Djelloul Marbrook

What happens to e-mail happens to us. We delete each other. We bounce, trash, junk, lose and leave each other unread or misfiled. It’s not surprising. Human minds created the computer and the Internet, so of course they would go on doing what they had always done, but with more dispatch and logic.

We can train an e-mail program to identify junk mail, but if we want to express our particular displeasure we bounce e-mail. This is much the same way we filter people. There are certain “kinds” of people we category and screen out, but once in a while we feel compelled to snub someone. We all know people who are junk mail, phishers, scammers, spammers.

We complain of torrents of e-mail: phishing expeditions, spam, erectile dysfunction remedies, fake Rolexes, winning lotteries we never entered, Dickensian Nigerian cons, but what is different is that now we have a computer model for what has always happened. People used to relish armillary spheres to remind them of the cosmos; now we have the computer to remind us of our internal cosmos.

Some weasel has always been rolling up his sleeve to show us fake watches. We have always been phished and scammed, often from the pulpit and the bandstand. Now we just train a program to filter it or hit a button, smile and move on. There is no danger the person we have rebuffed will drop his coffee on us, and if he bad-mouths us we won’t see or hear it.

There is something about e-mail that doesn’t oppress me the way postal mail and telephone rings used to get to me when I was down. There were days when a phone ring would send chills up my spine, days when I would gladly have burned the mail. E-mail isn’t so hard on me. But of course I have to watch out for those attachments. Don’t we all?

What is missing is the vibe. We can readily pick up on it when a con artist isn’t a native speaker, so that provides a certain distance. We don’t get much of a vibe from the Internet, the way we do when eyes meet at a party or a rally or in the street. E-mail is a metaphor without the vibe. Good writing, of course, puts vibes back in words, but there isn’t much good writing in our daily dose of e-mail, is there?

There are days —thank God not every day—when I’m actually happy to be called my darling and dearest one by a Nigerian crook. Is this a variation of Stockholm Syndrome? I actually enjoy the gobbledygook of spammers. I admire the way web saboteurs imbed stealth information in innocent prose.

There’s no reason e-mail should be so illiterate, but when you consider how illiterate news crawls on cable television can be, it’s not surprising. Just because the quill gives way to the pen, and calligraphy to moveable type, and typrewriter to computer doesn’t mean we can’t write well. All we have to do is want to write well. So, perhaps when we get over the novelty, we’ll do just that. After all, there never was a time when a great deal of phish and spam wasn’t written. We look back at a good bit of Elizabethan con artistry today and call it literature.

I correspond with two Britons, literary men, who write by hand. It reminds me of scrutinizing the handwriting of a girlfriend when I was a young man, studying curlicues and flourishes for hints of her affection.—DM