4-22-2009.
Man, it’s been a long time. The last time I posted, I had just turned thirty; now I’m more than halfway to thirty-one. Apologies if you’ve come by recently in search of new content.
My excuse is that I’ve been hard at work on a new book. The good news is…it’s in. The bad news is that I can’t tell you anything about it; can’t tell you the title or the release date. I’m still awaiting my editor’s comments. Depending on how she reacts, you’ll either see it in the stores sooner…or later. I’ll keep you posted.
Anyhow, that’s not the subject of this note. Instead I’m going to write about something near and dear to my heart, something we all deal with on a daily basis, something I spend a good deal thinking about. I speak, of course, of spam.
I first became interested in spam back in 2001, when I traded in my college e-mail address for a regular old Verizon account. Until then I’d been sheltered by Harvard’s powerful filters, which meant that I got little to no spam at all. It came as something of a shock to discover what the real world was like. (The same can be said for many a student who departs the comforting bosom of Alma Mater.) All of a sudden the majority of my e-mail came from people I’d never heard of, who didn’t seem to care if they were coherent or not, people with the unlikeliest monikers: Propellorhead Johnson and Lolita Zapata. I wondered who all these people were, how they’d gotten my e-mail address, and why they all seemed to think that I direly needed male enhancement pills.
My then-roommate and I took great delight in sending each some of the more creative offers that showed up in our inboxes, often explicating their content with commentary of our own. One particularly enjoyable exchanged involved an e-mail whose subject heading was “BREAK DOWN WALLS WITH YOUR HUGESHAFT,” which my friend sent to me along with the note, “In case you want to do some remodeling.” Then ensued a spirited discussion of how big one’s genitals would have to be in order to do actual structural work, along with speculation as to the attendant difficulties of having such an incredibly large organ: could one still fly coach? What kind of car would best accommodate said shaft? A convertible? A Hummer? More to the point, granted that a huge shaft could take care of bigger demo jobs, but what about fine inlay or tile work? Would one have to keep a smaller shaft in reserve to do things like shaping kitchen countertops? One got the sense that the people selling this product hadn’t completely thought through the practical implications—not to mention medical consequences—of being forced to constantly tote around a huge shaft.
The bulk of the spam I received back then tended to harp on this point, and at first I took this as something of an affront, but I soon came to realize that spam reflects the culture that produces it, and as such follows trends. When the country was the flush with cash (seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?), and consicuous consumption was the watchword, spam offered me status symbols on the cheap (Rolex watches, designer handbags). When the economy started to tank, my inbox filled up with offers for decreased mortgage payments. I’ve come to believe that observing the way the spam tide flows is a quick, crude, and brutal way to pinpoint our deepest national anxieties.
(Note: offers for penis enlargement pills keep on coming, the steady backbeat over which other kinds of spam get their turn to solo. I suppose that men’s fear of inadequacy is a constant.)
I’m not the first to suggest this idea, nor am I the first to point out that spam, with its computer-generated text, often inadvertantly approaches a kind of lyricism. Type “spam poetry” into Google and you’ll get about 35,000 hits. I did this today, then clicked the first link that came up—this site, which is pretty darned fantastic. The author of the site, someone named kristin, has taken fragments of junk mail that she has received, and stitched them together to create an entirely new species of poetry. The entries range from hilarious to strangely moving, and I highly recommend stopping your work to read the entire site.
There’s a lesson here, I think. Kristin, whoever she is, has made the effort to reorganize the raw spam-text in funny or intelligent ways; it is that act of reorganization that makes what she’s doing compelling. She’s using what the art world calls “found objects.” In this case, the objects are words, and she found them in her inbox. But what becomes of those objects when a human intelligence processes them is kind of extraordinary.
By way of contrast, check out the second link that comes up when you Google “spam poetry": the Spam Poetry Institute, an…uhm…organization?...whose stated mission is “collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world’s spammers.” The SPI also excerpts and displays bits o’ spam, but unlike kristin’s site, here the material is presented in its unaltered form. The poems are interesting in their own right, although—as you might expect—substantially less coherent and directed than what you find at www.spam-poetry.com. I admire them as well, for different reasons: it’s kind of similar to the difference between a painting of a sunset and the sunset itself.
Well, maybe not. Whatever. The point is that spam is a literary gold mine, and that we as readers and writers are ill-advised to ignore what, in my humble opinion, is clearly the way to the future.
Perhaps if my new book doesn’t go over well with the publisher I’ll resubmit an entire novel drawn solely from the junk that shows up in my inbox. Isn’t that what green-chic is all about? Reduce, reuse, recycle. And I am nothing if not green.
If I have one real problem with spam, it’s that it sometimes causes letters from actual human beings to get caught up in my mail client’s filter. Things get especially problematic if you’ve got a strange name, if you leave out a subject heading, or if your style of writing is particularly terse. The computer seems to want to protect me from people whose only comment to me is, “Good book.” (Or, “Bad book.” Although frankly, I’m happy to let those go unread.) The moral of the story here is, if you’re going to write to me, please be specific, use my name (“Dear Genius” also works for me), and tell me what’s on your mind.