Yes, kind readers, I abandoned you months ago. What can I say? I never loved you and I'm sorry. No. Of course I have no readers in this space, but if you accidentally happened upon the page then you're in luck because I have something that I'd like you to take a look at. It's spam.
Yahoo's spam filter is great, but lately some emails advertising stock tips have been slipping through. I don't know very much about how email filters work, but it seems like this particular spammer has an effective method to stealth messages past the sentries at Y-Mail. I think it has something to do with the everyday language they use, which seems to trick Yahoo into believing that this is an email from a known acquaintance - surely the person who emailed me with the following subject line is no salesman:
"I do not know why, but I am already happier somehow knowing that I might be very busy with jobs and school."
If Yahoo's keeping out the rif raf by selecting out certain spammy phrases, this would be a good way to perry that. But the perps don't stop there. The carefully arranged prose in the body of the email also seems designed to tiptoe over the spamfilter tripwires, which brings me, mercifully, to my point: The people who write emails for the purposes of eluding spam filters are gifted poets. Here today are some actual sentences from an email I received today:
My grandma wants me to do everything for my father and just drop whatever i want.I have been ready to give up so many times. and when i tell them how i feel.when i was a school girl, i was anything but giddy.Many about technology on which I depend somehow getting damaged.Life is good very, very good except. My eyes are drooping.I don't agree, crazy can be turn in a superpower.It's found art.
Christopher Wool pulls phrases from movies, stencils them onto a canvas, and subsequently presents what is now merely a sequence of words devoid of any context. You read them and, because you've most likely never seen the movie or if so don't remember the line, immediately create your own context. His stuff hangs at MOMA in New York. Somebody get me some stencils and a can of spray paint, quick.