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When spam metamorphoses into literature…

… or the dada poem that tricked your junk mail filter.

Today's spam filters can be taught to block messages containing specific words most likely to appear in the subject line or body. As a response, the spammers sometimes combine, distort or switch the content of message body and its subject line. This produces a virtual infinite range of unique messages that, every now and then, can carry an (involuntary) literary potential.

 

For instance, let's assume a spammer has several text sources as pools for the message's body and subject line creation. In our automated era, all he needs to do is to create a script that picks a phrase from a pool, another phrase from another pool, and so on. You can see the result below:

 

Although you might think this is our times' invention, it actually dates at the beginning of the past century and belongs to an artistic group called Dada. The avant-garde movement that emerged in Zurich right at the outbreak of World War I, openly professed the text cut-up and word collage technique. Tristan Tzara, one of the Dada founders, included in one manifesto specific instructions on how "To Make A Dadaist Poem", which, you guessed, details exactly the practice the spammers employ today in a more technical manner.

 

But unlike their genuine literary precursors (that you can read in an online facsimile edition of Dada Review), the contemporary "dada-spammers" are nothing than just some unintentional epigones whose main contribution to the humanity is to trick the spam filters. Of course, in addition to their (unmerited, in my opinion) credits for "writing" poetry or, if you prefer, "spoetry" (the term Eva Wiseman uses to designate these texts in her article "An introduction to spoetry").

 

As the filters' detection methods recognize common words, "dada-spammers" deviated towards rare, obsolete and sometimes metaphorical vocabulary, more difficult to be classified as pertaining to spam. With no intertextual effect in mind, "dada-spammers" no longer turned their attention towards the newspaper that Tzara mentioned in his manifesto, but to passages from classic authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens or Hemingway they automatically extracted from Web sites offering literary content, such as Project Gutenberg^TM, as revealed here.

 

In spite of the possible indirect "cultural benefit" - that some recipients could lay their hands (and eyes) on volumes they haven't got the chance to read by now - the obvious detriments are spam and occasionally... bad literature.

 

To conclude, I can only suggest that you follow as a golden rule the passage I bolded in the three Tzara's verses I quoted below:

 

"Little cousin, boarding school girl, dressed in black, white collar,

I love you because you are simple and you dream

And you are kind, you cry, you tear up letters that have no meaning".

 

Post Scriptum 1: For those of you that enjoyed the idea of mixing content from text pools, maybe you would also like to try and play / read some of Raymond Queneau's works, available online. The founder of the early ‘60s OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which could be approximated into "workshop of potential literature") has a delightful poetry work called Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) and a wonderful Story of Three Peas.

 

Post Scriptum 2: There is, however, a spam-based or spam derived literature which resembles Dadaism and the following Surrealists too. See, for instance, the electronic edition of Morton Hurley's Anthology of Spam Poetry.