by Mark Snyder
how much I miss the old days of school for the first time in my life that you have been in love with me and I have been trying to figure out how to make you look at my place in your life and how I felt bad for you and I don't think I can say that I could see the full story of the world in my heart.
AFTERWORD
This work began while I was bored as the kids watched a movie in the park that they'd seen a thousand times. I began playing with my cellphone (a Samsung Galaxy S4 running Android version 4.4.2).
The virtual keyboard has an autosuggest feature that recommends an array of up to nine words to follow any word that's typed. Playing with this feature in the stock word processor I quickly realized that the non-random nature of the text generated by the autosuggest feature could potentially create a narrative- a fractured, confused, meandering narrative, but a narrative nevertheless. I began to wonder how human such a narrative would feel to the reader, thinking of Alan Turing's test of a machine's ability to imitate human communication. This work is my cellphone's attempt to pass the Turing test.
The computers of Turing's day, such as the ERA 1101, could store approximately 4000 words- just a bit less than the 5727 words generated in this text by my cellphone- an interesting highlighting of the change in technology over time.
Early in creating this work I came across the Pali work “vadantu.” I reconjugated it to the third person imperative, and had my title: “Let it speak.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Therese Pope, Nicola Quinn, T. De Los Reyes, Karren Aleiner, Mark Herron, Carol Stephen, Mary Armour, Raymond Maxwell, Mandana Chaffa, Massimo Soranzio, Jeremy Dixon, Eric Weinstein, Christina Rau, Ingrid Ruthing, Bill Speer, Allan Keeton, Dennis Aguinaldo, Mathew Corey, and Julia Bloch for their encouragement and friendship, and for reviewing several sections of the draft as it was in progress.
Thank you to Brilton Quick and Betsi Leviner, for your friendship and your support. I'll miss you both on Wednesdays.
Thanks also to Kenneth Goldsmith, for his continuing inspiration and championing of uncreative writing.
I remain indebted to Al Filreis, who reviewed an early draft of this work and whose teaching made it possible for me to be a writer.
Finally, thank you to Pam, Hayley, and Melanie, for your love and support, and for taking me to the movie in the park that got me started on this work.
Mark Snyder grew up in Evergreen Park, Illinois. He serves as a Community TA in the course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry at Coursera.org under Prof. Al Filreis. He has created two experimental books- Epitaph: A Conceptual Elegy and Come As You Are- and two albums of experimental music- Necessary Evil and Requiem- the latter a secular conceptual setting of the Mass composed in the days immediately prior to the death of his father. He lives in rural North Carolina and practices general community psychiatry. He lives with his wife and daughters.