"Michael May" <may_m@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:bnofmv$13as4n$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:10:22 GMT, "palmer.william"
> <palmer.william@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
> snip inaccurate legal/literary make-believe.
>
>
> >Here is one thing we do know, then: Whoever is doing this
> >is presenting a horrible Twinkles-changling, is cruelly and
> >through bad prose burning a Twinkles-effigy that they have
> >hoisted high over the net on ropes and pulleys and set ablaze,
> >as it were, while trying to deceive readers into thinking it is the
> >authentic Twinkles.
>
> Talk about mangling the language!
Nothing at all wrong about that sentence--unless you
are talking about the typo I corrected or are even more
cluelessly and sophomorically insisting on applying
Strunk and White to it. Usenet is not business English,
and it is not my goal to express myself in as few everyday
words as possible avoiding figurative language whenever
I can..
Quite the contrary.
In fact, if you look at that passage again, you will see that I
have added a few ropes and pulleys that I left out the first time.
Two things I am big on as a poster are thread-hijacking and
post-editing.
All that puts me in mind of one of my favorite anecdotes,
the one about the person who accused me of "wasting
bandwidth." My response was to tell him that I have never
seen my role in Usenet as one of "saving bandwidth."
I added that if he saw HIS role as that of a bandwidth-saver,
then why did he not show fidelity to his principles and
stop posting entirely? That shut him up for a whle.
>
> Having recently arrived on the shores of this newsgroup and noticing
> the high volume of Palmer related posts, I have spent an amusing hour
> or so reading through the google archives on Palmer/Twinkles. Based on
> my small amount of research, I find the new Twinkles to be far more
> entertaining than the original Bill Palmer creation. Others may
> disagree. Perhaps BP should not keep denying author/owner-****p of the
> new one, it might improve his credibility as a *usenet
> writer/performance artiste*. I love the concept of a usenet
> performance artist, it is a shame that Palmer didn't successfully pull
> it off. Who knows, perhaps Twinkles can. ;)
Cute, but you miss a few clues. Most im****tant, it is precisely
because of the tremendous success of my performance art that
the various parasites you refer to slither out of the woodwork
and try to attach themselves to me one annoying way or another.
The reason it is so hard for people like you to get a handle on
what is going on here is that this whole interactive thing is so
new. With traditional print world writers, letters written to them
by nutcases usually go right in the publisher's wastebasket. In
Usenet performance art, the same sort of people who write the
crank letters to writers often make themselves part of the act.
After all, we must respect the fact that in Usenet they have as
much right to express themselves as does the writer they are
trying to attach themselves too.
If that sort of thing simply involves following the writer up, flaming
him,
etc., fair enough, although such flames should be topical in the groups
where they are posted. All that is part of the performance artist's
show. (Actually, YOU try and flame me a bit yourself by suggesting
the colossal show which has been rolling back and forth, sometimes
quite noisily, through the Usenet community for many years is about
tics and fleas rather than the star attraction.)
Matters sometimes go wrong, though, because once in a while
dedicated fans become obsessed and turn to things like forgery
and other dirty trick to get attention. Being a pest in Usenet
does not take writing talent. There is nothing at all funny
about counterfeiting a famous performance artist's name and
address simply to deceive others.
Getting back to what I said earlier about your missing the point,
that shows in your comments about Twinkles. Twinkles is simply
one small part of the entire show, but he is a part that much attention
is currently focused upon because of the "kidnapping."
What you and some others don't seem to grasp about Usenet
performace art is that the performace artist--due to the interactive
nature of the medium--must swim with the flow. It seems to me
that you try and apply traditional vaudeville standards here. You
expect the perfromance artist to step on stage, put on some sort
of planned act, and then set back and receive his boos or his
applause. That's not how it works.
It is more like people in the audience get up on stage, dance
and prance with the performance artist, engage in public pie-
throwing (or maybe mudball throwing is a better analogy),
chase the performer around, get chased, do cartwheels,
take pratfalls on their butts, etc.
The show always includes the audience, in other words.
The successful performer must adapt to each situation.
If the audience member is prancing around the stage, the
performer might applaud, or prance himself in a way that
upstages the audience-member turned performer and
snatches back the limelight.
If an audience member runs up on stage with a bucket of
mudballs, the performance artist must be ready to respond,
even if it means having a bigger bucket of mudballs just
back of the curtain where they can be readily grabbed and
hurled.
While I had no idea that all this Twinkles craziness would
come up, well, instead of going back to the upstairs office
and crying in my root beer, I am simply changing the show
somewhat by way of responding.
It is always that way. If I planned my entertainment routines
sort of like "Next week I am going to do do this, and the next
week I am goint to do that," then I would not be doing
performance art at all.
Instead, I would be engaging in scheduled, traditional
writing. And, no matter what skill was put into the effort,
the result would ultimately be boring as far as Usenet
readers are concerned. The spontaneity and the
interactivity are what they are here for in the first place.
That is no exaggeration. My suspicion is that if you could
convince a Thomas Pynchon, a John Updike or a Norman
Mailer to do an agreed-upon number of Usenet posts, sort
of like a series of short essays or stories, few if anyone in
Usenet would appreciate those efforts--UNLESS, of course,
the writers used their real names. Even that might not
work, since most readers would simply assume someone
was imitiating those three writers' famous styles.
Usenet is not a venue where you occasionally post a few
polished prose pieces and then sit back and garner your rave
reviews.
Essentially, Usenet is a place where they read you or they don't.
And the only way you can prove they read you is by the follow-up
from a great many different people, and by the allusions to you
and your work that appear in the posts of others.
Perhaps now you can see, then, that it is a mistake to try and
comprehend Usenet performance art by applying print-world
conventions and vaudeville customs.
>
> Palmer, your only entertainment value seems to be as a straight man to
> your various nemeses. Is that your intended role when you describe
> yourself as a performance artist?
That's a good example of where your lack of understanding
about what is going here led you. Hope my comments above
have now set you straight.
Now, wave to the folks out there...
Hi Auntie Martha...
Whee...
accept no chimp imitations:
the alt.genius.bill-palmer
--firing posts at passersby at random from an open window in an
office upstairs from rec.arts.prose
>
> Michael
>
> "You have the right to remain silent.
> Anything that you do say may be taken
> out of context and used to discredit you."
> ... usenet maxim C. 1986
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