A Primordial Reader Response: Interest

Terry underwood

Jun 11, 2024

A reader, a writer, and a bot walk into a bar.

The reader says, "I'll have a Melville with a rope twist, a ripe onion, and two drops of old Ahab’s blood.”

“Cayenne in the blood?”

The reader nixes the heat. “Quickly.”

The writer says, "I'll have a Calliope. Is this a nicotine-friendly environment?”

The bartender says, “There.”

With a deictic flourish of an indexical finger, he points toward the door. “County voted. You can vape—not the weed. State voted.”

A soft silent pause in the dimly lit hole in the wall.

“Love is like a dying ember… Where only memories remain… Through the ages I'll remember—Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain.”

The writer says, “Nice music. This your own playlist?”

The bartender says, “Pandora. My channel. Hank Williams.”

The reader says, “I love, love, love Hank Williams, groovy smoothy. Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline—my sister singers he influenced. We wouldn’t have Grace Slick and Joplin if the whacky power in the sky directing this silly play we refer to euphemistically as life had sentenced Hank to a counterfactual.”

The reader softly sings along, mumbled phrases, milky ecstasy, the lyrics imbricating background chatter under mumbles during the ineluctable discussion of Calliope’s intoxicants. This is my attempt at writerly babble for what discourse analysts call latched or overlapping speech.

“Now my hair has turned to silver… All my life I've loved in vain… I can see her star in heaven… Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain.”

The writer asks, “What’s your recipe for a Calliope?”

“A jigger of Metaxa, half ounce of Ouzo, half ounce of Mastiha, half ounce of honey syrup, fresh squeezed lemon juice, ice.”

“You just made a friend. Go easy on the Melville, all right. She’s already lit. I need some feedback on my manuscript. You got any special artificial concoctions for my friend, the botter, lives in my phone? You got no drinking age for bots right? They’re not illegal in this county are they?”

The bartender reaches for the phone, says, “1010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101100 00100000 01100010 01101001 01100111 00100000 01100111 01110101 01111001 00111111?”

The bot says, "01001001 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100011 01101011 01110100 01100001 01101001 01101100 00101110."1

*****

Reflective Prompts:

Given that a text is neither inherently interesting nor boring, that interest is a human response to a text, that AI has no human interest in texts, see what you can learn from this short personal reading experience about the role of interest in reading, comprehending, and interpreting a complex text designed for the imagination. Note: Interest in this particular text is not a requirement nor a prerequisite for contemplating this question.
Can you put your finger on any word, idea, or image that drew your attention to the textworld, that is, the envisioned bar in your brain, not the bar you know or are in. Say why and explain the text element’s impact. Did you find any characters, relationships, symbols, conflicts, details or themes that sparked interest? Was there any surprise or ambiguity or irony that evoked curiosity?
Do you have any interest in decoding the bot’s answer? Why or why not.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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