Postcards from Another Planet

The Daily gets thousands of comments a day. Nearly all of them are spam. This should be annoying, and I suppose it can be. Problem is, I find myself captivated by our spam, so much so that I keep a running list of my favorite comments. As far as I know, they’re entirely computer generated: an algorithm hurls together bits of text from around the Internet, hoping to rustle up enough verisimilitude to trick our spam filter. The results are unduly captivating—they’re by turns ludic, cryptic, disquieting, emotional, and inadvertently profound. On many days they’re more interesting than the comments we receive from real people.

Here, for instance, is an automated comment from “geniadove”:

If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadove

That swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do.

Here’s another, from “getfave.com,” with the original spelling and punctuation preserved:

The Helmet Communicator is currently available in three different configurations - the HBC 100 Moto, the HBC 120 Snow, and the HBC 130 Bike. Nellie enjoyed playing bingo, going to the Caymans dead or alive. Cheap Sympathy Flowers can be ordered online, or by telephone, you must be a registereed menber and loggedd in. Mr Nicelli responded hat Mr. These memorial timber are planted by the name of the particular items and services you offer and where they can get tooo vague. Frankly, if they are willing to do violate the family’s privacy that way?

The best spam coalesces—with its typos, its competing voices, and its gloriously infelicitous phrasings—into a sort of nauseous goulash. Reading it is roughly akin to parsing the overlapping fragments of dialogue in a Robert Altman movie or sorting through the polyphony in certain works of high modernism: Gaddis’s J. R., maybe, or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson.

But there are a number of literary antecedents here: found poetry, Dadaist ready-mades, collage and bricolage, cutups, aleatoric poems, various Oulipo shenanigans. Most especially, there’s spoetry, spam lit, and flarf, similar movements from the past two decades that have made poetic hay from the Internet’s endless detritus. Flarf descends from Gary Sullivan, who collaborated with other poets online, constructing abhorrently bland poems from the results of random Google searches, workplace memos, Associated Press stories, and the like. (“awe yea You see, somebody’s done messed up / my latvian women’s soccer team fantasy REAL bad, / oh pagers make of cheese,” goes a representative sample.) As the flarfist Sharon Mesmer told Poets & Writers in 2009,

There’s this idea that juxtaposition creates a little pop in your mind to take you out of your immediate, mundane reality. When we do these crazy things with Google, a lot of times we’re putting something beautiful together with something ugly, and it makes this third thing that is completely delightful and unexpected.

And in 2008, the Guardian ran a piece on spam lit and its practitioners, especially Ben Myers and Lee Ranaldo, both of whom have published volumes of work derived from spam:

These instances of found poetry—often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty—seemed, in Myers’s words, like “scriptures from the future” or “postcards from another planet.” Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.

That sense of private discovery, of trespassing, is key to the somewhat vertiginous feeling you get from reading a quality piece of spam: you’ve gone past the edge of something, and you’re not supposed to be there, but there you are, enjoying the vista.

by Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Jay Ward Productions via: