social media – Postcards from Barton Springs

@OedipusGothplex 2bornt2b? Can one tweet beyond the mental coil?

Tweet based on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as translated in Twitterature

All that time wasted in high school. Struggling through the purgatory of Milton’s Paradise Lost. And those Shakespeare plays, one after another. All those sexual innuendos eighth graders would love if they were not penned in an obscure archaic tongue.

Top those off with Melville’s Moby Dick. Actually, I was pretty impressed with Melville. In fact, he was such a good writer, he even managed to make whale hunting fascinating. But, he did go on and on. And on and on. Completion would have interfered with my telephone time, of utmost importance at that stage in life. Midway through I was desperate. I finally invoked the every-fifth-chapter approach. Amazingly, employing this arbitrary and brutal form of editing allowed me to follow the plot enough to regurgitate meaty, quasi-intelligent answers to Mrs. Masterson’s dreadfully detail-demanding discussion questions.

Why, oh why, wasn’t Twitterature available then? So concise, condensed to a point no slicing-and-dicing editor at Readers’s Digest could have imagined. Written in language high school students can comprehend.

@AliceInTheSkyWithDiamonds This land is terrorized by the Queen of Hearts. She’s a card. Wouldn’t it be funny if I just destroyed her army by shuffling them?

Tweet based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as translated in Twitterature

For the old-fashioned, tweets come across as texts on your cellphones. Each tweet an author chirps – including the identifying “from” name as in @OediupusGothplex – cannot contain more than 140 characters. And that’s counting punctuation and spaces. This extreme brevity means they can be scrolled through rapidly, unlike the unabridged Moby Dick.

@EarlyBloomer69 All his intello friends are coming over all the time. Borrrrrring. All they do is talk about books.

Tweet based on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as translated in Twitterature

Imagine, each assigned tome compressed into a mere 20 tweets or less. The book’s editor at Viking/Penguin, Will Hammond wrote:

Say the word Twitter to a book lover and they will probably roll their eyes at you and sigh. Some of the greatest works of literature… are long, sometimes difficult and often challenging. Twitter is the opposite: a free-for-all of voices clamouring for a split-second’s attention with zero quality control. This is what makes Twitterature so funny: huge books made ridiculously small; great stories told in silly voices. Like all good pastiche, Twitterature skewers the original work with pin-point accuracy – mocking its grandiosity, exposing absurd coincidences of plotting, parodying its subject’s ticks, slips and oddities.

Twitterature is not new. It was written by two University of Chicago students, @AcimanandRensin, or Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, in 2009. The book was written so long ago even @AcimanandRensin no longer tweets about it.

But I’m a little slow in discovering it, probably because I didn’t start tweeting for clients until three years ago. A fellow blogger tweeted about the book from London only this morning. And, now, able to comprehend tweet-speak at this late point in my career, I am appreciative of the humor. Coupled with Will Cuppy’s versions of history found in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody to which Bluebird led me, my academic path and my grade-point average would have been impacted radically.

@TheRealDesperateHousewife My life is awful. I’m going shopping. I want to buy a whole bunch on credit that I can’t afford, and then declare bankruptcy.

Tweet based on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as translated in Twitterature

Can’t believe I waded through the whole thing in French. A Twitteral translation would have made it so easy.

You might wonder, if I’m so social-media proficient now, why am I blogging about Twitterature instead of tweeting? Restricting my fingers to 140 characters is work. Blogging allows me the recreational therapy of being loose-finger-tipped. The above paragraphs would add up to way more tweets than Twitterature‘s entire version of Moby Dick.

The authors of Twitterature were considerate enough of those unaccustomed to the tweet language to generally write in complete words and sentences with few of the widely accepted Twitter shortcuts, and they actually grasp the literature they harpoon. According to Hammond:

…what makes this little collection particularly enjoyable, is that the joke falls just as heavily (well, probably more so) on Twitter. In a face-off between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and his Twitter avatar ‘BigMac’, it’s fairly clear who comes off looking worse. So, in a curious way, Twitterature is just as much a celebration of the classics as it is a mockery of them.

Do you think @AcimanandRensin composed the entire volume of Twitterature on their cellphones?

Reflecting on her four years of blogging, author C.M. Mayo writes:

Blogging is whatever you want it to be. And that morphs. I don’t worry about this so much as I once did. I just blog.

C.M. Mayo’s blog led my daughter and me to the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference, which we now hope to make an annual pilgrimage. But the conference also led me to wallow in the bog of blogging.

Google-Maps-Envelopes — A simple posting of very few words about a proposed product for preventing postmen from getting lost via Google map destination envelopes is highly appealing.

I have been blogging eight weeks since San Miguel, and find myself inappropriately writing feature-length stories – a rant about John Edge’s claim that Austin had the best breakfast tacos in the U.S. turned into a more than a thousand-word restaurant review – obviously unsuitable for the attention span of anyone surfing the web. I remain verbose, even though my favorite post of mine let the photo tell all and I am drawn to quick-read postings, such as Swiss Miss’ goggle map envelopes I discovered through a Mayo post.

My blog also has a tendency to let politics slip in – Texas produces such rich fodder for ridicule – and I have even fired volleys at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Unwise for a freelance writer trying to make a living in Texas. Biting one’s tongue while blogging is as difficult as doing so at well-lubricated cocktail parties. Author Margaret Atwood describes this problem on the New York Review of Books Blog:

Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said. But it’s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth—or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button—you can’t take them back.

I fear blogging is a distraction diverting me from more serious writing projects. Mayo dismisses this as not problematic (but she, of course, has several successful books under her belt):

I’m finding it increasingly less interesting to even think about querying newspapers and magazines. I’ve written for the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Mexico, Inside Mexico, and the like, and until I started my blog, I assumed I would continue to do so. But I prefer to put my effort into writing books (long form) and blogging (short form). Maybe I’ll rethink this. Sometime.

As Atwood began to build her website in 2009, her publishers were nervous:

“That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Yet Atwood has embraced fully the technological advances affecting how writers communicate. (I only wish while in San Antonio as part of Gemini Ink Autograph Series, she had convinced her friend, Colleen Grissom, to start a blog. Reading things Colleen “shouldn’t have said” would be so entertaining.) At the Texas Book Festival in the fall of 2009, Atwood spoke extensively of her progress from blogging to tweeting. She regards her followers as though they are “33,000 precocious grandchildren.”

On the subject of followers, Mayo shared one of her poetic tweets – “a tweet can be a form of poetry (twiku) or fiction (twiction)” – in “Twitter Is:”

@c_m_mayo: Following no one, having no followers, she was like the woman in the back closet, grumbling at the blankets, existing on mothballed air

There’s no period at the end of that sentence because I’d used up my allotment of characters. Fster than a wlnut cn roll dwn t roof of a hen house, were gng 2 see t nd of cvlizatn

One of Mayo’s tweeters defined tweeting as:

@lisaborders: Twitter is a message in a bottle that sometimes gets answered

If novelists such as Atwood and Mayo can confine their thoughts to 140 characters, surely there is hope for me to learn to curb my blogging output before my few followers dwindle to none. Then again, here I am with a 700-word entry about the critical need for brevity in blogging.

As one “grandchild” of Margaret Atwood tweeted: “I love it when old ladies blog.”

Note Added on April 28: The Daily Beast‘s “Can the Author Survive the Internet?”

James Wood…. said he finds looking through readers’ comments on blogs to be akin to a descent into Hades. He added that his friend Andrew Sullivan is buckling under the strain of writing three hundred blog posts per week, which has interfered with his ability to concentrate on anything longer than a few paragraphs.

I like readers’ comments (of course, mine are rather limited).

Note added on May 3: Margaret Atwood’s speech upon her acceptance of the American PEN Award.

Note added on July 13: C.M. Mayo now has a second blog for those seriously researching the “French Intervention” in Mexico and also provides podcasts online of some of her presentations on both her writing and writing in general.

Note Added on September 5: Here I am a few months later managing facebook fan pages, responding to yelpers and, yes, even tweeting for a restaurant client.

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