Friday, January 11, 2013

I Spam; Yet Who I Spam None Cares or Knows...

I've always thought that spam is under-appreciated, and here is a website that agrees with me. The Spam Institute is dedicated to "preserving the fine literature created by the world's spammers".

The Message from the Director reads:

"I receive well over 100 e-mails each day in my home e-mail accounts. I was finding myself spending an increasing amount of time sifting through all of the messages, trying to determine which ones had value and which ones were junk.

As I was going through a batch of e-mails recently, wondering which I needed more – Viagra or a new home mortgage – I came upon this short, provocative treasure in my inbox:

dodecahedron, broach.
ingestion driven foolish!
burundi menagerie.

At that moment, I realized I had been unknowingly deleting some incredible literature!"

I totally agree. I rarely empty my spam folder without noticing at least one subject line that uses language in a strange, startling or mysterious way. Whether it's sentences that begin in media res and finish in thin air, or messages attempting to sell me sex-related products that resort to a more-than-Victorian euphemistic ingenuity in order to sail past the spam filter, I have to admit that the linguistic felicity of my spam puts my other messages to shame (including the ones I write and send myself).

If W.H. Auden was alive today, he would undoubtedly have written a long and ponderous Ode to Spam.

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