Spam Poetry
I’m sure we all get them. The emails that are addressed from someone we know and yet is full of jargon with an image attached selling Cialis and Viagra. I’m not sure exactly how the text is generated for these emails. I suspect it’s based on popular word ratings.
Maybe it’s because I’m often procrastinating doing some kind of work, but I often find myself reading the text of these strange emails and pondering the sometimes poetic beauty of the random words. For example:
Hot, I dropped the polpettone into the glowing ashes. “No chairs for us?” I asked, but was ignored. Fido felt equally
catastrophe. None survive.
None-other than that it is at the very highest level. The people I
intact, But without the artifact. For certain reasons, we could do not
this next song to the concert master himself, Svinjar. He nodded.
They double-timed and we followed.
Around the bend into the next galactic mail order. Spend! The more you spend the better,
womenfolk. Well, this was a slaveholding society so such concern was
an honest answer, Captain, and I thank you for it.
Maybe my reaction is because I’ve been inundated with bad poetry during my years of literature classes. Maybe I spend too much time next to a poorly insulated microwave and my brain has been affected. But when I read that passage…well I think the speaker and his dog massacred people for not providing chairs, a common curtosy afterall.
Ahh the joys of technology.
By the way, a polpettone is a fancy Italian meatloaf. I had to look it up.
January 13th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Fun, isn’t it? I keep a Found Poetry blog, and had a go at this too, last September:
—
Owen just told to me that you presumably read
about the arrangment on
extending out your livelyhood,
Oh forgot, there also great at helping me on losing my spare tire.
I weight ski shook hands with each of the three remaining men. Even
As concrete
South China twinkle covering her face with
—
8)
January 13th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
y’know… this gives me a terrific idea for a drawing project with my class. i should have them illustrate senseless spam. hmmmmmmmm….
January 16th, 2007 at 5:55 am
I thought I was the only one who did this! Makes me think of good ole’ Burrough’s cut and paste concepts. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful . . . and generated by “the thinking machine” . . . the computer not the human (in the case of random spam). It draws to the surface questions of what it means to be “thinking.” Why does the art culture make me feel guilty (for the most part) for even acknowledging it as poetry?
January 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
“I’m not sure exactly how the text is generated for these emails. I suspect it’s based on popular word ratings.”
After reading “an honest answer, Captain, and I thank you for it.” i feel these ramblings cannot be basic word statistics. Literature prevails even if it’s slaughtered this way…
It looks like randomized lists of sentence or part-of-sentences.
After Googling the phrase :
“an honest answer, Captain, and I thank you for it.”
I find it seems to stem from a book by Harry Harrison (which I haven’t read). Go look at http://712.anlit.org/ (or for that matter http://any-number-between-100-and-some-large-number.anlit.org/ which seems to be a fairly large amount of English books in sequence with no navigational apparatus). One reason I can think of for hosting a site like that is to maintain a resource for looking up random sentences for spam-construction.