Two articles and some musing on twitter
Daniel Mendelsohn, with whom I fell in love when reading his The Lost a few years ago, is on twitter. It's really weird to follow on twitter a writer you love, but the twitter thing is weird, anyway,when it comes to "famous" people you have never interacted with.
I don't tweet myself a lot, even though I was drawn to twitter, at first, for its rule of "up to 140 characters". I saw it as a challenge of concision - a tool that Tacitus would have liked!- and a funny way to come up with neat aphorisms. That was before I realised that some twittos just mircoblogged and used text-message language to "cheat"! The art of aphorism is lost on so many people...
I mostly follow media accounts and academic accounts, in order to get links to interesting articles. I also follow a few French politicians, because this is election year. So basically I use twitter for the news, to get information. It is my very won AFP or Reuters. And twitter can also become a forum when there's an event people all over the world tweet about and you just follow and feed the hashtag said event is about. It's fascinating to see twitter turning into an agora then.
So, basically my use is rather impersonal, and I don't really consider twitter as a "social network". There are exceptions of course. Some LJ friends are on twitter so it's another way to be connected. It's like bumping into someone you know, while walking in the street, and stopping for a moment to say hello or have little chat. I also follow a few artists in order to get updates on their works (like Moffat, Rufus Wainwright, Emily Barker, Bear McCreary, etc...), most of them are performers so twitter is a way to know about albums or gigs.
And of course there's Tom Mcrae, who fits in the latter category but is also someone I have met in RL and with whom I sometimes have interactions online. We aren't friends but, after all those years, exchanging words with Tom on the internet doesn't feel like crossing the line. He's familiar enough to me in a way that is similar to my connection with certain distant LJ readers who are on my flist. In other words, there's nothing "sacred" about his online persona. I see him as an equal.
It's another story when it comes to Umberto Eco or Daniel Mendelsohn! I wouldn't dare to reply to one of their tweets...
Why following writers on twitter? To get a glimpse of the person behing the books? Maybe. To extend the connection you once fell when reading their work. Probably. To witness a work in progress and perhaps make out the backstage of creation? Hopefully.
But there's also the fact that we expect them to shine, to use their words mojo within an up-to-140-characters post. Is it possible?
Umberto Eco uses twitter in an interesting way, juggling with Italian and English (but so do I, with French and English), making aphorisms and, above all, bypassing the rule with bursts of multiple tweets, which isn't very refreshing per se, except that, the way he does it, the ending part comes first so his speech scrolls down and you can read his tweets normally, from top to bottom, without losing the right syntax! It means that he has to prepare the whole thing before he starts tweeting.
So far, Mendelsohn's tweets are unimpressive. He seems to use twitter as a social network or as a newsletter for his articles.
By the way, he posted links to two of them, lately:
The first one is a travel tale, titled A Modern Odyssey, in which he tells the Mediterranean cruise he took with his father, following Odysseus' steps. I especially liked the ending of the article:
"But maybe it doesn’t matter how closely you follow in Odysseus’s footsteps, in the end. More than anything, The Odyssey is a story about stories-stories about Odysseus, so long missing in action; stories that Odysseus hears; stories that, often to save his skin, he tells; stories that we all tell about ourselves, often without knowing it: the canny businesswoman who becomes a little girl again with her dad, the family whose Mediterranean reunion seeks to palliate a recent loss, the scientist who sits breakfasting pleasantly with the executive who dismantled the company to which he gave his life.
And then there was the story that I couldn’t have made up if I were writing a novel instead of a travel article. One day, while I was sunbathing, I noticed that the elderly gentleman next to me had quite a scar on his leg; when he noticed me noticing it, he smiled. “There’s a story to that scar,” he said; I settled in to listen. The scar, he began, was why he was on the cruise. He was Dutch, and during the final, most dreadful winter of World War II, when he was a teenager and people in Holland were eating tulip bulbs to stay alive, he went out, weak and underfed as he was, to chop some wood; unable to wield the heavy axe properly, he ended up swinging it into his own leg. For weeks he hovered near death. What saved him was The Odyssey. A family friend who was a professor of Greek would come every day and, to distract the teenager from his pain, would teach him bits of Greek and recite passages from Homer’s epic of wonder and pain. “I can still recite parts of it in Greek!” he exclaimed; and did just that, right there on the deck of the Corinthian II, nearly seven decades later. He grew quiet and said, “I made a vow that, before I died, I would see what Odysseus saw.”
The stories we tell! This was why, when the captain announced that the Corinth Canal had been closed by disgruntled strikers, and that we’d therefore have to skip Ithaca-skip Ithaca!-in order to get back to Athens in time for our flights, I don’t think anyone really minded. For Ithaca-as the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy writes in his famous poem by that name-represents the gift of a “beautiful journey.” If the island itself disappoints, you’re still “rich with all you’ve gotten on the way.”"
.
The second, Unsinkable, is a long article published on The New Yorker. It's about The Titanic, and of course, being a classicist, he studies the event as a Myth.
So I follow him on twitter, but I know the brilliance is elsewhere, and the Mendelsohn I love isn't the tweeting man who exposes himself online, but the one who reveals himself when telling stories.
I don't tweet myself a lot, even though I was drawn to twitter, at first, for its rule of "up to 140 characters". I saw it as a challenge of concision - a tool that Tacitus would have liked!- and a funny way to come up with neat aphorisms. That was before I realised that some twittos just mircoblogged and used text-message language to "cheat"! The art of aphorism is lost on so many people...
I mostly follow media accounts and academic accounts, in order to get links to interesting articles. I also follow a few French politicians, because this is election year. So basically I use twitter for the news, to get information. It is my very won AFP or Reuters. And twitter can also become a forum when there's an event people all over the world tweet about and you just follow and feed the hashtag said event is about. It's fascinating to see twitter turning into an agora then.
So, basically my use is rather impersonal, and I don't really consider twitter as a "social network". There are exceptions of course. Some LJ friends are on twitter so it's another way to be connected. It's like bumping into someone you know, while walking in the street, and stopping for a moment to say hello or have little chat. I also follow a few artists in order to get updates on their works (like Moffat, Rufus Wainwright, Emily Barker, Bear McCreary, etc...), most of them are performers so twitter is a way to know about albums or gigs.
And of course there's Tom Mcrae, who fits in the latter category but is also someone I have met in RL and with whom I sometimes have interactions online. We aren't friends but, after all those years, exchanging words with Tom on the internet doesn't feel like crossing the line. He's familiar enough to me in a way that is similar to my connection with certain distant LJ readers who are on my flist. In other words, there's nothing "sacred" about his online persona. I see him as an equal.
It's another story when it comes to Umberto Eco or Daniel Mendelsohn! I wouldn't dare to reply to one of their tweets...
Why following writers on twitter? To get a glimpse of the person behing the books? Maybe. To extend the connection you once fell when reading their work. Probably. To witness a work in progress and perhaps make out the backstage of creation? Hopefully.
But there's also the fact that we expect them to shine, to use their words mojo within an up-to-140-characters post. Is it possible?
Umberto Eco uses twitter in an interesting way, juggling with Italian and English (but so do I, with French and English), making aphorisms and, above all, bypassing the rule with bursts of multiple tweets, which isn't very refreshing per se, except that, the way he does it, the ending part comes first so his speech scrolls down and you can read his tweets normally, from top to bottom, without losing the right syntax! It means that he has to prepare the whole thing before he starts tweeting.
So far, Mendelsohn's tweets are unimpressive. He seems to use twitter as a social network or as a newsletter for his articles.
By the way, he posted links to two of them, lately:
The first one is a travel tale, titled A Modern Odyssey, in which he tells the Mediterranean cruise he took with his father, following Odysseus' steps. I especially liked the ending of the article:
"But maybe it doesn’t matter how closely you follow in Odysseus’s footsteps, in the end. More than anything, The Odyssey is a story about stories-stories about Odysseus, so long missing in action; stories that Odysseus hears; stories that, often to save his skin, he tells; stories that we all tell about ourselves, often without knowing it: the canny businesswoman who becomes a little girl again with her dad, the family whose Mediterranean reunion seeks to palliate a recent loss, the scientist who sits breakfasting pleasantly with the executive who dismantled the company to which he gave his life.
And then there was the story that I couldn’t have made up if I were writing a novel instead of a travel article. One day, while I was sunbathing, I noticed that the elderly gentleman next to me had quite a scar on his leg; when he noticed me noticing it, he smiled. “There’s a story to that scar,” he said; I settled in to listen. The scar, he began, was why he was on the cruise. He was Dutch, and during the final, most dreadful winter of World War II, when he was a teenager and people in Holland were eating tulip bulbs to stay alive, he went out, weak and underfed as he was, to chop some wood; unable to wield the heavy axe properly, he ended up swinging it into his own leg. For weeks he hovered near death. What saved him was The Odyssey. A family friend who was a professor of Greek would come every day and, to distract the teenager from his pain, would teach him bits of Greek and recite passages from Homer’s epic of wonder and pain. “I can still recite parts of it in Greek!” he exclaimed; and did just that, right there on the deck of the Corinthian II, nearly seven decades later. He grew quiet and said, “I made a vow that, before I died, I would see what Odysseus saw.”
The stories we tell! This was why, when the captain announced that the Corinth Canal had been closed by disgruntled strikers, and that we’d therefore have to skip Ithaca-skip Ithaca!-in order to get back to Athens in time for our flights, I don’t think anyone really minded. For Ithaca-as the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy writes in his famous poem by that name-represents the gift of a “beautiful journey.” If the island itself disappoints, you’re still “rich with all you’ve gotten on the way.”"
.
The second, Unsinkable, is a long article published on The New Yorker. It's about The Titanic, and of course, being a classicist, he studies the event as a Myth.
So I follow him on twitter, but I know the brilliance is elsewhere, and the Mendelsohn I love isn't the tweeting man who exposes himself online, but the one who reveals himself when telling stories.