I received the following poem (spam) a couple of days ago. Does being spam preclude it from being art? Did a human make this? If not can an algorithm be an artist? Are humans anything but complex algorithms? And if they are cannot they too send thousands of people words strung together in a pleasing manner such that they be considered poetry? What if the purpose of said poetry was to sell Viagra?
The poem that evaded the filter follows:
It was not grief, this feeling, although she was nearly overwhelmed with grief — this was a strange, thundery feeling that she couldn’t ever remember having before.
Is it all cut up in that trunk his wife won’t let out of her sight?
Yes, he supposed he had been his own Scheherazade, just as he was his own dream-woman when he grabbed hold of himself and jacked off to the feverish beat of his fantasies.
I think we are all guilty of spam if not in action then at least in thought which in turn moves our hearts. Why, oh why cannot our filters stop what our algorithms create? Perhaps our filters, like Google’s, are less than perfect. Please Google take gmail out of beta and with it improve our souls, our poetry, our hearts… and the strength and duration of our erections.
As spammers work to get around email defense barriers, the actual contents of the spam pieces are becoming increasingly ridiculous and surreal. In what I hope will become a regular feature here at eightandfive, I present an oddly poetic piece of spam that made it past Gmail’s usually rigorous security (full disclosure: I did make a few minor formatting changes, just punctuation and line breaks):