Has anyone else noticed that their usual stock market spam is getting a lot prettier?
(What a silly question – of course you have noticed – if the stuff makes it to your inbox and into the viewing pane of your email reader.)
In all seriousness:
It’s almost beautiful, wouldn’t you say? And so distorted that it doesn’t function as a visual advertisement, as such. Though I’d never actually click on it to find out what dismal corner of the internet it would cast me to, I can admire its aesthetic qualities safely in the window of my email reader. Perhaps there is some actual art to be made with these visually alluring spams, much like the poetry created by people who mashed up the ridiculous language commonly found in spam, creating a form known as flarf (which, of course, is a contested term and questionable genre). Also, it has been noted that it seems like the spammers themselves are out to create a kind of poetry in the first place. Perhaps following the Spam Shelley, we have Spam Seurat.
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Some of it is quite enthralling. I got this yesterday:
came to the man’s assistance and they hit Ivan on the back with some instrument, though not painfully, traced some signs on the skin of his chest with the handle of a little hammer, hit him on the knees with more little hammers, making Ivan’s legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it, pricked his elbow joint, wrapped rubber bracelets round his arm…
Ivan could only smile bitterly to himself and ponder on the absurdity of it all. He had wanted to warn them all of the danger threatening them from the mysterious professor, and had tried to catch him, yet all he had achieved was to land up in this weird laboratory just to talk a lot of rubbish about his uncle Fyodor who had died of drink in Vologda.
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Pingback from Spam literature « Robert Sharp on December 5, 2006 at 9:11 pm
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Flarf Collective performances available here:
http://www.mainstreampoetry.com
And by searching “Flarf” on YouTube
New articles on Flarf in the “More on Flarf” section here:
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As a busy academic one of my very few creative outlets happens to be writing spam poetry, it’s athanksless task, but someone has to do it.
Also I think some of the better passages of spam text are actually cribs from famous novels, which is why they sound so good, they are.
Note the Russian names, think a translation of Gorky perhaps. or some backwards translated Ian Wilbur spy novel.
Here is my favorite spam poetry:
All lines are taken from subject headers in my yahoo inbox.Oh, you are not able to control your feelings!
You gape for shooting like you had seen in those films…
Hi, moon-gazing lightweight.
Deflate demure materialist.
objects including selflove
flutter

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