Eat the bread everyone. Namaste.
March 7, 2012 5:28 PM   Subscribe

“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.” Poet and Twitter entity Patricia Lockwood talks with HTMLGIANT about Twitter, literature, twitterature, comedy, poetry, sexting, Aaliyah and Olive Garden. Lockwood suggests that there may be something substantial and heretofore unexamined rumbling in the bowels of certain Twitter communities and people (such as @graeyalien and MeFi's own @gregerskine.)
posted by naju (28 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fuck man. Now I want to unfriend everyone on twitter except Lockwood, Greg Nog and horse_ebooks. I mean, coordinating flash mob revolutions is awesome and all, but in the US it gave us dramatic undergrads trying to get pepper sprayed for freedom. When I read: "“I HAND U A PANINI AND U OPEN IT UP 2 SEE THE COMMAND ‘ORGASM’ WRITTEN IN THOUSAND ISLAND" I feel like the medium's potential is being realized.
posted by R. Schlock at 5:40 PM on March 7, 2012 [5 favorites]


I have followed Patricia Lockwood's writing online for years and years - I am happy to see her name popping up more and more places. Yay!
posted by Windigo at 5:43 PM on March 7, 2012


This is hilarious and awesome. Thanks.
posted by RogerB at 5:46 PM on March 7, 2012


Huzzah for @gregerskine! Huzzah as well for @graeyalien and whatnot.

I'm also a huge fan of how you can search for Tweets and then RT them in sequence, in order to show a theme, viz. stupidity. @brendlewhat does this a lot, such as RTing ones that combine "Africa," "Kony," and "idgaf."
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:51 PM on March 7, 2012


Yeah, the poet/absurdist/Markov people/droids/bots on Twitter are my favorites, across the board, followed by the comics artists. They're just so endlessly refreshing.
posted by limeonaire at 6:12 PM on March 7, 2012 [2 favorites]


Ahhhhh, the gorgeous colors of the sunset are killing us. is my new zen koan.
posted by The Whelk at 6:14 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


Also, I can read the grar news of the day or people's thoughts on the new iPad anywhere; I don't need Twitter to serve as a glorified RSS feed for that stuff. I need Twitter for the weirdly collaborative, absurdist headspace it gets me into.
posted by limeonaire at 6:15 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


Along those lines, actually, that's part of why I miss the recent Twitter activity page on MetaFilter. It let me do a quick scan down the page to find the delightful weirdo absurdists in the crowd.
posted by limeonaire at 6:18 PM on March 7, 2012 [2 favorites]


It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.”

Boy, shame she didn't get it when she first thought about it because she would've beat the guys who started Twitter in 2006, 6 years ago.
posted by nevercalm at 6:24 PM on March 7, 2012 [2 favorites]


Boy, shame she didn't get it when she first thought about it because she would've beat the guys who started Twitter in 2006, 6 years ago.

So if she had said it took her forever to join twitter, would you be calling her on how twitter didn't exist at the beginning of time?
posted by billyfleetwood at 6:37 PM on March 7, 2012 [7 favorites]


As long as we're sharing awesome Twitter profiles, let me highlight zizek_ebooks. I have no idea if they're actually things Slavoj Zizek has said, but you can't beat things like:

The Christian motto “All men are brothers,” however, means ALSO that “Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT (EVEN) MEN"
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:41 PM on March 7, 2012 [4 favorites]


Nope, would've been way better because she wouldn't have delineated a ridiculous timeframe. "It took me 25 years to join Facebook." Why not just say something amorphous like "forever," which any pedantic asshole wouldn't question?
posted by nevercalm at 6:42 PM on March 7, 2012


I don't know who she is, but I like her style.
posted by horsemuth at 7:18 PM on March 7, 2012


dogboner spergers fart, an eternal golden braid

man when the asteroid finally smacks into us i am gonna be waiting at ground zero like Melancholia
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:29 PM on March 7, 2012 [5 favorites]


this is pretty cool, it's the only time ive seen someone accurately articulate 'getting' the internet (or at least the tiny pocket of it that i inhabit)
posted by p3on at 8:24 PM on March 7, 2012 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: Any Pedantic Asshole
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 8:29 PM on March 7, 2012


I spend way too much time on the internet and Twitter and I have no fucking clue who these people are.
posted by bardic at 8:34 PM on March 7, 2012


I have no fucking clue who these people are.

Well sure. I'm pretty sure they're not well known yet, on twitter or otherwise. But I think a decent case is made in the FPP for why they might be worth paying attention to.
posted by naju at 8:47 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


As long as we're sharing awesome Twitter profiles, let me highlight zizek_ebooks.

I really like PLT_Zizek: "The desire to perform ever more checks at compile time - is it not a perverse jouissance with the goal of never having to run a program?"
posted by kenko at 9:43 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


and people have the nerve to call franzen a fucking hipster
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 9:56 PM on March 7, 2012


Metafilter's own Powerful Religious Baby Tricia Lockwood!

She's awesome. So is greg nog. Some of the funniest people on the internet.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:18 PM on March 7, 2012


One of the most percipient political observers I know of is the fake President Bartlet (of The West Wing fame) Twitter account.

It's gotten a bit less witty during the current election cycle, but it earns my retweets pretty frequently.

Also, George Takei (or his publicist) run marvelous Facebook and Twitter accounts. Also the only celebrity who's ever responded to one of my tweets, which is pretty cool.
posted by schmod at 10:26 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


another of my fave things about twitter is how if you say the wrong thing about a bot a person will threaten to injure your genitals
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 10:46 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


As long as we're sharing awesome Twitter profiles, let me highlight zizek_ebooks. I have no idea if they're actually things Slavoj Zizek has said, but you can't beat things like:
From the feed:
Is the typical World Wide Web surfer today not more and more a monad with no direct windows onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacr
Which appeals to me since I know what all those terms mean! However, I don't really get the long term appeal of this stuff. Whenever anyone links to some "awesome" twitter feed, it's all just random randomness. I can appreciate it for the few seconds I'm looking at it, but I wouldn't want to spend all day reading random randomness for the sheer random randomality of it all.

The other major aspect of twitter seems to be entirely about whatever random uninteresting thoughts come out of the heads of random, uninteresting celebrities.
posted by delmoi at 2:59 AM on March 8, 2012 [1 favorite]


What I love about Twitter is the small percentage of users who use it as a performance platform, as Lockwood does, floating atop a sea of spambots and SEO assholes.

This is my favorite tweet ever.
posted by trunk muffins at 9:14 AM on March 8, 2012 [2 favorites]


I really like PLT_Zizek

Oh, that's awesome! Along the same lines, I've been enjoying DevOps Borat.
posted by A dead Quaker at 10:22 AM on March 8, 2012


I love the voices she makes with the punctuation
posted by Shasta at 4:27 PM on March 8, 2012


Just came here to post this and some links to her poetry. She is great.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:49 AM on March 11, 2012


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