But internet-derived poetry like flarf by necessity must attract a more diverse crowd because it involves and includes more people. First, the program developers have to be interested, otherwise the programs wouldn’t exist.  Second, the fact that language is limited by what is already high on the Google hierarchy forces the language to be accessible because commercial and personal websites alike want to attract as many readers as possible, so the language should, in theory, be geared towards as broad an audience as possible (as opposed to the semantics of lyric poetry or the syntax of L=A=N=G… poetry).  Might a throng of prepubescent swooning teenage girls be excited by the idea that poetry is “allowed” to contain their latest evolution in chatspeak, might they be able to see poetry in a “kewl” light.  So then why do most poet-academics consider flarf poetry a bastard child that inherited the features of its mother with virtually none of her personality or substance? Because technology does not trump craft.  And it is perhaps the very notion that the internet can “generate” mainstream(ish) poetry that makes flarfists reluctant to do extensive revision which includes authorial voice, even if it is disguised as flarf in terms of language.  

Flarf poets are also reluctant to conjugate internet mining with authorial voice because it undermines the beauty of letting the search engine formulate what is most relevant in relation to the keyword hierarchy. “Hey Boo Boo,” shows that a majority of internet-users talk about brittle nails and vomiting in relation to the United States of America, but is the poem good illustrating anything deeper? I’d say no. These flarfists need to let go of the principles which weaken concerns about syntax, diction, and overall cohesion. The generated words need a human filter, a process that adds complexity and depth where cutting and pasting can’t because its mere luck and chance with the generator.  Much like a Dadaist method of creating poetry (i.e.: if one were to cut words and phrases out of a newspaper, rearrange them randomly on the floor, and use the exact results as a poem), flarf without extensive revision is mere trick with no personality or substance, like the bastard child. The output is by nature more coherent and useful when there is some kind of imagistic cohesion beyond keyword relevance, and I would argue that it serves more purpose by better provoking abstract thought in the reader. The poet individual connects with the internet collective and a fusion occurs—the successful flarf, a cyborg poem.

Anne Boyer’s flarf poem, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” I think, illustrates the qualities of a successful cyborg poem because its images cohere and there is obviously an authorial voice:

I’m an ardent feminist and often get in arguments.
I am spreading antibacterial Purell all over my keyboard

and throwing the plant, a little piece of apple,
toenail clippers and everything at the drive-thru window.

Lilith, who was the world’s first feminist, thought
I am doing the best I can. 

That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats
and sheep over rocky pastures invading your facial orifices.

A lot of people would probably not understand how a staunch feminist
could justify participants and many spectators dousing one another’s

glorious gaping anus baseballs with colored water in the mall
& a lot of people lacking only a clown with a flower and a bear on a tricycle

would not believe in a woman old enough to be retired
expressing milk out her eyelids.

But feminism is a righteous gift.

Being a student of écriture féminine
is much more specific than being the “Vagina Lady”

Women have the god-given ability to be as boy teen titans
or un-analyzable gilt casino ballooner haven treats.

The Great Cosmic Mother turns around.
Her hair looks like taco meat
and the truck stops

and everybody gets like a-when I get my mind is going
thats nmaybe vagina hunuhhh

I was thinking about it,
and then I remembered I was squirting glue on Jesus.

I blame the Matriarchy, mmm mmm mmmm.
Just lie to me and say it’s all right.

Whether the reader ascribes the “I” to Boyer or to a fictional persona is not as important as the fact that the first line gets straight to the point: we know the poem will be about feminism, and we know the voice/persona is abrasive. The text that is driven by internet mining manifests itself as fresh imagery, which helps to collectively define the individual experience of the persona. The images are bizarre and vibrant enough to be distinguished from Boyer’s embellishments if the reader can identify, or knows, that the poem is flarf. A lot of the poem loses, at first, its sense to rampant imagery. But upon close reading we can still connect those images to Boyer’s rather ironic look at feminism: the doused glorious gaping anus baseballs are a symbol for an act of exhibition that other uninvolved persons would question (say passersby at the mall who are neither dousing nor willing participants of the spectacle, but are so out of chance), and there is American symbolism in the baseball, as well the mall setting. 

The people lacking clowns with flowers and bears on tricycles while an old woman “expresses” milk out of her eyes can be unknotted as well. The clowns and bears are Boyer’s/Google’s euphemistic image for humor (i.e.: a lot of people are lacking a sense of humor about the act of exhibition), and the milk out of the woman’s eyes implies and is associated with motherhood (how else can a post-menopausal woman display her motherly urges but with emotion when her body has failed her?). The images that first seem nonsensically transplanted from Google actually function to enact the meaning of the poem through its freshness: I will remember the time Boyer’s poem-persona “squirts glue” on Jesus as she thinks about The Great Cosmic Mother over Mohammad’s infertile diction, hands down.

What is successful about Anne Boyer’s flarf poem in comparison to Mohammad’s “Hey Boo Boo” is that Boyer adheres to somewhat traditional notions of poetical form and houses her cyborg creation within it. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” is mostly written in couplets, giving it a real-poem feel that “Hey Boo Boo” and “Mm-Hmm” lack. Boyer’s flarfing could in no way have dictated all aspects of form even if she used Get a Google Poem’s couplet feature, because at closer inspection, there is a smattering of one-line and three-line stanzas that she would have had to manipulate herself, further defining an authorial consciousness already noticeable in the poem. The only one-line stanza, “But feminism is a righteous gift,” is a pivotal point in the poem because Boyer directly affronts the reader with a sarcasm that is present in the poem.  We already catch a bit of her sarcasm in the irony of her title in juxtaposition with Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” but in this moment we can for sure say Boyer is jesting. Think back to Mohammad’s cultural “Boo-Boo.” Whereas he hides his tiny little witticisms and criticisms in layers of meaningless internetese, Boyer entertains and challenges her reader with references to pop-culture throughout the poem, so there is no mistaking it. Mohammad may have Yogi Bear, but Boyer really makes use of her “glorious gaping anus baseballs.”

Very rarely does Anne Boyer use sloppy punctuation or syntax in “The Vindication of the Rights of Women.” In fact, there is only one time where she does, and it’s when she’s recreating a thought-process in the brain. This occurs in the second half of the poem where elements of feminism are assigned negative characteristics: The Great Cosmic Mother has hair like “taco meat,” “Vagina Lady” implies that feminist women by nature are defined by their less-than-elegant qualities, and when the poem-persona’s mind gets “going” thinking about feminism, it goes: “thats nmaybe vagina hunuhhh.” The reader is more apt to consider her deviations from the norm artful or purposely done because there is no over-abundance which might read like a lack of revision or like too much dictation by the internet.  Poems like “Mm-hmm” and “Hey Boo Boo” rely too heavily on their internet parent to sustain meaning and forgive strange typographical and syntactical deviations from the norm, and if that parent is ever removed from the context of the reader, it becomes harder to stand on its own. 

The lines, though they vary in length, are tighter and better contained than “Hey Boo Boo.”  By contained I mean that each line has an image or ideology that can stand for the most part on its own as fertile and unique. What is a more enacting first line, “1. the United States of America,” or “I’m an ardent feminist and often get in arguments”? What is a more provocative seventh line, “addled, foolish, stupid” or “That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats/ and sheep over rocky pastures”? Even if you are a male chauvinist with a total lack of concern for feminism, I think you would be hard-pressed to defend Mohammad’s linguistic choices if we consider its impact on the memory and its ability to render unique imagery even if we do cut Mohammad a break and try to read between the lines. After all, the internet is mammoth in breadth, he could have kept searching until he found language that was less of a dud.   

Boyer is a successful flarfist because she’s willing to concede or compromise with traditional notions of poetics. She might be giving up some of her basic freedom, but in the end Boyer is helping the greater good of flarf by showing nosebleed academics that the cyborg poem can be successful. And in order for flarf to exist, whether or not people continue to call it flarf, we need poets like Boyer. Moreso, I think the poets on the internet need to calm down and stop slurping up each others opinions just to regurgitate them onto their own blog (which is how I think flarf’s reputation came to be this way since it’s so internet-based). Its true flarf seems to attract poets of a lesser caliber than those who typically have their poems published in Poetry magazine, but I think that with a little compromise to tradition, flarf as process or constraint could be stripped of its amateurish reputation. But perhaps that involves stripping off the “flarf” label and redesigning it so it appeals to the more stuffy people who run this joint.  

The conduct of and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrivied at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathering from books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilites and virtues exact respect.
/- - -/
Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of streangth, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire. Let men become more chaste and modest, and if women do not grow wiser in the same ratio it will be clear that they have weaker understandings. It seems scarcely necessary to say that I now speak of the sex in general. Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and, as nothing preponderates where there is a constant struggle for an equilibrium without it has naturally more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will allways govern.
(Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)

(Photo by comatosed)

Spending most of my undergraduate days either writing essays on the fallacy of the notion of "Asian Values," or trying to pick up women at Amnesty International by joining their protests about them, then I completely disagree with Peter's culturally-relativist sentiments that it's inapproprite to judge this from his own US world-view. I do think that being a housewife is a waste of an intelligent woman's abilities, particularly after 10+ years of career in a field that they enjoy, but notice that I didn't say "raising children," because yes, despite what I just said, my own wife is also a housewife and mother.

Why the contradiction? Well, we've decided that with the expense and widespread concerns over standards of childcare in Korea that this is best for our daughter (and our next child), but from what we've learned about childcare availability in Australia or New Zealand, then she would definitely work again if we lived there (which is...ahem...all I can really say about that online). Despite the boredom of being at home all day, she loves raising Alice of course (although it certainly helps that I'm doing much of it until I go to work at 1pm every day), and I'm reminded of a decade-old column I read in the New Zealand Herald about childless, soon-to-be (then) prime minister Helen Clark's visions for childcare, which according to the columnist were based on an assumption that more women wanted to work but inadequate childcare facilities were the only reason preventing them from doing so, which the columnist, who was a mother, argued wasn't quite the case. Somewhere in my possession I also have an Economist magazine article from 2000 or so that argued that the concept of going off to work and handing your children to complete strangers for the day was a recent anthropological oddity and hardly natural, and that thus, however cliched it sounds, "reconciling women's roles as mothers and workers is one of the prime concerns of our age."

I will try to find both articles if anyone wants to know more. In the meantime, I recommend you read this and then this article on the related subject of evolutionary psychology from Time magazine, both of which had a great influence on me at the time, and which briefly discuss the "naturalness" of modern-day childcare arrangements in passing (on pages 2 and 4 respectively). And if you haven't seen it, then Mona Lisa Smile is a great movie dealing with all the themes above. It's set in 1953, and if accurate, shows an environment clearly ripe for Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970. I haven't read it, but I've heard that it discusses "Housewives Syndrome," a term used by family doctors in the 1950s and 1960s to describe the physchological and physiological problems many women were developing because all they were expected to do with their university educations was cook, look after children, and clean the house for the remainder of their lives.

But despite all that, regular readers will not be surprised to find that I still think that the expansion and increased availability of childcare is by no means the only, but still the best route for the advancement of women in Korean society at the moment. To take a leaf from the 18th Century "Mother of Feminism" Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, where she counters arguments that women are inherently mentally inferior to men by pointing out that such comparisons couldn't be made until women received the same education as men, I'll accept that women instinctively want to stay home and only be mothers only once they have all options available to them. Until then, gynocentric feminists can just STFU.

But all this is not going to happen without the political will in Korea. So far on the blog, I've repeatedly mentioned that it is because of this lack that legislation is not enforced, but in hindsight discussions of where it is supposed to come from have been suspiciously absent. Maybe it's because it obviously must come from Korean women themselves, whom I am not imposing my own worldview on when I say that intelligent and ambitious women happily giving their careers up upon marriage is wrong, self-defeating and basically, just, well...pisses me off.

That may sound too strong, even for a geek like me, but placed in the context of my Korean female friend that complains that Korean men refuse to wear condoms, to which I reply that I'm pretty certain that most Western guys pretended to be happy to suit up only once they were given the option of doing that or not getting laid...do Korean women really need to be told to demand the same? Then there's the Korean female friends with great bodies who just whine that they're fat all the time: they'll dutifully nod at my pointing out how healthy andattractive they are, but will still starve themselves at their next meal. Naturally I just loved having my opinions so completely ignored, one reason why I'm not friends with anyone like that anymore.

(On a side note, unless the recipient is clearly anorexic, then literally telling a woman that she looks healthy in Korean "넌 건강에 좋아보여요" or "You-health-goodlook," actually means "You look fat". What is wrong with this place??!)

Regardless of how universally applicable the points in my rant are, a fellow blogger has pointed out to me that there is no greater indictment of a society than its members' refusal to continue it, and I'm concerned that once my daughter starts school here then she too will indirectly learn there that it's possible for a women to have a career, or to have children, but unreasonable to expect to have both. Needless to say, most Korean and Japanese women are choosing the former, and the results speak for themselves:

(Photo by ichico)

New Adults Fewer Than Ever

The number of people who reached the legal age of adulthood was only 1.35 million last year, which is the lowest number on record and 40,000 less than the previous year, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said Monday.

The announcement came on the national holiday Coming-of-Age Day, held annually on the second Monday of January, as most new adults participate in Coming-of-Age ceremonies, women traditionally in expensive "furisode" kimonos and men in suits or dark kimonos with hakama.

Of the new adults, 690,000 are men and 660,000 are women, according to a Kyodo News report. Percentage wise, the new adults constitute 1.06 percent of the total population, which is down 0.03 points since the previous year.

The legal age of adulthood is 20 in Japan.

The previous record low, 1.36 million new adults, was recorded in 1987.

Thanks to Edward Chmura, again at Japundit, for bringing that article to my attention. Finally, here is some still woefully inadequate, but rare encouraging news from the Korean Times on the Lee Myung-bak's Administration's measures for dealing with the low birthrate in Korea:

Home Buying to Become Easier for Newlyweds

Newlyweds may see themselves a step closer to becoming homeowners by the year's end, as President-elect Lee Myung-bak and his transition team is actively reviewing the ins and outs of his proposed housing policy for just-married couples. The policy is to take effect in the second half of 2008.

The Ministry of Construction and Transportation said Monday that the modified housing system is set to allow married couples of less than three years, who successfully pay monthly installments of 50,000 to 100,000 won into a housing savings fund, to get long-term home financing with low interest rates. However, couples must take the benefit within a year of having their first child.

The plan, which was one of Lee's flagship campaign pledges, has been welcomed by young couples as buying a home in Korea is widely known as a cost-burdening and time consuming, but a must-do task for married couples.

A recent Kookmin Bank survey said that the average period it took for a couple to buy their own house after marriage was around 9.4 years, up two years since 2005, as local home prices have consistently been on the rise. Therefore, the initiative of the president-in-waiting is seen as a springboard for financially weak, just-starting couples.

The ministry said that the incoming government has plans to inject 4.1 trillion won to supply homes for the low-income newlyweds. It forecasts that the fresh policy will feed about 120,000 homes, each less than 80 square meters, into the market.

It added that the transition team is considering expanding the system to those who are eligible, but are already paying into a housing savings fund, to enjoy the same benefits.

Earlier, the president-elect said the reformed policy was ultimately drawn to encourage young couples from having more kids, as many are known to refrain from giving birth to a second child due to financial instability, including not owning a house.

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