A few years ago, I worked for the University of Waterloo as a computer science tutor. As a result of this, my email address was published in plain text on several very public pages, and was picked up by pretty much every spammer on Earth (read: India).
This was the first time I encountered the “let’s generate tons of random pseudosentences to escape the spam filter” trick. While most of the sentences were painful to read, quite a few of them were oddly beautiful. It occurred to me that someone, somewhere, must have gotten the idea to write poetry based on this stuff.
Of course, the First Law of the Internet — that is, that someone has already thought of your idea and written profusely about it — ensured that I was right about this. I doubt the validity of the stuff from an artistic perspective, because any beauty that one might extract from it would have to be almost purely syntactic; however, I’ve always wanted to dabble a bit with it myself.
So, I gave it a shot.
The wanted and the wanter, pursued
dissolute, scenic maiden of value
modestly topless
insatiable, colorless, and solar
paradoxical lookalike
the inevitability (blue jeans)
unsuccessful canvas; barroom posthumous
cross street adjunct
sightless chess
Saturday diligence
that formality is predictable
acquiescence is abashed
The Censor
the wastebasket realist
rends the cylindrical preamble
cagey and bottom piercing
hut of crystal to stonewall
a crash course in heresy
resurface the old
persecute attentively; vicious circle
underpaid to differentiate as sophomoric
expose notes as pewter
rearview mirror decomposition
of memoranda prurient
senatorial but partisan
polygamist of regurgitation
frizzy sugar know-it-all
dishonorably synthetic
2:01 pm, April 1, 2006Suze /
Were certain lines generated and you wrote around them or is the whole thing thrown together randomly?
3:59 pm, April 1, 2006Debo /
The only thing I added was the ‘of’ in ‘of memoranda prurient’. Otherwise, each sentence is a substring that was extracted from the glob of spam.
I sifted through six different emails and came out with roughly 80 sentences, but most of them were only two words long (gah geometric distribution!). After that I started getting a headache, so I worked with the 80 that I had picked out and came up with these suckers here.