Today's exploit in the TechnoVerse begins with a story. In that story, there is a photograph of me, resembling Cher circa 1980.
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| My brother-in-law, nephew (in Luke Skywalker wig), me (Cher wig, don't ask) and niece hamming it up. |
That would be the Cher video in which she performs for sailors on a Navy destroyer. You remember. She is gyrating on the guns wearing a see-through black costume with not much more than a black maxi-pad over parts we'd rather not see.
(If you absolutely insist on refreshing your memory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsKbwR7WXN4.)
Of course, my brother posted a link to the video after some goading. I watched the whole scary thing and replied from my phone: "That's the one. The shots from the back are...disturbing." By shots, I was referring to the camera angles that show Cher's almost bare, skinny rear end.
However, Auto-Correct does not know about music videos and camera angles. It had a different idea. So, what I actually posted to Facebook from my phone was this: "That's the one. The shits from the back are...disturbing." Which sent my sister-in-law into hysterics, which made me go back to re-read what I had posted. I was laughing so hard, I fell up the stairs. For real.
Good times, Auto-Correct.
But Auto-Correct isn't all shits and giggles, people. It has purpose, even when it gets things wrong. Here is one of Baltimore's best-loved poets and poetry cheerleaders, Clarinda Harriss, to tell us how she is making poetry from Auto-Correct's faux-pas.
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| Auto-Correct, you're stirring up trouble again. (Thanks, Mashable.com) |
Auto-Correct as Poet and Muse
Sometimes I call him Otto. Other times I call her Ada. I am ambivalent about the gender of
Auto-Correct, s/he of startling intrusions upon one’s effort to write via
iPhone, iPad, or “real computer.” S/he
is a hardheaded, softhearted creature, and I find I resort to standard gender
stereotypes when ascribing his/her efforts to one of his/her genders. I shall
shamelessly resort to such stereotypes in this discussion of Auto-Correct: Poet
and Muse.
| The nine muses of Greek mythology. I believe that is Otto cavorting in the blue toga. Ada is in green, on her tip toes. |
Consider my theory that Otto/Ada is/are indeed a poet. Observe, with me, that Otto/Ada takes the ordinary and makes it strange again. (Which
famous human poet said that was the role of poetry?)
Witness what I regard as his/her finest
effort: changing my text-message attempt
at brevity—“tx dear heart” (tx standing for thanks, of course) to “Taxed at
heart.” The poet in him/her not only
came up with a stunning and original phrase, to do with what s/he will, but also
provided me with the start and direction of a whole series of my own poems.
Ada is sensitive to my moods. She often changes a hurried
closing,
Best,
Clarinda
to something much closer to my reality at the time:
Beset,
Clarinda.
Otto is hardheaded and stubbornly old-fashioned. You all know this side of Otto. He insists
that each new line of a poem start with a capital letter, something most poets
gave up around 1950. You have to go back
and forth with him three times before he will grudgingly let you de-capitalize,
and he never gives up; he’ll do the same thing with every poem you write. According to some, you can go over his head to
his employer, Word, and force him to accept your more modern approach to
lineation; however, I myself have never succeeded in changing his somewhat
calcified mind. Otto knows his Freud. I suspect that they actually knew one another
personally.
| Otto dreams of making Freudian slips of your typos. |
When I jot down notes toward a poem using my iPhone or iPad, I may
write something like this: “I know what u feel.” Otto changes it to “I know
what I feel.” My essential self-centeredness
is exposed. A dear and brilliant poet
friend of mine once claimed that he believed all poems are love poems and that
most are self-love poems. Otto’s with
him on this.
Ada, in fact, shares with Otto a general distaste for the
inelegance of text abbreviations. For
example, “Tx!” is always “Tax!” Thus a simple, prosaic “Tx for everything!”
becomes the much more poetic, albeit quite political, “Tax for everything!” Again,
she is both poet and muse.
As I mentioned before, Otto/Ada have started me on a series,
perhaps even an entire chapbook, to be called simply “Mistakes.” I am inspired
by mistakes. One of my favorite recent
poems is called “Thank you, Gentopia,” a tribute to the wondrous misreadings my
particular eye problem affords me. (Not all inspiring mistakes are Otto/Ada’s
doing.) This series is barely begun, but
my auto-correct poet/muses did leave a haiku in my typewriter.
Tax for
everything
Taxed at heart,
beset,
Meaning to feel
what you feel
I feel what I
feel.
by Clarinda Harriss, posted with permission
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| Otto disguised as Uncle Sam. |
Check out Otto’s capitalization—and his correct syllable
count. Note that Ada sly added a few by
giving the haiku a title. Feel what Ada and
I are feeling.
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Clarinda Harriss, co-editor of Hot Sonnets: An Anthology, is a professor emerita of Towson University, where she taught for decades and chaired the English Department for one of those. Recently CityLit (Baltimore) instituted the Harriss Prize for Poetry in her honor. She directs BrickHouse Books, Inc., Maryland's oldest literary press. In her continuing work with prison writers, she has done as much jail time as many felons; several BhB books have come out of that work. Her own most recent books are Air Travel, Mortmain, and Dirty Blue Voice. A chapbook working titled Old Stolen Car is in the works; a collection of her prizewinning short fiction will come out in 2013.
Tomorrow in the TechnoVerse, children's author Debbie Levy shows us a dictionary app. We might need it to decipher Auto-Correct's "translations" of our poetry.
