today’s topic: spam. the bad followed by the good. first the bad- the nonist’s url was spoofed by a spammer somewhere so if you have received any emails trying to sell you pharmaceuticals or raising the alarm over bird flu i apologize, but rest assured it was not from us. second the good- last week i received two bits of mail, undeniably spam, which never the less caught my eye. at the top of each message was the usual junk, but in each, after a short bit of blank space, the message continued with a large block of text which to my -highly- developed ear sounded uncannily like dada poetry. the first thing that sprung to mind was that fortune cookie which reads: “help me i’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory.” was this a creative cry for help?

obviously i’d never be able to find this burgeoning poet out there in the vast, seedy, rough and tumble underbelly of the internet. the cut throat world of spammers is not safe for a gentleman such as myself to simply go traipsing through. there was no helping him/her that was the sad reality. i decided, however, that this spammer poet’s work should not languish along with it’s author. as such i took the liberty of taking the text and reformatting it in the proper dada style it deserved. i thought it was just the right thing to do.

below you will find an 11 page chapbook (10 pages and an insert with regards from the author / using a nom de plume of course) reconstructing the poem word for word using bits of imagery culled exclusively from the digital dada library and redesigned to suit the text.

the title is-
ahmad, are you still mad at me?

there.

we may never know who noreen rupprecht really is, for all we know his/her throat has already been slit in some spammer back-alley, but at very least his/her poem can now live on in the annals of dada where it belongs.

ende