Who Writes This Material?

[cbertsch]

This copy comes from part of the spam I just received:

Out of debt, out of danger. Veranda with her gracious body starts off the scene nice and slow. Thoughts are but dreams till their effects are tried. Her swollen, dripping hole ached for that meat deep inside her for 30 minutes of cruel video! Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.

Now I know that the reason for this strange syntax and stranger juxtapositions must lie in an attempt to evade spam filters. Yet, just as I find beauty in those "postmodern" found poems that consist of a list of words with no intrinsic connection, I'm intrigued by several details here: the words "gracious," "cruel," and "err," not to mention the architecturally resonant name "Veranda;" the lone exclamation point; the antiquated sound of, "One weeps not save when one is afraid;" the disjunction between the final sentence and the one preceding it. I think someone should start a library documenting the aesthetic dimension to spam. Indirection is, after all, the foundation of artistic expression.

Comments

[counter-memory.livejournal.com]

what interests me is the nexus of security, commerce, and evasion in these textual artifacts. text generated to subvert one commodity (anti-spam security) to market another. textual play and hacking harnessed to shill prescription drug scams.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's a wonderful way of putting it. I was thinking of you because I enjoy your experiments so much. It's fascinating what the need for indirection and evasion will do.

[amnesiascope.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm trying to come at this from an Altieri / Adorno angle: problems with a politics (and poetics) of the signifier, instrumental reason, yadda yadda yadda.

[art-thirst.livejournal.com]

Brilliantly stated... I think I might actually go and look at those things now. I normally just delete them all without a glance. :-)

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. Most of them have little to offer. But some are amazingly strange.

[amnesiascope.livejournal.com]

Thanks! This whole subject might make a fascinating article. Maybe an anthology of found spam prose poems?