Most Beautiful

2 September 2007

Then, out of the blue comes the most beautiful spam subject line I’ve had in ages.

> i very want to find my love

Must use it as a title for something. It’s from one of those ‘I am biologically female, saw your profile on the internets, will be in your town soon and would like to meet you’ invitations, which I have been collecting for no particular reason. I think I’m attracted to it as a project (like some of mine) about endless variations-on-a-theme. Also the performance of not-writing-very-well. Or the genuine not-writing-very-well. Or the combination of the two.

*

A few things on the Nettime list recently that I liked reading. This interview by Jelle Bouwhuis with Norman Klein on the New Canon. A link by Olia Lialina to her article about Web Vernacular which led me, indirectly to this piece of hers from back in 1996, which I liked, called (I think) ‘My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone’. Very much a Donald Barthelme kind of title.  (Google Ads makes a very weird intervention on the first page of this work though, by pulling up random text-ads for anything to do with War – War Medals, War of the Worlds Tickets, Modern War Studies, Records from World War Two etc – hard to take against the minimalist aesthetic of the piece). Also on Nettime Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) pointing to this blog entry by Steve Shaviro reviewing William Gibson’s Spook Country. I wasn’t so keen on the book myself (I just finished it and liked Pattern Recognition rather better) but Shaviro makes an interesting case for it.