in a secluded

The latest spam trend in my inbox is some of the most fascinating mail I have ever received. They masquerade as ads for digital cable filters or CDs banned by the government, but they caught my attention because the subject lines each ended with three random words. Always three, always preceded by a bit of gibberish, almost never repeats among different messages, and always grammatical but incomplete, lifted from some book perhaps never written.

From: Corrine Meyer [oqmnqivahoq@canada.com]
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 6:34 AM
To: ??@unc.edu
Subject: Re: XVMZI, in a secluded
Importance: High

The phrases don't relate to each other, and yet somehow I feel that they must. I keep trying to put them together, like the best Magnetic Poetry game ever:

here something strange
began to rise

here the writers
had perpetrated savage
material was thus
of silk scraps

such an interesting
quite a different

scrutinizing some inconspicuous
palace garden from
here: a beauty

[and the professor
said he would
leave me alone]

As I was copying over a message to write this entry, I made the even greater discovery that the HTML body of the message contains yet more random words, written in a white font and therefore hidden from view until you select the text with the cursor. Instead of a phrase, these are just a stream-of-consciousness style core dump.

From: Dan Napier [wbchayoehxa@yahoo.com.hk]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 1:39 PM
To: ??@unc.edu
Subject: Re: KRJJKAJE, certainly take something
Importance: High

dispersive bombay control brittany cheetah blueback angela geranium debris automate pyroelectric holmdel steamy laterite torpor selfadjoint choir triplet dreyfuss philharmonic absent

Banned CD Government don't want me to sell it. See Now

connotation noteworthy accentuate calorimeter marriott crew staphylococcus amygdaloid allocate dominican ballast crust id chatham able optoacoustic cruelty virginia yourselves axiom stud chess skippy coverage affix percent marquee ceres

It's like spam is suddenly trying to communicate on its own, in the background behind the cheap sell.

Addendum: My very clever husband suggested that I Google the phrases. They all appear in a 1997 translation of _The Master and Margarita_ by Mikhail Bulgakow, available at http://lib.ru/.

It reminds me of the tattoos my friends and I just got as part of Shelley Jackson's Skin project. Now we are a phrase of six words, connected to each other but lost from our mother work, recombined in ways the author never wrote.