Why was this thread deleted ? May 15, 2006 3:56 PM   Subscribe

Why was this thread deleted ? I was trying to start a discussion on Post Modernism and had hoped Jackmo woud turn up , what gives ? it could have been a classic !I could have learned something !
posted by sgt.serenity to Etiquette/Policy at 3:56 PM (41 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

I'm just very confused about Postmodernism just now. All i can say is that i'm pretty disappointed as it was the kind of ideal thread to discuss that sort of thing in my view. I wish i'd been given a bit more time to raise the Meta-bar.
posted by sgt.serenity at 3:58 PM on May 15, 2006


Space before punctuation is post-modern ;)
posted by bonaldi at 4:03 PM on May 15, 2006


I'll just go away then.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:03 PM on May 15, 2006


Are you high?
posted by SweetJesus at 4:03 PM on May 15, 2006


I'm gonna guess this isn't a real question (because the answer is too obvious), but some sort of postmodernist expression?
posted by Bugbread at 4:04 PM on May 15, 2006


I just need to become PostModern as quickly as possible , i'm getting there with my punctuation though which is good.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:10 PM on May 15, 2006


I second SweetJesus's question, and embelish it a bit, sgt.serenity: are you totally fucking high?
posted by delfuego at 4:12 PM on May 15, 2006


One is residing in the Slough of Despond after the demise of that particular thread , so no , i'm not high.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:15 PM on May 15, 2006


and i'm sure the silent majority of metafilter users agree with me.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:21 PM on May 15, 2006


Fairies are the new post-modern. Or perhaps, the pre-post-post-modern.
posted by mischief at 4:24 PM on May 15, 2006


Fairies wear Pepsi Blue boots.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 4:30 PM on May 15, 2006


You should have posted this question on AskMe and then ranted about it here when it too was deleted. It could have been the trifecta of post-modernism, metafilter-style.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:32 PM on May 15, 2006


Yeah, what?
posted by rhapsodie at 4:46 PM on May 15, 2006


are you totally fucking high?

I vote for drunk.
posted by mediareport at 4:48 PM on May 15, 2006


i'm sure the silent majority of metafilter users agree with me.

well there was an unsilent minority who didn't. Doesn't Jackmo have email?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:53 PM on May 15, 2006


Here is a postmodern story which you can apply to your forehead

I wrote a letter to the President of the moon, asked him if they had towaway zones up there. The cops had towed away my Honda and I didn't like it. Cost me seventy-five dollars to get it back, plus the mental health. You ever notice how the tow trucks pick on little tiny cars? You ever seen them hauling off a Chrysler Imperial? No, you haven't.

The President of the moon replied most courteously that the moon had no towaway zones whatsoever. Mental health on the moon, he added, cost only a dollar.

Well, I needed mental health real bad that week, so I wrote back saying I thought I could get there by the spring of '81, if the space shuttle fulfilled its porcelain promise, and to keep some mental health warm for me who needed it, and could I interest him in a bucket of ribs in red sauce? Which I would gladly carry on up there to him if he wished?

The President of the moon wrote back that he would be delighted to have a bucket of ribs in red sauce, and that his zip code, if I needed it, was 10011000000000.

I cabled him that I'd bring some six-packs of Rolling Rock beer to drink with the ribs in red sauce, and, by the way, what was the apartment situation up there?

It was bad, he replied by platitudinum plate, apartments were running about a dollar a year, he knew that was high but what could he do? These were four-bedroom apartments, he said, with three baths, library, billiard room, root cellar, and terrace over- looking the Sea of Prosperity. Maybe he could get me a rent abatement, he said, 'cause of me being a friend of the moon.

The moon began to sound like a pretty nice place. I sent a dollar to the Space Shuttle Hurry-Up Fund.

Drumming fiercely on a hollow log with a longitudinal slit tuned to moon frequencies, I asked him about employment, medical coverage, retirement benefits, tax shelterage, convenience cards, and Christmas Club accounts.

That's a roger, he moonbeamed back, a dollar covers it all, and if you don't have a dollar we'll lend you a dollar through the Greater Moon Development Mechanism.

What about war and peace? I inquired by means of curly little ALGOL circuits I had knitted myself on my Apple computer.

The President of the moon answered (by MIRV'D metaphor) that ticktacktoe was about as far as they'd got in that direction, and about as far as they would go, if he had anything to say about it.

I told him via flights of angels with special instructions that it looked to me like he had things pretty well in hand up there and would he by any chance consider being President of us? Part-time if need be?

No, he said (in a shower of used-car asteroids with blue-and-green bumper stickers), our Presidential campaigns seemed to damage the candidates, hurt them. They began hitting each other over the head with pneumatic Russians, or saying terminally silly things about the trees. He wouldn't mind being Dizzy Gillespie, he said.

posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:54 PM on May 15, 2006 [4 favorites]


"unsilent minority"; once again the whiners get the popsicle.
posted by mischief at 4:54 PM on May 15, 2006


He wouldn't mind being Dizzy Gillespie, he said.

I wouldn't mind being Donald Barthelme.

Oh, wait, maybe I would.
posted by dersins at 5:01 PM on May 15, 2006


mischief : "'unsilent minority'; once again the whiners get the popsicle."

Maybe you should run some kind of hip MTV "Get Out The Vote" type campaign.
posted by Bugbread at 5:09 PM on May 15, 2006


I had a talk with the the silent majority of metafilter users and they said you owe them twenty quid. But they'll settle for a drink.
posted by languagehat at 5:15 PM on May 15, 2006


While PreFuturism may be seen as the negative space in the image of Post Modernism - the "half full" of the mostly empty PoMo mirrorglass - it must be juxtaposed and contexualized in the hermeneutic context of a reified normative culture with its attendant assumptions about chronological narrative. Just as the Plebian Militarism of "sgt." gains a truculent currency from its adjoining to the highbrow trope of "serenity", we see that the very use of a time-order-absolute qualifier (such as "pre" or "post") with a time-relative label such as "Modern" creates a tension between meanings, a veritable clockwork of intent and implication, waiting to SPROING!!! open at the slightest touch: like a bomb, like a spring, like the tensegrity-sculptures built by school children of popsicle sticks.

Thus the association of a term such as these with a "thread" of time-ordered yet time-static commentary which has in fact been "deleted" creates in turn an imperitive to question what it meant before it was deleted, and how much more it meant after. For as demonstrated above, the absence of a signifier can be more meaningful than its presence.

We see, in fact, the half empty glass of milk next to where the cookie once lay But Is No More.
posted by freebird at 5:34 PM on May 15, 2006


I think the real question is this: Who ate the cookie?
posted by atrazine at 5:43 PM on May 15, 2006


Whoever finished last.
posted by puke & cry at 5:46 PM on May 15, 2006


I think PostModernism owes me twenty bucks. At least.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:47 PM on May 15, 2006


*shaman waltz*
posted by mds35 at 6:31 PM on May 15, 2006


What in the fuck kind of crazy fucking sherpa shit are you people smoking in here?
posted by loquacious at 7:18 PM on May 15, 2006


Doesn't Jackmo have email?

Nah. As a high modernist I prefer the old-fashioned way:- I type a draft manuscript many thousands of lines long, forward it to my friend Ezra Pound for rigorous editing, then have it published in The Criterion.

I hear you, though, sgt. - folk do tend to use the term 'postmodern' with scant regard for what it, you know, actually means, or might mean. Unless it just means 'self-referential' now.

Also, if my name (approx.) is up top there, does this count as some species of pseudo-callout? And if so, can anyone suggest the best way in which I might flame out, given the circumstances? Quoting Lyotard while wearing a leotard? Post-post-colonial non-ironic blackface minstrelsy? Mildly pornographic ASCII art besmirching the good reputation of the women of Hull?
posted by jack_mo at 7:41 PM on May 15, 2006


What in the fuck kind of crazy fucking sherpa shit are you people smoking in here?

I've not smoked anything stronger than Benson & Hedges. (Which is why I'm still awake at 3:43am.)
posted by jack_mo at 7:42 PM on May 15, 2006


No one does it like freebird.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:03 PM on May 15, 2006


IMHO, this is all you need to know about Postmodernism.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:25 PM on May 15, 2006


Actually, it's not. I make a lot of fun of PoMo bullshit, but I get really fed up too with the self-satisfied smugness of the "debunkers". I've had some experiences similar to those in Steven C. Den Beste's link (as a mathguy/software engineer from UCSC it's quite possible I've talked with some of the same people).

I've also had the experience where I'm sitting in an over-the-top PoMo lecture thinking what pompous self-inflating dumbasses these PoMo soft-science people are - then I actually understand what they're talking about, and it's fucking awesome. You kind of need to use some twisted language when your discourse is *about* language and the nature of discourse.

Sure - a lot of it is total bullshit. Same goes for most discourse. Get off the high horse. Anyone who says crap like "this is all you need to know about X" probably doesn't understand X very well. IMHO.
posted by freebird at 9:24 PM on May 15, 2006


Freebird has been my hero ever since this:

The use of the term 'beef' in relation to a conceptual text object clearly demonstrates the extent to which our memetic landscape, our cultural corpus if you will, is reduced to commodified fodder - the wild buffalo of cognition and language domesticated to mere factory-farmed, hollow-eyed meat-products on the hoof.

More here.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:57 PM on May 15, 2006


oh my goodness.

*vanishes in puff of smoke and mirrors pointed at mirrors*
posted by freebird at 10:06 PM on May 15, 2006


Puff puff give! Puff puff give! You're fucking up the rotation, man!
posted by Rhomboid at 10:54 PM on May 15, 2006


Don't joint that Bogart.

Truly great stuff, freebird.
posted by quadog at 1:02 AM on May 16, 2006


Crop Rotation in the 14th century was considerably more widespread after John
posted by sgt.serenity at 1:11 AM on May 16, 2006


I love me some freebird™.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:41 AM on May 16, 2006


man, freebird's the shit.
posted by shmegegge at 6:27 AM on May 16, 2006


That thread was lossy. Duh.
posted by Witty at 9:01 AM on May 16, 2006


I think we raised the bar a little before the chicken thread started.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:28 PM on May 16, 2006


God, grant me the sgt.serenity to accept the things that have been deleted... the courage to make better posts... and the jessamyn to know the difference.
posted by vronsky at 3:21 PM on May 16, 2006


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