The poetics of spam

I love found poetry.  Love it.  Found poetry reminds me of the time my friend Erin and I discovered John Wesley’s directions for singing in the back of a Methodist hymnal and she sat in the wooden pew furiously scribbling them all down on a spare church bulletin. Number two, for example, commands, “Sing [these tunes] exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.”  There are seven in total.  

I love how Wesley’s language is purposeful, direct and alarmingly un-ironic.  On the other hand, sometimes you find poetry in an unexpected metaphor, a euphemism that is hilariously endearing.  And that is what I bring you today.  Most of us probably don’t often think of e-mail spammers as endearing, but I present the following list with hopes you’ll reconsider.  

After four weeks out of town, I arrived home to over six hundred (!) messages in my g-mail spam folder.  Of course there was lots of “Hot sale: Generic Medecines and Vi@gr!@”, but some folks took the time to charm me with their subject lines.  Here is a brief review of the top titles:

 

• Your drillo needs support
• Your battleship won’t sink
• Vulcanizer for your hot-stick!
• Best doping for night monster
• Your shuttle needs better fuel
• Energy for your dude piston
• The best software for your joystick
• Charge your love generator

 

and, my personal favorite:

 

• The magic melody for your flute

 

I mean, if I were in the market for some generic Viagra, I’d hands-down buy it from that guy.  In my book, a well-written metaphor goes a long way.  And admit it, you’ve already started thinking of your own.*

 

*Tentacle, love gun, and tasty cake have already been taken.

all art is quite useless

small thing: long sentence

In my Brit Lit class we’re currently reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which, if you’ve not read it, is an odd cross between gothic novel and theatrical Victorian comedy of manners, and is at once both moralist parable and prescription for indulgence.  Wilde is of course known for being very witty, which he is in this book, but what interests me more is the text’s false confidence, its inherent contradictions. Take for example the sentence below.  Wilde wanted to be both an efficient prose stylist and the decadent voice of the aesthetic movement.  Sometimes one of those wants overshadowed the other.

Here is the first sentence of the second paragraph of Chapter One:

 

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

 

Holy long sentence!  And so absurdly over-adjectived. But even the mere act of typing it into the text box felt luxurious, indulgent; for a moment it could’ve been me on the couch with the cigarettes, listening to the breeze rustle through the expensive silk, surrounded by birds and windows and hazy memories of Japan.  Oh to be a Victorian gentleman!

What’s not to love about a man who takes his personal philosophy of art (brief explanation) to its logical extreme in the very second sentence of his first (and only) novel?  I love words!