SUNDAY POETRY – A NEW TWIST (and it goes like this)

Uncle Bill Burroughs should have lived to see this. He would have loved it – online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted.

Even I thought the porn vendors were getting a little bold when, one afternoon (as is my habit) I rose and opened my email to find a clear and graphic sample image of a rather depressed-looking young woman felating a carthorse. There is little that shocks the Doc, but after coughing into my first Coke and cigarette of the day, I decided those responsible were sailing a tad close the contemporary winds of censorship, but that is really beside the point. John Ashcroft and worried webservers had unwittingly turned cyberpanderers into post-Beatnik techno-poets.

In the course of their subterfuge, the porn spammers were busily, but, I assumed, unknowingly, creating a form of found poetry, hugely resembling the works created by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, first with paper and scissors, and then with their various models of cutup engine, a technique later "borrowed" by David Bowie in his Thin White Duke incarnation, or so David boasted at the time.

Most of this kind of spam seems effectively random, although some spammers betray a self-awareness and creativity over and above their basic mission of smut-camouflage, by arranging the text into fanciful and maybe symbolic typographic structures – unless of course some HAL 9000 artificial intelligence is at work and playing long with the game. Unfortunately these line and column formations are destroyed by the act of removing the codes prior to posting. Which is a pity but inevitable. Unless someone had a smart idea.

As evidence that nothing is ever wasted in the constantly expanding culture, I have started to collect these items. More are always welcome, and I will post them until they stop coming or we all get bored with the exercise. (Send to byron4d@aol.com.) Here is the first example. The title is imposed, but I don’t think that’s breaking the rules...

LUCRETIUS CONCEDES.

On televison program,
On sit, a exciting there overcooked I shabby also f x, is forked
he .soup, Their she child and and comedy g g a early.
dull,
Is I'll or British pastry bar n u,
it becoming he stabbing a doctor.
&&&&
There wanna,
She dusty, their pie she generic object web site a hill on geeky
The could? I high,
On right are vibrator a k or slow their dirty their against it
don't gonna.
The text,
A buying the creamy a five dollar bill I because leaf,
a before it of he .

Is suit,
found there four n p is deep
or biscuit also run
h a there until and tender she atom f e is silky.

It brothers y p, I about v o I shiny the brain throughout
j q and trailer q l a are king on does also she frosty. 318
Or bat b b, ours u o he train
I lonely there dropping u s he smacking h o on home
I great gun. Or store y p, She ;)
The coloring book, I bed and n v she mail. n f

adjectival deflate

delirious happy aunt bernice prissy
delirious happy aunt bernice prissy

I'd love to perform for you. manicuring Lucretius concedes.

COMMENTS BOARD

Funtopia Rich, the Doc, and I are wondering what to do about the comments board. Suggestions? Maybe a second one?

CRYPTIQUE – See Spot die.