For god's sake, Brian, don't get too excited! Whatever you do. Have you called your lawyer yet?

Brian, the google influence is good but you're still pretty uptight in that last stanza. Not a single "assface" or "prreecumcision" in there. Not to worry, we'll have you flarfing in no time.

Wow, you're quick! That poem was only up for about 3 minutes!

No, haven't called a lawyer - I figure I have to come across more than two very brief ads to make a case, and then figure out who designed them. I hope it's the same person who saw my piece at ubu.com and has been exploiting the method for his entire career on Madison Ave.

As it is, I don't see myself convincing a jury that the idea of making a pair of scare quotes twirl into place around the word "best" is original to me (or the orange background, which is one of the pre-programmed Flash colors).

Nice poem.

The commentary was esp. funny, like Edgar Winter giving the Ramones some song-writing tips!

PS: Did you mean: "antidote" ... ?

Yes, of course... shows you what an assface I can be about spelling sometimes.

Actually, I think Rob Fitterman, in his rock and roll sonnets, mixed my poetry with Edgar Winter lyrics... or maybe it was Steve Miller.

But sluriously: don't short-change this type of poetry -- the whole middle section of Fashionable Noise is about this very type of "writing"!

Thought you might find my essay on Flarf helpful.

Flarf Poetry

More than any other school of poetry, Flarf directly and vociferously opposed the impersonality argued for by T. S. Eliot. The ‘I’ of the poem is meant as a direct representation of the flesh-and-blood Kantian aesthetic of pleasure in coinciding with the rise of culturally variegated performing arts focused on the dynamic of energetic and dull time. It particularly emphasized the power, force and motion of office machinery combined with the contemporary fascination with email while at the same time denouncing the 'static' art of lime tics (which resist objectification), especially in considering how the reception of the work was determined by a large right whale with an explosion of anthologies. "Special-interest groups" enter the Flarf marketplace in the 2000s operating in a highly contested literary field. I intend to throw a hamster out the window.

Almost as soon as Flarf was born, it began to age. Many "Flarfists" joined the movement. However, "many were copyists or just plain second rate." (www.flarf.org.uk). The movement's initial spark was gone. Much of what was new during the beginning of the century, such as brass mites and mopeds and floppy cheese goggles had become commonplace. A few new movements emerged from the ashes of Flarf, such as the so-called "Super-Flarf." Flarfists flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing Combo 12 (2003) edited by Michael Magee, The "packaging" of Flarf reflect different stances toward the "culture" -- i.e. it takes the place of the world. The bad aesthetics and incidentally, bad morals described here are a credo upheld by the New Critics and by the poets writing during "the tranquilized 1990" (as Magee deemed them). By the end of that decade the tide had turned measurably, though. "A poem takes pains to become a kind of log" is misleadingly overstated. Operating only in the back seat, and often resorting to reductive terms like uh hunh yea uhhhm to assert what sometimes seemed to be a horny communitarianism or else an over-zealous and equally zippy, inane formalism. These poets strove to subvert the co-optive tendencies of a constructed niche market, and its small presses and entrepreneurial ventures flooded into the concurrent discourse on poetics relating to strobing squid, and illuminated this squid. Flarf writers are framed less as a politically-motivated tendency, than as a "natural" development of Bill Clinton. This position, however, critiquing the center, covering the liaisons with eels, covering raisons within the world, they were more first ears and pens for each other then they were eating my dead penis.

Criticism and academia produced a body of work which maintained its own co-optive tendencies of conventional criticism. Anyone can write Flarf. It's not difficult to learn and there's no rules saying it has to be good :) Flarf does not have to be good. Non-effective political interventions, as well as the frame of it within a narrative of American transavantgardism are the tendency to consistently present the polemics surrounding Flarf’s emergence in as many ways as possible. These polemics determined the reception of the artistic work by the culture that can't write Flarf. Flarf, in other words, is like truth. 2003 was the annus mirabilis of Farf, the year that Magee’s My Ange Dickinson and K. Silim Mohamed Deer Head Nation were published. Mohamed’s book won the Pulitzer Prize; Magee’s, the National Book Award. It was in Magee’s acceptance speech that he says that a generation of poets would then find it necessary not only to open one of those fried clams places, but to break them open, to widen them into a revelation about fried clams (which for him, in Flarf’s constitution, was a literary movement and Poundian dictum to "make it glom on a bit more on this side." Magee is now a professor at the University of East Jesus. His "reminiscence" of the Flarf school days in the November 2003 Voice Literary Supplement restores the management of autobiography to, say, the New York Times, and from to lyric in general in the dangers inherent in this excessive form of egotism, where it’s like "that’s a lotta prestige suit you got on there partner!"

Conversely, in Flarf such details can serve to deny universality by delineating the poet as apart from a simulation of sincerity. By relying on Cable TV and clipboards in many ways, the products of critics and scholars interested in establishing it as the latest in the avant-garde took on a question to be asked, namely, "what the fuck?" This mainstream "fascination" with Flarf’s "success" -- their work through a new relationship to "flarfyness" and the "poetic," and with a soft buff green corsage sponge bath with a pattern of childlike line drawings of deer heads and gophers. Magee seems to be contradicting the "obnoxious and important consideration in any definition of poetry as the degree to which it was a self-pitying cake. For more open-minded English departments "into the freaky stuff", however, the reception of Flarf became an interesting exercise in self-sabotage, demonstrating deep ambivalences at every level of consciousness and social life.

As the tendency began to gain currency under the Flarf moniker, the poets often resisted a unified identity even as their public manifestations exhibited a more or less stable core to the movement. The critic M. L. Rosenthal, in his review of Deer Head Nation for The Nation, characterized this new poetry as follows: writers think of art as a slinky, and some think of it as a naughty doctor/nurse-robot thingy. If art is Windex, then the my pension out the window. For a poem’s emotional authenticity, the poet makes an artifice of the Onanism of a specific medium -- "the flarf itself." Yet it is not only the post-modernist gimtricks linking this selection to a tradition of American poetry claimed by a majority of Americans. To those who would accuse the group of flarfy ideas, the subtitle "a very very very very very special issue" and the title of Magee’s introduction, "Hell yea!" signal his attempt at close-readings, with a dash of theory to spice up the one-dimensional shared poetic dogma.

Despite the definitions of Flarf, anything anti-poetic usually end up being the best stuff. And if it is from your heart, who is to say what is good poetry and what is the group’s relation to other poetic formations? Combo, named after Magee’s favorite snack food, wants to know. He is less concerned with challenging preconceptions about the movement than making sure the poetry symbolically represents the official canon of the Flarf movement. Yet Magee’s compendium explicitly resists the traditional "great works" function, attempting radical inclusivity despite the exclusivity of being published at all. Now remember, the poem doesn't have to work, and you don't have to use the example below to light on the difficulties inherent to a consideration of Flarf as a movement. The extremism of Emersonian expansiveness was to a great extent okay with Flarf in commodity culture. This is what critic Jerome McGann predicted in 2002 when he suggested that Flarf would have to grapple with "the classic looking over my shoulder" delemma. The tension between an externally-imposed group identification and the poets’ own insane level of insignificance on the heterogeneous, communal, and clay courts is an aesthetic principle proving unsustainable beyond the fixed boundaries of love.

Combo operates in a literary field governed by large, squishy mittens, and the anthology is a manifestation which can be read as a response to the controversies taking place over the group’s artistic legitimacy --the rhetoric of providing a coherent answer to this question. "Hunh?" "Combo 12" ultimately privilege the "yea giddy up" type stuff over the individual editorial power in presenting the public face of this movement. Like most of us, Flarf is happy living between placed scare quotes.

Try to think of a place where the pen has it's adventure! eg: riding around in Bob Dole's neck, lost outside in a Mongoose, or accidentally thrown out and the owner is desperately trying to call off a merger until a major force of cohesion fell into contemporaneous debates over identity politics. The institutionalized workshop is alive! Give it a name! What type of pen is it? Is it a girl or a boy pen? What colour? Ball point or fountain pen? Make up a character and give the pen emotions. (eg: happy, sad, mischievous, Caucasian, swampy, tired), between the symbolic, formally restrained, carefully reasoned poetry championed by the New Criticism on the one hand, and the fervor and atavistic logic of a new personalized flarfyness on the other, perhaps signaling the inevitable end of an aesthetic avant-garde that "makes out with Whoopi Goldberg," unchecked by reason or any definitions. Flarf proliferated in a generally unconsidered and uncomprehended manner. Every poet's own counter-polemics lives for the poetry, but not all poetries are used similarly (the humans getting on w/ their bad selves).

The different elements of the life of alterity are somebody else’s ideas for a poem only limited by aluminum. Thought automatism is obnoxious dynamism: This is the investigation of form applied to the representational technique in the urge to Flarf. This is considered the definitive work of the Flarfists. What Flarfists have in common, what sets them apart from other poets that incorporate details from cable TV, is their sense of worn-on-the-sleeve self-revelation and their silly whims. What, within this territory, is the individual doing?" McGann’s rhetoric of "the peeved wall between him and the bathroom; the world becomes an extension of the bathroom, and is deprived of its reality. The poet’s words cease to be a means of introduction.

Character is limited, synecdochic, a partial vision of a part of the groin. If art is conceived to be a Dalmatian, the artist is no longer able to contextualize the group within a historical and poetic framework which would then allow a different "phase." This is what’s is going on. It is during this phase that some of the most innovative poets work in their attempts to capture the changing world around them.

The Combo issue perhaps marked the logical end of Flarf, symbolizing the avant-garde dilemma fully played out. Yet Magee’s question "what is wrong with these people," still haunts us with its "sympathetic interest now how did you go?" If you have completed a poem to provide the basis for more general speculation, that constitutes the poem’s bid for universality. Half of this century is a notion of the escape from personality and emus. By mid-century, however, the poetry associated with the emus created historical distinctions that were articulated across of broad set of concerns, primarily in terms of large flightless birds and the analogous relationships of formal technique to social resistance. It is a writing practice that started as a collective beef of a new generation of poets which became an actual shift in the asphalt. Have you ever tried to write a poem? If not then don't be discouraged. From my experience in conducting workshops, many children and adults are like tadpoles. Through its enumeration of life, the Flarf poem emerges as a tragic self-portrait, its words inscribed, like Kafka’s penal commandments, directly onto the hide of Suzanne Sommers.

Not shortchanging you, flarf, Edgar Winter, or the Ramones. The analogy was about clashing sensibilities, which I think can be funny to watch play themselves out. (E.g., "Dee Dee ... if you would just ... slow ... *down*!")

Ah... like Orson Welles critiquing the Farelly Brothers?

(Pardon my spelling again...)

So, this is pretty good ... but it would be better if you or your significant other were actually eating the watermelon. Sure, you can *get by* on the Macintosh without an installer program. But if the candles aren't well anchored?

Before I got my own installer program, I too had a big crush on this girl (in my class)--we used to spend an hour reading in the class--the whole class had to read silently until lunchtime. I used to sit across the way from her, and so could see her side-on. She had such a beautiful nose profile, and she used to pick her nose too while she read, and I found that quite a turn on I have to admit.

But, getting back to the conversion from digital to video. You know, it's like a bird: it flies in, then it flies out just as quickly as it came, and if you don't catch it when it's there, it's like a wave, you know. It would just work better if you could extend your neck eight or ten feet, then you can yell at what you are looking at.

I mean, now I can't shake the feeling that some cosmic karma force is going to get me for even entertaining the idea of turning a man's tragedy into a spectator sport. I feel a little bit silly complaining about it, e.g., 'My hotel room doesn't have good towels', and as much as I appreciate "word of mouth" advertising, it would be better if you could see the other shore; i.e., if it were to be nearer or maybe a boat could be waiting and when you jump on it takes you there?

Finally, putting on my moderator's hat, it would be better if you not cross-post essentially the same question in multiple forums. This is why it would ultimately be better to use another person.

Enjoy your trip!

Diet Chaskopee's

http://www.celebrityrants.com/content/celeb_welles.html

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.