Phatic Spam

[nuncstans]

I realize this is not the most current of topics, but since it is 1996 I figured I could ask the burgeoning WWW a question about 'spam

Comments

[pomo_drunkard]

Simple.

It's all taken from James Joyce's later unpublished novels. Quoted verbatim.

[astronomick]

Someone very clever had to write that stuff. Word on the street is that it's Joyce.

I'm using "THE URINALS OF HELL CATBOX GARGOYLE" somehow tomorrow. Otherwise I find that life lacks meaning.

[nuncstans]

Did you both independently decide it was Joyce? I feel like Joyce takes the fall for a lot of crappy writing, when he was only responsible for a tiny percentage of what is overwhelmingly the fault of English departments, which always commit naturalistic fallacies all o'er everyone's asses.

English departments are also to blame for most other instances of massive linguistic disasters, and so I would tend to blame the phatic spam (hi, I'm spam) on them until proven wrong.

[pomo_drunkard]

I'm sorry. I lied to you just to carry out my stupid and pointless vendetta against James Joyce (a thing I do fairly often) for no particular reason.

In actuality, I think spam is generated by grad students who are struggling to impress those writers they think they should be immitating, such as Mark Leyner or Douglas Coupland--so they create massive amounts of particularly crappy prose, and then send it to everyone they know, hoping to get a book deal.

When they start footnoting, then we'll know they've moved on to David Foster Wallace.

[ms_priestypants]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

[astronomick]

Nah; pomo_drunkard is my source for news from the street.

[mendaciloquent]

Aliens.

[rubychard]

but then there's the kind of spam i've been getting lately, which reads like mangled excerpts of bad novels, rather than pure gibberish. for example, the following, which i excerpt verbatim