literary twitter feeds good and bad

Marcel Proust ftw.

Although the actual Proust is easily in my top ten 20th Century authors who would have been awful on Twitter.

yes i'm being a bit challopsy there -- but i'd been trying to read FW "properly" since i wz a pretentious teen and not really feeling it, and really did start to enjoy it more via the twitterfeed

(beyond the DO-YOU-SEE mythological elements, i'm not persuaded the HCE/ALP stuff is actually that interesting? i've definitely never read anyone writing anything attention-catching about it, once they got past weightily noting that it's there…)

I'm pretty sure I have read some good pieces on them when I was doing Joyce at university but I'm really straining to think what they were - my own specialism was on the typographical elements b/c everyone says it's a very auditory book so I wanted to return to it as a written artefact. Though doing a whiskey tasting surrounded by Dubliners reading from the text during Bloomsday has definitely made me appreciate the phonics more. Also moving around the geography of 'Howth Castle & Environs' kind of helps give you a sense of them existing as the land. Obviously you shouldn't *have* to visit somewhere to understand a text, and I don't think you do in this case, but it helped me to move it out of theoretical analysis and into lived and shared experience.

yr humble author's contribution: https://twitter.com/SchoonerTweeter

(also a huge fan of howl tweeter)

i've said it before and i'll say it again

literary and experimental twitter is the only good thing twitter does

for everything else there are better solutions/avenues

this was fun while it lasted: https://twitter.com/libraryofbabel_

it moved elsewhere, though. more info: https://libraryofbabel.info

twitter does many good things and many bad. it would be easy to spend time in one part of it and assume the rest was bad if it didn't meet your interests.

how diplomatic

unlike twitter

Did it here (not exactly easy to search)

"Lit -Twitter"

In addition to what I posted before:

- I'd forgotten the Empson account - my bio on twitter is a quote from that. There was this bitchyness around Oxford poets and Auden that was funny. Shame but the person who ran it kept repeating a lot of tweets so idk wasn't fussed when that stopped.
- The Proust account is a good re-working - gets to an essence of his long sentences to tweet level. The person who runs it clearly works at it. Rhys also v good.
- JH Prynne is bets of the recent poetry batch except there isn't much lately. Re-tweeted a couple of things just recently to hopefully wake whoever up.

Mark I see what you mean around Arcades Porject but like the Finnegans Wake I haven't read it so in the sense that you can find something of the flavour in it - could be the wrong take so...Both accounts are so so - ignore for days then something amazing pops up. The habit of getting the initial quote of a passage in the Arcades and then a whole excerpt does annoy over time. Certainly feel like I'll get around FW as a book, whereas before it felt either forbidding or so much quackery.

LIKE TO SEE:

Accounts on Musil, Celine and Platonov.

celine as twitter troll would be a tonne of fun

but it would probably be taken down super fast once he gets to the racist remarks

https://twitter.com/FW_WOTD

I need to learn new words so #vGdTick

joyce finnegans wake: much the best way to encounter this book, which is basically a vast compendium of literary-literary-linguistic micro-gags and puns and NOT MUCH MORE

― mark s, Wednesday, August 24, 2016 6:37 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i been following this one for a while and its utterly indistinguishable from a lot of the bots i follow, joyce was the original bot my phd thesis

Sappho: https://twitter.com/sapphobot

came back to reiterate how great the 12 multi-milton feeds are, esp.as they sometimes get in weirdly appropriate synch with one another and the world

(milton often wrote good lines who knew ect ect)

because I am a stone cold bitch https://t.co/kahsnvagMh

— S. E. Hinton (@se4realhinton) January 24, 2018

@DailyYeats for alternating snippets of his poems viz

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

— W. B. Yeats (@DailyYeats) December 30, 2018

and

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;

— W. B. Yeats (@DailyYeats) December 30, 2018

with such important commentary as:

The Weirdest Pizza Toppings Ever - https://t.co/cmIsceU7Z8 pic.twitter.com/tF5lY9Mgp3

— W. B. Yeats (@DailyYeats) December 30, 2018

and

Films You Wish Disney Would Make - https://t.co/FG4eT8ppSE pic.twitter.com/pox40bqsP9

— W. B. Yeats (@DailyYeats) December 30, 2018

lol:

There is a Garda speed check car going around Sligo.

— W. B. Yeats (@DailyYeats) March 5, 2019

pepys on pen (every time): FUCK THIS GUY

To the office, where all the morning sitting and did discover three or four fresh instances of Sir W. Pen’s old cheating dissembling tricks, he being as false a fellow as ever was born.

— Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) March 8, 2019

Tasty, and also I would rather receive tweets about pizza toppings and the speed check car than solemn vapid versification of those Dec. 30 offerings.

Oops they're all four Dec. 30!

Well WB knew Dec.30 was end of the bolt/time for a change.

Kinda like this one, even though it hasn't taken off:

https://twitter.com/GenjiMonoBot

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

— Jean Rhys (@MsJeanRhys) March 18, 2020

Use your intelligence, can’t you?

— Samuel Beckett (@samuelbbeckett) August 14, 2021

]
]queen
]
]

— Sappho Bot (@sapphobot) August 14, 2021

(my love miltonbot has shut up shop for good i think, and all sanity departed the site with it)

s/b lovely, but why not declare my passion for all to know

joyce finnegans wake: much the best way to encounter this book

I have always remembered this opinion and, having spent many hours reading certain passages of FW with fanatical closeness, I admit that it has a kernel of truth.

yeats pizza topping tweet is still all time SITO

Paying my respects.

rereading "classics" of American literature & have to concede, much prose by truly great writers (Poe, Melville, James) is actually just awkward, inept, hit-or-miss, something like stream-of-consciousness in an era before revising was relatively easy. oy!--sorry to have assigned.

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) April 12, 2022

Joyce Carol Roaste

Whether or not you like James' sentences the idea that he (or any of them, but especially him) wrote that way because he didn't have a word processor is hilarious.

maybe she was feeling hangry and fired off a grumpy tweet & reconsidered later after she had something to eat

Lots of classics could have used an editor

i like the reply guy who boldly claims this is why *all* these authors read better in spanish

this is also what i think now (i don't read spanish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46XqDu_54iA

will her tweets be better now that there’s an edit function??

It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.

— Simone Weil (@simone_says_en) July 4, 2022

Milk, rolls and chocolate.

Franz Kafka, 1916.

— The sunny side of Franz Kafka (@AmschelKavka) December 18, 2022

Any good literary mastodon feeds out there?

Kafka would definitely toot after that shopping list —rolling laughing crying emoji X 3

Re: mastodon. Only joined for now, and have followed some ppl that I found through twitter/lit twitter but not gone beyond that.

Wouldn't know of this poetry if it wasn't for people sharing in grief (died a couple of days ago):

Gboyega and I met in Jan 2020, at a reading in a weird, tiny jazz club. Our fee was whatever got taken at the door, so afterwards we each took our £5 and hit the pub. It was always a joy to see him - he was so funny, and so brilliant. This poem is one of my favourites by anyone. pic.twitter.com/jsypaMeeLU

— Susannah Dickey (@SusannahDickey) September 1, 2023

A fund is going to be established for low-income black writers

Please donate & share ~ Gboyega Odubanjo – beloved son, brother, friend
https://t.co/mzAgfw2hmQ

— Amy Key (@msamykey) September 1, 2023