Flarf poem

Euro Scumbag, champagne and cavier, techno bullshit
WITHOUT. god, techno lyrics suck. XDDD "you touch my mind in special places."
Sounds like the so-called Eurotrash-techno to me and that hurts my ears
Pulsing with a techno intensity that only Eurotrash could love
a Euro Trash night-out!

Call me Max
Music non stop, techno pop
I'm thinking what I'm giving,
I'm giving what it takes
Max, Max, Max,
Elektroklänge überall
I'm in love with you and I love my ex
I love you both, and to be true
I don't know what I'm gonna do
Decibell im ultraschall
I gotta warn you,
Max, don't have sex with your ex
It will make your life complex,
Music non stop, techno pop

Flarf and Spoetry

Spoetry and in particular Flarf is, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of web 2.0 thus far. The fantastic creativity of the authors in combining their source materials, whether Google searches or other internet tidbits, creates a unique kind of sense out of the internet as a whole, its culture, its dark side and is just plain hilarious. I spend a lot of time on the internet: I surf just for fun, when I’m bored, any time I need to find something out, etc. I am, therefore, quite in tune with the culture of the internet and that makes reading Flarf and Spoetry a kind of sarcastic look at myself and the culture I’m familiar with. It brings to light the kind of things that I take as normal but are in truth very absurd. The emphasis on vulgarity is particularly effective because the internet is so full of it. After a while, a person is desensitized to it and then it loses some of its meaning. However, reading Flarf and Spoetry is a like an antidote for me, something to keep me sane through all of the insanity. In particular, I liked the poem “Truckin’ Poem,” by Chickee Chickston, not necessarily because it has any of the qualities described above, but because it is so light-hearted, effective and hilarious. The repetitiveness truly does bring to mind long hours on the road. The way the lines are mixed furthers this effect by bringing to mind how road travel is just a mix of the same actions (left turn, right turn, honk, stop, go) but in various often different combinations. The lines of the poem act like mile markers, helping me get through the poem’s monotony, and yet, it’s a monotony I love and wish there was more of. Perhaps I also like it that much more because I do love road trips.
I even thoroughly love how Flarf poetry came into being: as a sarcastic bating of Poetry.com. There is perhaps nothing more omnipresent on the internet than sarcasm and disgruntlement towards the real world and even towards the internet itself. This is what produces all of the flame wars and internet memes that are a hallmark of all chat rooms and anywhere else that internet culture is prevalent. Even the way that the original Flarf Collective communicate, through email, is distinctly founded on the internet. This makes Flarf completely and fully rooted in the internet and that makes it particularly suited for the social commentary it provides. In perhaps a similar way that poetry and song-writing in the 1960’s provided society a mirror, Flarf is providing the internet a mirror in a form that can be taken seriously in literary circles and gives the internet a kind of legitimacy at the same time as showing its shortcomings as well. More importantly, it seems to be a warning against taking the internet too seriously and what might happen to a person through overexposure to internet culture’s negative influences.

In class response to "Carnival" by Steve McCaffery

In response to the first prompt, about the destruction of a book to create a panel, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the procedure described. Really, what is a book? If one takes clay and shapes it from a square to a rectangle, it is still clay. I find that the same would be true about this book, and about the physical manifestation about writing. If a word is written, but the letters are all out of place (for example, instead of helicopter if one wrote cpeltiorhe) then the word remains, however its meaning is lost. McCaffery's book is not about the meaning of the words though, but about their form, their structure, their letters or lack thereof. Therefore, I would say that one is not destroying the book, just changing its shape. To destroy the book, one would have to do something to the book that would make it impossible for a reader to understand the writer's intent or meaning in the work. It is interesting then that the author uses the word "destroy" in the directions. I think this means that the destruction is of the form "book", the sequential nature of the pages, not really of the idea "book".

Visual text

The Iron Whim and Carnival

In reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim, I couldn’t help but continuously think back to the first chapter in which he describes the destruction of a typewriter by throwing it out of a car window. He makes the point that in the destruction of an object (once it is trash) one can fully understand the meaning of that object as a cultural object. Essentially, he means to look at all the parts, rather than the whole. The collection of anecdotes that is in this book is a continuation on this theme. Wershler-Henry investigates each little snippet of a story about typewriters or writing machines and then the reader can make a whole meaning from that if they choose. I, for one, love this approach and don’t feel obliged to make a “whole meaning.” The interest in the details is enough for me and, to use a Foucaultian phrase that Wershler-Henry also employs, I would like to focus on the discourse. The freedom to ponder the little details is I think what the typewriter really is about. Each key is one letter, one little part of the whole. This means that one would have to throw a word out of a car at 90 miles per hour to understand the meaning of its construction and not just the meaning of the word in the language that it’s in. However, throwing a word out of a car is perhaps not as practical. The medium that the word is made in, for example: ink on paper, becomes the object that gets destroyed, not the word on it. This then leads to the question of how to destroy a word, which, to me, is answered by Steve McCaffery, in his work Carnival. There are two different panels, each from a different time period, that are essentially large canvasses covered in letters, sometimes whole words, that are constructed and destructed in progressions. However, the words are often arranged to form shapes, but, to me, look like the result of driving a car over the canvasses and throwing letters out onto it at 90 miles per hour. The strange shapes produced by the words are the work of the author and perhaps indicate at what time and in what succession McCaffery threw each word out. One of my favorite examples comes on the second panel when the word “flower” is written and then under it, the word “flow” appears and towards the bottom of the progression, simply an “f” and then the word “lower” slightly below it and to the right. Not only does one get a feeling for the word’s meaning in the language, there are other words with separate meanings within the word “flower” than can contribute to its construction and perhaps inform the reader of subtle nuances of meaning. More importantly, the reader notices the letters used to write the word and immediately begins to think of the actual manner in which those letters are produced: the typewriter, the whim of the writer.

Freewrite about Interface Culture

Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, states that the hypertext link is the first new form of punctuation in centuries. To me, and again this could be because of a lack of knowledge of written English, punctuation has a lot in common with grammar in that there are proper and improper uses of punctuation. However, because the hypertext link "lives" through the internet, it is difficult to understand exactly what would be correct grammar in its usage. Punctuation is also used to convey subtle tone in language as well as background information about the sentence or statement. In this sense, a hypertext link can offer background on whatever a person may be speaking about by linking to a page containing these previous ideas.

Baron Freewrite

Baron has several general stages that literacy technology goes through. First, he states that as a technology is developed, it is only used by a few people who are either the inventors of the technology or who want to hold to the knowledge either because of privilege or because it is unfamiliar to the general public or potentially because the technology is very expensive. Then, as knowledge of the technology spreads, the original or “priestly,” as Baron puts it, caste of holders of this technology become mediators between the common person and the technology itself. As further knowledge of the technology spreads, the common people start using the technology for themselves and eventually, as the knowledge base becomes broader and the technology becomes cheaper and more available, it is widely used and adopted. I think that these are very good general stages that can be widely applied to literacy technologies. For example, mechanical pencils were once a new invention, probably fairly expensive compared to regular pencils and only used by people who had access to them. I’m sure they were not sold everywhere. Gradually, as they became less expensive and more varieties came about, more people used them and now one can buy twenty mechanical pencils for a dollar. I think Ong would agree with these stages of technology. The web 2.0 technologies are a briliant example of these stages in that not only are more people willing to use the technologies because they are getting easier to use and to learn how to use, but people are also more willing to learn. This is especially true of computer programming, also.