Dada in the Internet Age: Horse_ebooks

I remember coming late to a party in second grade. It felt really awkward. I was an outsider in this fantastical amazing best birthday party ever. Everyone was already off playing with the new toys, and I arrived late with my small gift of what was perhaps the GREATEST COMPUTER GAME EVER to my second-grade self, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? But this is just to say that I think I might just be late to the party on most things. With the exception of Rebecca Black’s masterpiece, Friday, I’m pretty sure I’m one of the last people to find things out on the internet. But not Friday, that was my JAM before it was everyone else’s.

So I was exploring the internet this week and somehow stumbled upon a treasure trove of magic and wonder, a twitter feed called @Horse_ebooks. It’s been around for about a year now, apparently everyone was into it a year ago. And now it’s old news. But it’s new news to me, so you are going to get a blog post about it!

Horse_ebooks is a spam account. It is meant to try and get you to buy things (digitized books, helpfully named “ebooks”). But spam account are flagged by twitter, and hopefully deleted, so as a way of getting around this, Horse_ebooks posts random excerpts from the ebooks which it is trying to sell (or at least it did, for a while. Now it seems to post things from all over. For a more detailed look at that, see here). With these random text tweets, it looks like a user who just HAPPENS to post a link encouraging you to buy this ebook, but also look at all these purely text posts that CLEARLY mean this is a real person. The result: utmost delight.

These random snippets of text are the ultimate non sequitur joke. There is something so wonderful in the truth and panic in “Do you get stressed out because there is NOT ENOUGH TIME,” the humor of “Have you ever made a phone call to a man and later regretted it? Have you ever hesitated before,” and the Gertrude Stein-ness of “Hesitate. Did not hesitate (to) Do not hesitate (to) Do not hesitate to accept Do not hesitate to refuse Do not hesitate to reply If you do.” And all of these were found in the same daylong period. Horse_ebooks is a goldmine of wisdom (How can I know if rabbits are playing or fighting?), of philosophical discourse (There is not a single vacant room throughout the entire infinite hotel.), of the mundane (The dimly lit cocktail hour oozes class and sophistication. I recognize some of my accounting professors), and of the absurd (Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mort gage Mortgage Mortgage Mortggge Mortgage Mortgage).

To me, the whole thing bears a remarkable similarity to dada and surrealist art and poetry. Meant to find some kind of subconscious meaning within the absurd, the these artists would often play games, like exquisite corpse, to generate artistic material that was free from the ego and from personal choice. The thought was that the subconscious would form it’s own conclusions and find beauty in these random strings of phrases. I certainly can feel that pull in Horse_ebooks, a desire to form meaning, even though it all is meaningless. The mind makes connections that are wholly individual and meaningful. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s quite a beautiful and human sentiment. Finding sense in the senseless. Aww. I’m all inspired now.

But what else is it that draws me so much to the unrestrained and anarchist beauty of Horse_ebooks? I feel a part of it is the unrelenting non sequitur humor. The hilarity in finding something that has nothing to do with anything else. The inevitable question of “where in the WORLD could that quote come from.” But there is also a sense of discovery. Horse_ebooks feels to me like a worldwide bathroom stall, upon which the randomly generated graffiti of an anonymous horse has been written. There is something strangely personal about it all—these words had to come from some person. But now all that remains are the few words tweeted by a spambot, left to be mulled over and drawn in comic-form. But still, there is something really magical in finding the profound amid the absurd.

And so, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with a dada poem generated by randomly selecting words from the above post. I hope you enjoy. (and also that make your own!)

by For And I my
things get a in form the the
Friday, But Mortgage). kind me
a real of sequitur has quote “left”
pretty you can artistic that
Black’s is hesitate pull I from.â in