Poor Girls: Jude the Obscure :: Spammers : All of Us
The subject lines of two emails in my junk mail folder right now remind me of one of my favorite books, Jude the Obscure:
- “Tap her hole and drill her.”
- “Specialize in X-Ray technology. Train to be a Radiologist.”
In a critical moment early on in the book, Jude is walking along a public road and thinking about his progress towards his goal of becoming a great scholar, pondering the great authors he’ll read –Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus — when he’s hit in the ear with a chopped-off pig penis thrown at him by low-class girls who are washing pig offal in a stream and who call him “Hoity-toity.” One of these girls (the thrower of the pig parts) becomes his wife and completely derails his dreams of scholarship.
These two spam emails pretty much sum up Jude’s losing battle between pursuit of animal gratificatin and pursuit of high-minded scholarship. It’s fun (and maybe a bit sad) to note that not a lot has changed since Hardy published Jude the Obscure back in 1896. I’m wondering whether some cultural critic a hundred years from now will take a serious look at spam mail over time and come to the same conclusion.