Posted by Michael Spears at January 20, 2006 03:18 PM
Very insightful, even for a cultural critic. Oh yeah, Kurt Schwitters, the Dada dissident and founder of the one-man Merz movement wrote poetry compiled from found sources of text, this was around 1917. More contemporary artists have been using the script generated text of email spam as a source of material for a few years now.
Anyways, thanks for obvious observations, you're a real visionary
Persnickety, yes, but I never said _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_ was "random"; I said the words were *unrelated*, which they are. Yeah, I know the title's provenance: A spook chanting "radio phonetics," or strings of (coded?) words into the ether, from Irdial Records' _Conet Project_. But the words are either part of an acronym or some more obscure code, and bear no relationship to one another, at least none I can discern. Can you?
Posted by M. Dery at January 20, 2006 03:31 PM
yes, I have been an admirer and collector dada-esque spam for a while. its great when trying to come up with titles for band names, albums, and songs
Posted by jesse at January 20, 2006 03:59 PM
I've been trimming at the 'kudzu' for awhile now with my Daily Treated Spam - I modify by omission of letters and words to get to a 'poam' every day, sent out to a bunch of recipients. Perhaps the only place on the net where people sign up to get spam on purpose - www.dailytreatedspam.com
Posted by bodo peeters at January 20, 2006 06:39 PM
Being a cautious sort, I rarely open such gnomic spam messages at all, choosing instead to scan the subject lines before marking them for deletion.
Can't say that the ones I receive are as avant-garde as yours Mark...they seem, rather, to target my (perceived) insecurities. "behungforladies" they advise (aiming spam missiles at the groin), or (perhaps sincerely) they tell me that I will soon "enjoyTheBenefits". More ambiguously, I'm informed that I'll "havethemsoon" (is this good?), and that I am a mere click away from "theUltimateSourceofFun".
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or YHF is a high-traffic station on the network of short-wave radio stations operated by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. These stations have played an essential role in allowing Mossad to communicate with agents by broadcasting one-way transmissions usually identified with a tactical call-sign consisting of three phonetic letters, such as "Charlie India Oscar" or "Echo Zulu India". Although the broadcast voice is always female, it's not an actual person but a speech synthesizer -- automatic machines do the actual announcing, sending out a seemingly endless stream of rota-styled messages.
Back when Wilco were promoting Summerteeth, Jeff Tweedy's interest in short-wave radio came up in an interview with Stephen Dowling of Music 365 -- in fact, he had a four-cd set of nothing but recorded transmissions intercepted from worldwide intelligence agencies. As Tweedy explained: "I got this record of all Morse code last year and I swear to God I listened to it more than any other record. . . . Well, it's actually number stations on short wave radio that have existed since World War II. There are hundreds of them owned and run by intelligence agencies and they still for some reason transfer code . . . and lots of it is people reading out numbers". Then Dowling threw in Tweedy's monotone impersonation of a transmission: "four . . . 21 . . . 17".
(A much less enthusiastic Jay Bennett added, "I remember that car ride to Chicago where you played it. For the first 20 minutes it was like 'Oh, that's interesting'. And then after two hours. . . .")
Traces of Tweedy's radio fixation cropped up on Summerteeth; with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's center stage. (And Wilco can't miss the irony of Reprise wanting a more "radio-friendly record" when they've been handed an album built on the notion of radio's subversive potential.) Permeating YHF are the sounds of short-wave radio -- including a synthesized female voice repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" -- but we'll get to that later.
On YHF, Wilco use short-wave radio as a metaphor for communication in a relationship. Short-wave radio allows people to speak who are not in physical proximity, but there's no guarantee that the coded messages will be received successfully, and atmospheric interference is a given. People involved in a relationship often find their communication imperfect and cryptic, not unlike the experience of those relying on radio. After all, language itself is inherently flawed, inaccurate, and misread -- a code often misinterpreted; further complicating matters are external distortions and distractions -- a metaphoric radio static. With all of this interference, can we ever succeed in communicating with someone else?"
This article was originally published by PopMatters in the fall of 2001. We are republishing it in the wake of the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on Nonesuch Records in the US on 23 April 2002 and in the UK on 22 April 2002.
Posted by peter krapp at January 21, 2006 01:12 AM
I'll plug my little entry in the burgeoning field of spamlit, a chapbook published by my micropress IZEN entitled Machine Language (5.5"x8.5", 32 pages, $5 -- email me at endwar70@hotmail.com). It differs from the efforts of Rob Read and Cecil Touchon (among many others) in that i did only minimal editing of the most interesting selections i received and added an explanatory introductory essay. The selections to some extent were meant to illustrate the various categories of messages i was seeing. What i did, similar to the examples in Mark's blog entry here, was to select what appeared to be the computer generated cut-up texts embedded in these emails.
To recap the essay, which makes a point similar to the Christian Bok essay mentioned in another comment (thanks for the link!), i say that spam email messages consist of two parts, a text that contains the sales pitch (buy our pills / you've been accepted for a mortgage / check out the porn) and a second part, which i've called the paratext, which consists of (typically) randomly selected/generated text designed to convince the machines receiving the email that this message is not spam. So in a sense, the paratext is actually a message from one computer to another and has nothing to do with human communication, except insofar as the filters on the receiving machine are designed to detect human communication.
I suspect that the random texts are generated from some source texts (e.g. blog postings, news articles on Harry Potter, excerpts of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, minutes of Parliament, etc.) and rearranged using some sort of Markov chain algorithm (anybody here ever play with the Babble! program?).
There has also been some evolution in the structure of these paratexts -- some of the earlier examples i've seen were random strings of characters, then random strings with spaces approximating normal word lenghts, then word-length strings incorporating larger numbers of vowels so as to generate strings that might be humanly pronounceable. Then the Markov chain texts started appearing. Most recently i've seen porn spams that include texts that are sales pitches for porn sites written by people who are obviously non-native English speakers interleaved with inspirational/motivational quotes (often on the subject of moral values) -- These are particularly interesting because of the tension between the text and paratext (examples of these are to new to be in my book, unfortunately).
I could go on about various obfuscation schemes that have been used to disguise the texts -- obvious misspellings (e.g. "lowwest pricees", "Vaigkra"), added punctuation, spaces, and characters (e.g. "fr'ee", "V1agra", "$ale$"), spelling the words in large fonts made from punctuation marks (always a disaster when email is displayed in a proportional font), or putting parts of words on one line and other parts of the words on another line with spaces in between so that you have to read up and down while reading across, (e.g. : first line: "Vi ra", second line: " ag ", etc., which is a real mess when the linebreaks don't work right). Also, the sales pitch can be embedded in an attached picture with a link.
For camouflaging paratext from the human reader, i have seen the use of 1 point text and text colored to match background.
BTW, the presence of random words in subject lines is obviously so that a major mail server won't see the same message going to every address in the book -- a mail will go to say a dozen addresses, then the subject line will morph for the next batch, and so on. And sometimes the whole line is changed and sometimes just part (usually beginning and/or end). And again, initially it was a random string that later became pronounceable strings and finally recognizable words.
Fascinating. So what's the purpose of those brain-scrambling wads of Burroughsian cut-up that appear, increasingly, at the end of spams? To foil spamkilling programs, obviously, but how, exactly? What I'm most interested in is: What do spamcoders *call* those nonsensical end graphs, in the argot of their trade? And how are they generated? With an automated algorithm, as you suggest? If so, how are the source materials chosen, I wonder? It's the inexplicably odd choice of sources, juxtaposing high and low culture, that make some of these graphs so weird.
Posted by M. Dery at January 22, 2006 10:38 AM
If X number of spambots are constantly sending out X amount of spam to X number of people, does that mean that someone somewhere is getting spam e-mails in which the letters have randomly organized themselves into one of Shakespeare's sonnets? Or a more contemporary work? If so, is that spammer then infringing on someone's copyright? Maybe a limited dictionary to draw from prevents this - the closest one might get is probably something like "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows out outrageous Viagra."
Posted by Danny Goodman at January 22, 2006 02:36 PM
I'm going to leave the Cialis spam up, as a droll rejoinder to M's post. Uncanny how he invoked Viagra, and the Net answered with a Viagra spam. ("Ask and it shall be given...")
Danny Goodman: Thanks for the link; fascinating. BTW, as the author of the book _Spam Wars_, can you tell me what spamcoders call that hunk of cut-up prose they tack onto the end of a spam? It's machine-generated, obviously, but how do they choose the sources for their gobbledygook?
Posted by M. Dery at January 22, 2006 03:02 PM
I enjoyed this article Mark. My only small quibble is in the use of Duchamp to exemplify this kind of random 'poetry' - firstly he never aligned himself with Dadaism, but more importantly Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara (who invented the 'cut-up' method) were the authors of chance and nonsense poetry in the Dada movement.
Posted by escha at January 22, 2006 11:38 PM
Well, Duchamp never aligned himself with *anything*. He maintained a droll, lofty distance from all the -isms that tried to claim him. But that shouldn't stop any critic who wants to stamp Duchamp with the impress of a given sensibility. Calvin Tompkins claims him, alternately, as a Dadaist, a Surrealist, a progenitor of Cage's aleatoric experiments, the founding father of op art, and the John the Baptist of '70s conceptualism. In Duchamp, we can find premonitions of practically every major postwar movement, from Fluxus to appropriation art. Point taken about Ball and Tzara, although I was referring to Duchamp's readymades. Then, too, it bears pointing out that Duchamp was a great collector of "nonsensical" (to use your term) found phrases; Jerome Rothenberg grants him seminal status in his book _Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914-1945_, which includes a number of Duchamp's mosaics of sentence fragments and found phrases.
Posted by M. Dery at January 23, 2006 12:21 AM
Ever feel compelled to correct/edit the broken english in spam? The first spam i received with the automated gibberish triggered some kind of urgent need to make the text make sense. I appended each of the disjointed phrases with something to make the sentence fragment complete.
Example:
Original: You are always missing reading..
Revised: You are always missing reading..when you're alone on a desert island with nothing to look at except for the shifting sand and your own skin peel off your body from sun and wind burn.
Shovelware
Comments: Spam Lit
Spam's an excellent source of poetic verse as well. I've got a few on http://www.vintnerd.com
Posted by Tim Holt at January 20, 2006 03:04 PM
Nitpicky, yes, but Wilco's three word combination is not random:
http://www.ee.pdx.edu/~sheaj/icao.html
Posted by Anonymous at January 20, 2006 03:10 PM
You mentioned Christian Bok in your post. Here is a paper by him on a similar topic.
http://www.ubu.com/papers/object/03_bok.pdf
Posted by Michael Spears at January 20, 2006 03:18 PM
Very insightful, even for a cultural critic. Oh yeah, Kurt Schwitters, the Dada dissident and founder of the one-man Merz movement wrote poetry compiled from found sources of text, this was around 1917. More contemporary artists have been using the script generated text of email spam as a source of material for a few years now.
Anyways, thanks for obvious observations, you're a real visionary
Posted by En Coli at January 20, 2006 03:25 PM
Lovely article. I've been constructing some as well, here is my first:
http://thehellbox.blogspot.com/2005/08/poem-about-allan.html
Posted by Shocho at January 20, 2006 03:28 PM
Persnickety, yes, but I never said _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_ was "random"; I said the words were *unrelated*, which they are. Yeah, I know the title's provenance: A spook chanting "radio phonetics," or strings of (coded?) words into the ether, from Irdial Records' _Conet Project_. But the words are either part of an acronym or some more obscure code, and bear no relationship to one another, at least none I can discern. Can you?
Posted by M. Dery at January 20, 2006 03:31 PM
yes, I have been an admirer and collector dada-esque spam for a while. its great when trying to come up with titles for band names, albums, and songs
Posted by jesse at January 20, 2006 03:59 PM
I've been trimming at the 'kudzu' for awhile now with my Daily Treated Spam - I modify by omission of letters and words to get to a 'poam' every day, sent out to a bunch of recipients. Perhaps the only place on the net where people sign up to get spam on purpose - www.dailytreatedspam.com
Posted by Rob Read at January 20, 2006 04:00 PM
Run into several of these myself - spam poetry is the word/music of this generation...
http://www.livejournal.com/users/thedarkbackward
Posted by thedarkbackward at January 20, 2006 04:39 PM
great article...
also, check out the spoetry list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spoetrycollectors/
Posted by Kim Cascone at January 20, 2006 04:39 PM
Thanks for the kudos, all, and especially for the awesome references, a dataphile's wet dream of intertextual connections. Supercool.
Posted by M. Dery at January 20, 2006 05:11 PM
You must get a better class of 419ers. None of my spam is ever that interesting.
Posted by rob at January 20, 2006 06:35 PM
Wilco's title Hotel Yankee Foxtrot actually came from a so-called 'number station'
http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm
great source for more dadaist poetry!
Posted by bodo peeters at January 20, 2006 06:39 PM
Being a cautious sort, I rarely open such gnomic spam messages at all, choosing instead to scan the subject lines before marking them for deletion.
Can't say that the ones I receive are as avant-garde as yours Mark...they seem, rather, to target my (perceived) insecurities. "behungforladies" they advise (aiming spam missiles at the groin), or (perhaps sincerely) they tell me that I will soon "enjoyTheBenefits". More ambiguously, I'm informed that I'll "havethemsoon" (is this good?), and that I am a mere click away from "theUltimateSourceofFun".
Woo hoo!
Posted by fústar at January 20, 2006 09:03 PM
http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/w/wilco-yankee.shtml:
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or YHF is a high-traffic station on the network of short-wave radio stations operated by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. These stations have played an essential role in allowing Mossad to communicate with agents by broadcasting one-way transmissions usually identified with a tactical call-sign consisting of three phonetic letters, such as "Charlie India Oscar" or "Echo Zulu India". Although the broadcast voice is always female, it's not an actual person but a speech synthesizer -- automatic machines do the actual announcing, sending out a seemingly endless stream of rota-styled messages.
Back when Wilco were promoting Summerteeth, Jeff Tweedy's interest in short-wave radio came up in an interview with Stephen Dowling of Music 365 -- in fact, he had a four-cd set of nothing but recorded transmissions intercepted from worldwide intelligence agencies. As Tweedy explained: "I got this record of all Morse code last year and I swear to God I listened to it more than any other record. . . . Well, it's actually number stations on short wave radio that have existed since World War II. There are hundreds of them owned and run by intelligence agencies and they still for some reason transfer code . . . and lots of it is people reading out numbers". Then Dowling threw in Tweedy's monotone impersonation of a transmission: "four . . . 21 . . . 17".
(A much less enthusiastic Jay Bennett added, "I remember that car ride to Chicago where you played it. For the first 20 minutes it was like 'Oh, that's interesting'. And then after two hours. . . .")
Traces of Tweedy's radio fixation cropped up on Summerteeth; with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's center stage. (And Wilco can't miss the irony of Reprise wanting a more "radio-friendly record" when they've been handed an album built on the notion of radio's subversive potential.) Permeating YHF are the sounds of short-wave radio -- including a synthesized female voice repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" -- but we'll get to that later.
On YHF, Wilco use short-wave radio as a metaphor for communication in a relationship. Short-wave radio allows people to speak who are not in physical proximity, but there's no guarantee that the coded messages will be received successfully, and atmospheric interference is a given. People involved in a relationship often find their communication imperfect and cryptic, not unlike the experience of those relying on radio. After all, language itself is inherently flawed, inaccurate, and misread -- a code often misinterpreted; further complicating matters are external distortions and distractions -- a metaphoric radio static. With all of this interference, can we ever succeed in communicating with someone else?"
This article was originally published by PopMatters in the fall of 2001. We are republishing it in the wake of the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on Nonesuch Records in the US on 23 April 2002 and in the UK on 22 April 2002.
Posted by peter krapp at January 21, 2006 01:12 AM
I'll plug my little entry in the burgeoning field of spamlit, a chapbook published by my micropress IZEN entitled Machine Language (5.5"x8.5", 32 pages, $5 -- email me at endwar70@hotmail.com). It differs from the efforts of Rob Read and Cecil Touchon (among many others) in that i did only minimal editing of the most interesting selections i received and added an explanatory introductory essay. The selections to some extent were meant to illustrate the various categories of messages i was seeing. What i did, similar to the examples in Mark's blog entry here, was to select what appeared to be the computer generated cut-up texts embedded in these emails.
To recap the essay, which makes a point similar to the Christian Bok essay mentioned in another comment (thanks for the link!), i say that spam email messages consist of two parts, a text that contains the sales pitch (buy our pills / you've been accepted for a mortgage / check out the porn) and a second part, which i've called the paratext, which consists of (typically) randomly selected/generated text designed to convince the machines receiving the email that this message is not spam. So in a sense, the paratext is actually a message from one computer to another and has nothing to do with human communication, except insofar as the filters on the receiving machine are designed to detect human communication.
I suspect that the random texts are generated from some source texts (e.g. blog postings, news articles on Harry Potter, excerpts of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, minutes of Parliament, etc.) and rearranged using some sort of Markov chain algorithm (anybody here ever play with the Babble! program?).
There has also been some evolution in the structure of these paratexts -- some of the earlier examples i've seen were random strings of characters, then random strings with spaces approximating normal word lenghts, then word-length strings incorporating larger numbers of vowels so as to generate strings that might be humanly pronounceable. Then the Markov chain texts started appearing. Most recently i've seen porn spams that include texts that are sales pitches for porn sites written by people who are obviously non-native English speakers interleaved with inspirational/motivational quotes (often on the subject of moral values) -- These are particularly interesting because of the tension between the text and paratext (examples of these are to new to be in my book, unfortunately).
I could go on about various obfuscation schemes that have been used to disguise the texts -- obvious misspellings (e.g. "lowwest pricees", "Vaigkra"), added punctuation, spaces, and characters (e.g. "fr'ee", "V1agra", "$ale$"), spelling the words in large fonts made from punctuation marks (always a disaster when email is displayed in a proportional font), or putting parts of words on one line and other parts of the words on another line with spaces in between so that you have to read up and down while reading across, (e.g. : first line: "Vi ra", second line: " ag ", etc., which is a real mess when the linebreaks don't work right). Also, the sales pitch can be embedded in an attached picture with a link.
For camouflaging paratext from the human reader, i have seen the use of 1 point text and text colored to match background.
BTW, the presence of random words in subject lines is obviously so that a major mail server won't see the same message going to every address in the book -- a mail will go to say a dozen addresses, then the subject line will morph for the next batch, and so on. And sometimes the whole line is changed and sometimes just part (usually beginning and/or end). And again, initially it was a random string that later became pronounceable strings and finally recognizable words.
Posted by endwar at January 21, 2006 04:01 AM
Fascinating. So what's the purpose of those brain-scrambling wads of Burroughsian cut-up that appear, increasingly, at the end of spams? To foil spamkilling programs, obviously, but how, exactly? What I'm most interested in is: What do spamcoders *call* those nonsensical end graphs, in the argot of their trade? And how are they generated? With an automated algorithm, as you suggest? If so, how are the source materials chosen, I wonder? It's the inexplicably odd choice of sources, juxtaposing high and low culture, that make some of these graphs so weird.
Posted by M. Dery at January 22, 2006 10:38 AM
If X number of spambots are constantly sending out X amount of spam to X number of people, does that mean that someone somewhere is getting spam e-mails in which the letters have randomly organized themselves into one of Shakespeare's sonnets? Or a more contemporary work? If so, is that spammer then infringing on someone's copyright? Maybe a limited dictionary to draw from prevents this - the closest one might get is probably something like "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows out outrageous Viagra."
Posted by m at January 22, 2006 01:48 PM
See also "A Verse to Spam" [pun intended]
http://spamwars.com/archives/2005/07/a_verse_to_spam.html
Posted by Danny Goodman at January 22, 2006 02:36 PM
I'm going to leave the Cialis spam up, as a droll rejoinder to M's post. Uncanny how he invoked Viagra, and the Net answered with a Viagra spam. ("Ask and it shall be given...")
Danny Goodman: Thanks for the link; fascinating. BTW, as the author of the book _Spam Wars_, can you tell me what spamcoders call that hunk of cut-up prose they tack onto the end of a spam? It's machine-generated, obviously, but how do they choose the sources for their gobbledygook?
Posted by M. Dery at January 22, 2006 03:02 PM
I enjoyed this article Mark. My only small quibble is in the use of Duchamp to exemplify this kind of random 'poetry' - firstly he never aligned himself with Dadaism, but more importantly Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara (who invented the 'cut-up' method) were the authors of chance and nonsense poetry in the Dada movement.
Posted by escha at January 22, 2006 11:38 PM
Well, Duchamp never aligned himself with *anything*. He maintained a droll, lofty distance from all the -isms that tried to claim him. But that shouldn't stop any critic who wants to stamp Duchamp with the impress of a given sensibility. Calvin Tompkins claims him, alternately, as a Dadaist, a Surrealist, a progenitor of Cage's aleatoric experiments, the founding father of op art, and the John the Baptist of '70s conceptualism. In Duchamp, we can find premonitions of practically every major postwar movement, from Fluxus to appropriation art. Point taken about Ball and Tzara, although I was referring to Duchamp's readymades. Then, too, it bears pointing out that Duchamp was a great collector of "nonsensical" (to use your term) found phrases; Jerome Rothenberg grants him seminal status in his book _Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914-1945_, which includes a number of Duchamp's mosaics of sentence fragments and found phrases.
Posted by M. Dery at January 23, 2006 12:21 AM
Ever feel compelled to correct/edit the broken english in spam? The first spam i received with the automated gibberish triggered some kind of urgent need to make the text make sense. I appended each of the disjointed phrases with something to make the sentence fragment complete.
Example:
Original: You are always missing reading..
Revised: You are always missing reading..when you're alone on a desert island with nothing to look at except for the shifting sand and your own skin peel off your body from sun and wind burn.
Full post:
http://aubrew.blogspot.com/2005/11/spam-literature.html
Posted by Spam as muse at January 24, 2006 08:31 PM