Classic Spam

A few days back I opened a random spam e-mail ( just for the fun of it - yeah, I'm mad, bad and dangerous to know) to find a passage from "Anna Karenina". Why not "White Noise"? But let us not be ungentle, the message registers: all spam aspires to the condition of classic literature. Who can know cliche, and hence its opposite, more deeply than a spammer? Ultimately, all those ironic games - random combinations of words, comical obsession with penises and mortgages, prose that plunders itself and is generous with the plunder - must pall. All spammers are poets in secret; their god is Ray Johnson; their audience is legion; and if, consumed by our petty concerns with time and money, we fail to be overcome, thrillingly, by their effusions, we are so much the poorer. We are, sadly, no wiser. We grow older slower...