A lovely example of How It Happens:
Today's come-on post from London Review of Books pointed me to Hoodoo Man, Francis Gooding's piece on Mack Rebennack ('Dr. John') and David Toop's Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-Gris (2024), so I
- read the story
- think about my own engagement with the record (given to me by Ken Stallcup)
- order the book (should be here Tuesday...),
- search the google for a particularly ...apposite? bound phrase:
pareidolic digression ...which led to exploring wherewhen for the conjunction of words, and seeing that "AI Overview" had something to contribute:
AI Overview
a "Pareidolic digression" is a descriptive phrase, not a standard technical term, meaning a departure in thought or narrative triggered by seeing meaningful patterns in random or ambiguous stimuli.
The phrase combines two elements:Pareidolia: The psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, such as seeing faces in clouds, the man in the moon, or hearing hidden messages in music played in reverse.Digression: A temporary departure from the main subject in speech or writing.
The phrase suggests a writing or speaking style that frequently goes off on tangents based on the author's subjective interpretations of patterns they perceive around them. It was notably used in a review by Francis Gooding in the London Review of Books to describe the narrative style of author David Toop.
Among the things to note about "AI" 's overview is that the LRB piece just appeared this morning. And it produces an explanatory text that broadens what I know from personal experience and immersion in ...pareidolia. And quite providentially yesterday's mail brought Joel Simpson's Faces In The Rocks (which I learned about via a link to a conversation between Joel Simpson and John Paul Caponigro [available via Soundcloud]...)
Here's the passage that transfixed me:
Toop's narrative is far from straightforward. No opportunity for pareidolic digression, oblique observation or canny aside is wasted: every character's strange history comes to light, every thread is teased out until it thins to invisibility. Toop's own past, his own history of ideas and connections and sonic epiphanies, is also always in the mix. Two-Headed Doctor is in some ways an experiment in just how much close examination a single object — in this case, an album — will bear. It takes a similar approach to the idea of history, and the writing of it: any object or fact or event is just one node in a vast web of connections; the historian chooses a route through it, picks up some characters and leaves others behind, and produces a new story. A complex object like Gris-Gris is the precipitate of multiple pasts, all of which hold a space within it. Toop has invited all the ghosts to speak, and at this point in the story, as Rebennack and Battiste decide to make a record together, they all begin to clamour at once.You can see why I ordered the book...
All of which has me wondering if maybe pareidolia should join MYKeywords, or if it's really a subsection of the Keyword 'Imagination', and thus would be macraméed toAI Overview also pointed me to an article at PubMed Pareidolia in a Built Environment as a Complex Phenomenological Ambiguous Stimuli Chen Wang et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health (2022) (the bibliography is instructive)bricolage
creativity
Form
Image
ineffable
mashup
Mind
Narrative
parse
pattern
quixotic
Semantics
Serendipity
Story
verisimilitude
(at a minimum)
So here we have on view a fresh-baked bound phrase: a conjuncture of words into a single (sometimes even novel) semantic force field, that may resonate more evocatively as a pairing, as a created Image in the Imagination...
...which leads to thinking about how to enrich Imagination (at /lexicon/Key/) ...
And so it goes with the bowerbird scholar [bound phrase...], and it's not even 9:00 yet.