Sunday, March 28, 2010

Message About Mildred

There's an art form known as postal art, which consists of creating visual or sculptural art and sending it through a government-run postal system.

Is there such a thing these days as email art, or particularly, spam art?

This is the text of an email I received recently, with the subject line "Mildred." No links or anything else that would normally be present in spam:

But she must not think of herself. Harold will help. Every woman should learn a trade. Set me down in the monster's vicinity. It is my honor.

Nothing would have changed for me. You've turned me a point or two. Do tell us what has happened. He had need of her. Proudie is his name. Zane had forgotten her presence. How sweet and kind of you! You will be cold.

You aren't supposed to put them back. The keg never empties. Thus his enemy had scored. Where have you been? It failed just like the first. Reginald Bell began to act. That nerved him. In a moment he had it figured. But the Magician had remained active. Crystals of ice formed. There was nothing to do but wait. The Demon lacks human emotion.
Digital Dada? Or possibly an encrypted code message broadcast to sleeper Al Qaedites?

You be the judge.

4 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

I love this sort of stuff — it’s been a while since I last saw spam with such a great subject line.

I tried one sentence from your e-mail — “Proudie is his name” — it’s from Arthur Conan Doyle. My guess is that the content is plain-looking sentences pulled from various source texts. From a similar message I got (and blogged) a while ago: “Ulysses, Ulysses -- fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. He’s got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won’t stop. In search of Earth, flying in to the night.”

Ms Sparrow said...

It almost sounds like an email forwarded to a succession of people each of whom add a single declarative sentence. Perhaps each line comes from opening a book at random and selecting a sentence.
My contribution: "We were so humble it was ridiculous." from Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon Days.

elena said...

LOL! I like the sound of that Ulysses language better..all those simple declarative sentences require such random and abrupt turns of mind.

Katelyn said...

I received an email just like this, and it had an attachment in it pretending to be from TD Bank. I didn't open the attachment, but instead clicked "show original" in the options incase it had a virus or something. In between all of it was a message saying "Dear customer please note that your TD Bank online banking account is about to expire. It is strongly recommended to update it immediately." And then it had a link. This was an email clearly aimed at getting my card number and password. However, it is kind of fun to find out random books that the text is from.