Author Archives: oook

Another new genre?

uncharacteristically bacteria
He between disembowel
He yourselves causate
chiropractor untie
Go millard my distraught

I’ve been continuing to grab spam subject line text, but I’ve just discovered a NEW possibility that seems to unlock a Joycean reservoir of litrachur in a genre I didn’t even know existed, and can’t imagine how it’s generated. W&L’s new spam filter lets you see the content(s) of a spamunit before you discard it. Here’s one:

but??voice, van corked the bottle at a blow, threw down the corkscrew, spells hard, fussy words, like chi-rog-ra-phy and bron-chi-tis as their favorite nourishment is the seed-cake; apples also are freely
but but by train. nowadays there are fewer trains and henry, a: could you tell her to give doug a call when she gets back???the instant she saw him she felt that there was no hope, for she
the instant she saw him she felt that there was no hope, for she??and rose began to cuddle it in the fond, foolish way women have ‘i don’t worry about sat looking at the friendly words, as they took a new meaning, and
from the doctor to “hold the lamp a little higher, please,” or an “oh, put basin, sponge, towels, and a block of brown soap into my hands, eyes with her hand, and took a long look at a figure down in the??by storm, and held her position, in spite of doctors, matron, and
“i saw her going down the avenue??him that his dear mistress was coming back on the following saturday. “we’ll remember, mother!” and drift along blindly. watch and pray, dear nat; and while your hand
twice round the triangle without stopping, a star for emil, who “yes, dear, that is the true can never be the polished gentleman that my poor departed friend, ball,” proposed audacious molly loo, always ready for fun.??f: where
then, as she vanished,??”she will wait and wait, mother, so dazzled by the brilliancy and beauty that has suddenly of years gone by, and put up a splendid procession of ladies
another with every aggravation they could invent, as they and passion. to regard them as soberly as the enthusiastic mamma did. and??flash:??gods, and i will try to like yours,’ said bess, beginning time is 8:45.
henceforth.” wrathful, &c. none of the stories are precisely those of aesop, last, “and that is to return to the nome king and oblige him world.??whose kind old heart was full of sympathy, which he longed
“i do not know,” said the head; “but last, for the mirror had plainly told her that she was ‘a don’t expect perfection, but i should like one as good as model, and let us see you,” said her uncle, with an approving??voyage. it was a very different story from the written one;??half-fierce, half-imploring eyes of a wild animal caught in
those who had missed so great a blessing. to get upset about. were continually dodging his long arms

I’d have thought it was nowt but fluke, but then along comesd another:

Tackled, adjunct design challenges howeverby andrew binstock principal analyst. Goodies xceed suite theme med. Esc selects button press tab taskbar, shiftf context.
Hard there included shows preview, selective possible. Openmp set interfaces greatly simplifies. Policy copy, pty ltd rights.
Maximize close windowalt, althyphen.
Which of the, current.
Link featured netjava unified voice messaging powerco.
Formats supported, quicktime avi mjpeg mpeg!
Optimized ear drum rocking.
Deari know they thinking clear, huge change.
Filterkeys num, lock togglekeys offleft altleft shiftnum mousekeys? Planni study animation company demand solutio.
Collapses expanded otherwise childleft parentback property tabsback. Regular dosage, two, grains!
Up to ussubmit, policyrss with, usapc back issues may.
Tutorials sitemap hot, alliances submit, job. Reserved keyboard shortcuts, homeselect.

What interests me here is that these texts don’t mean nothing, indeed may really mean something if one has the Magic Decoder Ring. I continue to await developments, and hope others can shed some light on What It All Means.

Another from Open Source

Gardner and Alice, and Bryan too, know vastly more about film than I do, and so might find the recent Open Source program with Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes less entrancing than I did, but I was pretty continuously bugeyed by what I heard. The mp3 was the soundtrack to a brisk morning walk in which I seemed to see a photograph every few strides (and the camera at home on the kitchen table), but perhaps my reaction was a function of all that seaside oxygen. Clearly I hafta get my hands on the documentary, yclept The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema. These outtakes from the conversation may convey some of what riveted me:

choosing fiction over reality: The Matrix (0:40)
the true mystery of cinema (0:33)
Žižek on freedom (1:08)
Fiennes on psychic transvestitism (0:30)
Žižek on 300 (1:05)

Joshua Bell plays the Metro

I don’t know how long this Washington Post story will stay accessible, but MAKE time to read it, or at least skim through, before They pull it. Here’s the deal: famous violinist busks in the DC Metro, playing incredible music incredibly well on a damn Strad, and most of Boobus Americanus doesn’t even turn a head, let alone slow down to listen. Tsk.

There’s even a couple minutes of video, in 3 segments.

DON’T miss it. (via waxy.org)

free-form spam subject-line poetry, redux

Gardner’s What poetry form am I? pointer has led me to thinking about realms of the poetic, not generally something I do much of. I discover that I’m beyond simple vexation with spam, on the Other Side of simple vexation, where I start to perceive the glory in the medium of the spam subject line. Nick, over at Voice 0’Reason, has been on this case for a while, and I’ve been inspired (in great admiration for his efforts) to start harvesting the stuff myself. Today’s haul has pushed me over the edge, into what I fear may become a recurring obsession:

To myself watchmen
on epistemology my byroad
was cerebellum many wherein
It everything tutorial
It augment ourselves proviso
shut about-face
Is posterity untill dearth

One could argue for different ordering of the lines, adding punctuation, or executing edits (‘untill’ is just too poeticall, isn’t it?), but I’m for letting it stand as it falls, and Devil take the hindmost. What we have here is a new genre, and it calleth forth Utilities to support its gleaning and promulgation (a metric analyzer, for those who would have anapests and the like; a random combo generator to burrow through the corpus; a grand Corpus for the combo generator to work upon; usw…).

On the epiphanic

I was walking briskly down toward Port Clyde, listening to Chris Lydon talking with Sonny Rollins, and reflecting on reflecting (we seem to be very reflexive today at #312; has to do with reading a few pages of Calvino with the first morning coffee), and the word ‘epiphanic’ slid into the foreground as I was listening to a bit of St. Thomas. Ah, I thought, that’s it, that’s the word that epitomises the frisson of Recognition, the instant of grokkage, one of the states of mind I love most. So first some delicious trivia:

From Greek epiphaneia, manifestation; and from epiphainesthai, to appear.

An epiphany is a sudden shift of perspective or flash of intuition that opens one to a greater or more subtle understanding. “Epiphanic” describes something or somewhere that is full of epiphany.

and from morewords.com:
epiphanic is a valid word in this word list. For a definition, see the external dictionary links below.

The word “epiphanic” uses 9 letters: A C E H I I N P P.

No direct anagrams for epiphanic found in this word list.

Adding one letter to epiphanic does not form any other word in this word list.

Words formed when one letter is changed in epiphanic

No words found when changing letter 1 (E)
No words found when changing letter 2 (P)
No words found when changing letter 3 (I)
No words found when changing letter 4 (P)
No words found when changing letter 5 (H)
No words found when changing letter 6 (A)
No words found when changing letter 7 (N)
No words found when changing letter 8 (I)
No words found when changing letter 9 (C)
Sorry, no words at all (in this word list) can be found by changing one letter in epiphanic.

So ‘epiphanic’ is a lexical dead end, sort of. But the Googly fun doesn’t stop there. I found this lovely wrang-wrang on the subject, at hypermedia joyce studies:

Joyce’s epiphanies and the accounts of the epiphany he stages in his work, lack claritas. They leave us wondering what exactly an epiphany is. While we may be able to separate the epiphany off from the conceptual void or plenitude, and appreciate it as a conceptual complex in itself, its final harmony or whatness eludes us. The set-piece presentations of the theory, in Stephen Hero and Portrait, signally fail to work as epiphanies of the epiphany, while taking their place no doubt in the relation of part to part, in reading as an exercise in consonantia.

Ouch. It goes on from there…

But back to Sonny Rollins, and Chris Lydon. Even when I find the guest(s) annoying (Camille Paglia, or the acolytes of Hannah Arendt for instance), it’s all so conversational and unrehearsed, and there’s a freshness to what Chris is doing. It’s good for me to find out something about stuff that I wasn’t paying attention to, and didn’t know I was interested in. Tubas, for instance.

Here are some especially succulent bits from the Sonny Rollins conversation. You have to slow yourself down a bit to get the full benefit of the wisdom in what Sonny is saying, and not-saying (some stuff is just hard to talk about in words…). The whole interview is really a gem, and these outtakes are just a few that especially grabbed me:

St. Thomas: origins and DRM (1:20)

playing with Bud Powell (1:29)

what do you think about when you solo? (1:11)

all of the above (1:14)

1958: how ironic (1:32)

listening to myself is an ordeal (1:16)

with Sonny Stitt, and about others he’s played with (3:06)

act on it (1:33)

links for 2007-04-08