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Matt White
06-04-2006, 10:01 AM
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By ED BREIDBART

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- The Pulitzer Prize, which honors America's highest achievements in print journalism, fiction, poetry, drama and music, broadened its scope again this year -- in a surprising area.

"The new category acknowledges excellence in spam, the unsolicited advertising that crowds the world's e-mail boxes," said spokesperson Wendy Preminger.

Spam is a universally hated form of communique. Nearly every computer user has lost time and productivity in erasing the junk messages, which are favored tools of fraudsters and pornographers. But last spring, Preminger received an e-mail from a spammer whose creativity, emotional honesty and intellectual sweep kept the board president from tapping the delete key.

"The characteristic stridency of spam -- all those capital letters and exclamation points -- was turned to quiet power," Preminger recalled. "The usual chaos of spelling and grammar -- normally included just to defeat the junk filter -- became a clever use of language."

The subject line read:

Reve se (a)(g)(i)(n)(g) while you sle. . . ep!

"The use of a reverse-slash in the word reverse was itself inspired," Preminger said. "And the use of an ellipsis, a grammatical pause, to suggest 'sleep' was genius. And the parentheses, suggesting age, was perfect. The dates of a life are always encased in parentheses.

The body content read:

I will turn sleep -- death's twin -- against death,

One line in my checkbook erases the lines from my face.

I''ll remember --

(How hard in old age, to remember!)

-- that I've only borrowed the daylight,

The night comes free,

But our topical wrinkle remover is available for a new, low price.

"The message was sensitive and poetic," Preminger declared. "I knew I had found a great writer in a new medium."

Preminger forwarded the message to the computer science department of Columbia University, which administers the prize. Experts quickly traced the spam's origin through decoy open-relay servers in Nat Fu-Ling Yu, China. Preminger accompanied two Columbia security guards to the home of the spammer, Wiles Penn Frostburn, who lived only fifteen blocks north of the Columbia campus in a crumbling tenement.

"I thought it was a raid," Frostburn told Weekly World News. "Ms. Preminger pulled something from her suit pocket -- I thought it was going to be a badge or a gun. But it was an invitation to the Pulitzer luncheon.

"It was a dream come true," Frostburn said.

Wiles fell into spamming to support his poetry writing.

"I could have been a temp in an office, or a clerk in a bookstore," Frostburn said. "But the junk mail business gave me the money to pay off all my student loans. I'm not proud of it, but what good is a poet without a dark past?"

Frostburn's $10,000 cash award and his lucrative book deal with Snobf Publishing Group have propelled the young writer out of the spam racket, but Wiles still looks back on his early career with fondness.

"I was moving 150 million copies of my work every day," Frostburn said. "My book of poetry is selling well to friends and family, but I'll never see those numbers again."

binnie
06-04-2006, 10:20 AM
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction