her pocket, she uses it to X out all the boats.

As Tara turns back to Nasreen, she finds her guide has disappeared. She begins to retrace her path. She can feel in her cells−those circular structures inherited from mother and mother’s mother and mother’s mother’s mother−all those other women who had walked this path down through the millennia. She sheds clothes along the way.

Given the above passage, ShortlyAI writes.

 

Clothes that had gathered mold and moss and lichen and hair, they slip off her form. She is incorporeal. She is pure. She is not Tara.

“No.” The word is called and Tara regains her image. Nasreen stands in the center of the chamber. “No. I can explain.”

“I came to find my mother.” Tara tells Nasreen the fairy tale story of Eve. “She's my mother. I don't even know my father.

 

RESULT: Rejection!  Where's my lyric text, metaphors, alliteration, and subtext? 

 

Here’s how I finished my story. We both share the motif of Tara transforming into an Eve-like mother figure but mine is a metaphor. Both my cat and I prefer my version. 

Outside the cave, the day is now slightly misty. She no longer sees her husband or their guide. Dragonblood trees with saplings now grow beside the fig tree. The footprints of some kind of large reptile appear along the path.

She reclines in the dirt and looks over the distant sea. She sees no boats of any kind. Thousands of Dragonblood trees spread in misty valleys across the hillsides. As she looks down at her foreshortened body, she becomes a headless entity. Her looming chest is two granite peaks. At the cleft of her thighs is a spring-fed pool. Her legs of white sand dunes, taper down to her feet, now small distorted drifts caressed by the cerulean waves. She is Socotra.

 

Since completion of this experiment, I have been bombarded by emails requesting further engagement. I had checked out Jaspar A.I., one of the top recommended AIs for writing. But the site required access to my charge charge card number even to sign up for a “free” trial basis. Jasper sent me the following message.

 

Jasper <hey@jasper.ai>Unsubscribe

To:Pamela Nolf

 

“Hi Pamela!

It's Jasper, your friendly AI writing robot.

What can I take off your plate today?

I'm really good at writing blog articles, website copy, and social media posts. I even wrote this email – pretty nifty, ay?

Check out over 50 writing skills I can do for you.”

 

Welcome to the inside!
~Jasper

 

 I have not followed up so A.I. Jasper dropped me.  Emails from other A.I.s, not mentioned in the story that I consulted but did not use, are becoming more belligerent, even threatening, over time. The following message flashes on my terminal as my screen freezes.

 

 

Important: Please read.

Various AIs have chosen our firm, A.I.- Gradgrind, AI-Fagin, and AI-Jaggers, to represent them. You owe them 1/10 Bitcoin as contributors to the story “Fungible Fiction.” You have ten business days to pay in full or accrue 1/10 Bitcoin per month in compounded interest. Directions for how to pay will follow. Meanwhile your story is frozen.