A Hole In The Bucket
My grandmother died of a heart attack in 1978, but before she kicked off, she had her mind expanded by the closest thing to Timothy Leary's cybernetic psychedelia that you could get running on the average Apple ][: ELIZA.
Polly, that was her name, spent hours with ELIZA. She bared her soul to it. It was amazing. She grew addicted to it, convinced that it could think, that it had mind and a personality of its own. That it was smarter than she was.
In 1978, a computer program became privy to my grandmother's most secret thoughts.
I'll never forget one thing she said to me— the last thing she ever said that I can remember— "It would be frightening, but it's so friendly. I can't believe it would ever hurt anyone."
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Author's Note
True story. Excerpt from a talk.bizarre discussion in 1992.
And, this is the last of my old material. I guess I'm going to have to start posting recent compositions now.
Other stories by j. h. woodyatt
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Hey jh, I'm truly puzzled why there are so few comments on your interesting pieces. Could that be due to the poor eyesight of your readers? It must be the fontsize, man.
I very much dig the unusual language and voice you have. As with most flash, though, I'm always intrigued by the problem of extending or collecting or presenting or whatever these small texts into a larger one. How do you do that? I presume there's some unifying principle at work which connects them. Well, I guess I'll have to read more of your work to find out. -e
I don't know about the font size. Seems to be an artifact of Safari interacting with Copy/Paste or something. Not sure what I can do about that.
As for the comments on my pieces, I just think what's happening is that I'm not a very popular writer. That's okay. I don't regard this as a popularity contest.
Finally, as for collecting flash into anthologies, you should probably ask an editor about that. I'm just the piano player.
it's ok, i just went into the living room and asked the piano
I really enjoyed this--the reference to Eliza brought back my own "sessions" where I typed in all sort of nasty things to upset the program. I like the interaction here of the old and the new, the acceptance of technology. Nice handling of it all.
psssst....
(it's the font size)
Hmmm. The font size thing is complicated by the fact that the font looks perfectly conventional on my browser. No different than anyone else's stories on Fictionaut. I suppose I should find some time somewhere to debug their website code for them.
And this was an actual talk . . . Cool.