Page 16
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The scan-verified page opens Sightseer as an origin memory of orphanage discipline, starched nuns, Hollywood charity, a warden-like collarman, and a filmic passage into Hawaiian war imagery.
The repaired transcript makes the institutional scene more coherent while keeping its manuscript turbulence. The handwritten insertions push the orphanage memory toward spectacle and projection, so childhood fear, Catholic authority, and movie machinery all become part of the same remembered apparatus.
'Sightseer' - a prose-poem origin memory of an orphanage rendered as both Catholic institution and film set. It opens at the cradle ('Beginning. We were born.') amid 'Stiff paper airplane hats', sheets 'startched / enough to creak', and nuns whose habits give them 'button up startched wings for / breasts'. Charity arrives as spectacle: 'Hollywood movie / queens giving donations for our long lost upkeep', while an authority figure - 'the directive man ... as a warden with / a collar' who 'came in wearing worry over his / face' - presides over what becomes 'a relagated fantasia of dread, spliced ... with technics', sliding into 'the reality of an Hawaiian war'. The closing image fixes the nuns as 'numb as statues without blue / paint' whose 'noses would always be / streight'. Provisional: typed page under a dense handwritten revision band, with canceled margin drafting omitted. Source spellings ('startched', 'Soddenly', 'streight') are preserved.