XPost: alt.postmodern
From: kcalder@blueyonder.co.uk
In message <402FF009.9000902@hotmail.com>, Alienthe
writes
>Kevin Calder wrote:
>I hope to get broadband soon; that might increase my frequency...
Broadband is great! Pr0n for everyone!
>>>> Sokal clearly had a pretty pomo sense of humor, wouldn't you say?
>>> I am not sure if it is late POMO or early Post-POMO. Still I
>>> would agree there is something here. If we go sufficiently
>>> retro will we reach plain modernism?
>> I'm not sure if that's how it works, or even if it works at all. It
>I thought that was one of the very few things one could never say
>in a POMO world. Shurely workage would be subject to interpretation?
&
>> wouldn't help us much if it did though, Modernism is every bit as
>>slippery, if not more, than pomoism, IMHO.
>After POMO made itself known there has been less talk of Modernism.
>Is there for instance a newsgroup called alt.modernism?
Im not sure that there would have been even if the Internet had existed
in the 1920's. The impression I get from reading period discussions of
High Modernism is that it was even less well understood than pomoism. T.
S. Eliot et al have all kinds of ideas that they seem to have difficulty
actually putting down on paper, so you get lots of talk of things like
the "Mythical Method", but im not sure if anyone actually settles on a
stable definition. Pomoism, perhaps by virtue of its sheer verbosity,
does IMHO seem to settle a little bit more distinctly. I mean this in
the sense that as an undergraduate I found that summary texts on
Modernism seemed to have less definite content than the ones on pomoism
(!).
That said, many more recent commentaries maintain that pomoism does not
constitute a significant break from the project of Modernity, and the
whole thing is still very much a debate in progress.
Also, any question dealing with historical outlooks and postmodernism
will run into all kinds of problems associated with the various forms of
historicism attached to the term.
Which is why I say I am not sure if it "works" at all :)
And yes, in sufficiently sceptical "world", perhaps like some flavour of
pomo one, "workage" is very probably subject to interpretation.
>>>> And pomoism is well known for validating humour, parody and pastiche,
>>> It does?
>> Maybe not well known then.
>> However, if you were to ask me (and I should know) to pick out, from
>Just curious here, just how should you know?
Lol.
Good question.
I was mostly joking.
But a portion of my honours work was concerning 'narrative forms in
contemporary poetry' which is really just a sly way of titling an essay
on pomoish stuff.
You would probably be pleased to learn that there wasn't very much open
talk of pomoism during my whole degree, and that the course for which I
produced the above mentioned essay had 3 other students in it.
I have to wonder sometimes where the leftist-cultural
relativist-pomoistic conspiracy that rules non scientific departments in
higher education in the UK is actually taking place.
>> I realise that by admitting that I think that some poetry is funny
>>that I run the risk of looking like the English teacher that laughs
>>at the jokes in Shakespeare productions when on school outings to the
>>theatre, but... ah well...
>Ah, that kind of humour.
See! I knew you'd make fun of me!
> I have just finished the Tempest and a
>number of comments on it and it seems to be full of people
>congratulating themselves with the cleverness in determining the
>alleged jokes. The word "natural" appears to be a trigger word
>to start laughing.
Hrm I don't remember laughing much while reading the Tempest to be quite
honest. Ah well, humour at least is pretty relative isn't it?
>It is amazing how the fun evaporates under scrutiny.
Well, stop scrutinising then! Take back the fun!
>>> I can agree that humor has these qualities and more but as
>>> for POMO I am not sure. WmG, to bring this writhing thread
>>> briefly close to things cyberriffic,
>> We are on topic now? Crap.
>Quoting Keanu Reeves: Whoa!
Whoa there's a bomb in the matrix dude!
Seriously though. Seen as how we are on this xposting excursion I'd
like to invite the inhabitants of alt.pomo to comment on William Gibson,
and the produce of the ""cyberpunk movement"", and perhaps science
fiction in general. Pomoism seems to come up periodically in alt.cp,
not least perhaps because ""cyberpunk"" literature comes up occasionally
in scholarly discussions of pomoism. This is not necessarily to say
that cyberpunk texts are postmodern, but rather that some of the threads
in pomo literary criticism seem sympathetic to some of the features of
said texts. IMHO this has something to do with the fact that cp is a
pulped up jumbling of 'beat' stuff, noir detective fiction, bleak,
ambivalent, amoral social commentary and a particularly dystopian 'five
minutes into the future' brand of sci fi, a kind of low-art pastiche if
you will.
>It seems to be that irony is what they seize on, to the point
>of strangling the fun.
Someone else said pretty much the same thing to me the other night; it
seems to be that one of the main complains about forms of pomoism is
that they are preoccupied with irony. I have honestly never noticed
this, but I am certainly open to possibility. That said, I am not sure
if 'irony' even persists in discourse where meaning has been
substantially destabilised, like heavily pomoised texts.
> Some of the online POMO magazines show
>a level of puns, quality as well as quantity, similar to tabloids
>but unrivalled in terms of obviousness.
Ok, I see. I tend to navigate away from online magazines at top speed
whenever I encounter them, so I haven't witnessed this for myself, but
it seems probable enough for me to believe you about it :)
> Somehow I get the feeling
>the authors of these literary atrocities congratulate themselves
>on their inventiveness.
Is this the same feeling you got about the people who thought that The
Tempest was funny?
>What rates as serious has changed a lot I hear; Shakespeare
>was apparently most appreciated for his comedies in his time
>while now tragedies is all the rage. Personally I blame the
>70's for this. POMO or no POMO, humour doesn't rate that high
>everywhere still, and with the passing of Astrid Lindgren it
>was pointed out that also children's books had not been
>sufficiently appreciated by professional appreciaters. Perhaps
>Post-POMO will see to that.
That's certainly one option. Or maybe we need to get rid of
professional appreciaters, or at least put them in their place. I
realise that in general most people don't have time to personally rate
everything for themselves, but I wonder if music & film review magazines
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