Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.
TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE
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@WarmCigarette by Chimney
Genre: prosopopeian mise en phlegm
Since the late 90s and early 00s, following the demise of smoking in bars, cigarettes have become demodé. The waning of smokers has left four estranged islands in its wake: losers in their 20s who will never try a cigarette, exiles huddled together outside in the cold, those of us who have been addicted to nicorette for ten years (i.e. the editor of this journal) and the iron lung. Chimney’s feed reconnects with more philosophical concerns, embodying both substantialist and metonymous voices of the Marlborbo at various points in the feed. What’s more, Chimney applies solipsism to the act of smoking—to exist is to only know one’s own smoking— and then projects it onto the identities of its followers. Editorial favorites include: “7 steps to happiness: 7) cigarettes” “Aquarius: You know-it-all piece of shit. Your busy cigarette smoking schedule will make you late for everything this week, as per usual.” “Virgo: If everything needs to be perfect how come your life is always in complete disarray? Fuck off and smoke cigarettes.” “Registration plate ideas: BL4CK LUN6”. This is an awesome feed.
@retsoor by Jason Sebastian Russo
Genre: subtweeting at god
Russo’s feed thrives on tension and surreality, all set against a bloody backdrop of either the great mystery of life and/or a hot girl with tattoos and probably bangs. Through mixed metaphors, Russo transports us deeper and deeper into longing with each turn of the tweet. Smell the acidity of a box of white wine or the love lurking deep within the ball pit of a McDonald’s on rt 9, Poughkeepsie. “the typo in my genetic code compelled me to try to email your shih tzu w a microwave” he tweets. “just sat back & let karma ravage your face “ he tweets again. “bathed you in healing enzymes under a kaopectate sky” “made love to you under a giant warm crepe” “the two of us in an inverted arms race of low self esteem” he tweets again and again and a-fucking-gain.
@spencermadsen by Spencer Madsen
Genre: self-doubtcore
Translated from the Arabic by Madsen, this feed contextualizes doubt’s occupation of the self. Through these tweets, Madsen connects us to the earliest known feelings of penis-disbelief (“just remembered I dated a girl who called my penis pietro, feel like Regret would be a better name though”), cosmic isolation (“i still identify as single & lonely even when I’m in a relationship, Try It”), cosmic apartness (“is anyone on twitter right now, or are my tweets bad”) and cosmic monkhood (“a cool trick is to have sex with somebody and then watch as they slowly cease to exist”), yet the dialectic tension between them is utterly contemporary.
@BradListi by Brad Listi
Genre: postparanoiac speculative Californian
Had Los Angeles been a male body instead of a city, had that body been injected with the promise of never having its own brand of tennis shoes and then violently crammed into a 12-inch laptop, the result might be something like Listi’s feed. Listi juxtaposes Leidnerian-style tableaux (“Gwyneth Paltrow in a XXL Hanes Beefy T, weeping in an Old Navy warehouse full of blousy tanktops”), shame (“Quietly called myself a ‘whore’ after posting, then immediately deleting a Facebook status update involving what I had for breakfast.”), parenting anecdotes (“Daughter just defecated like a lumberjack. Now saying ‘poo-poo’ repeatedly in a forlorn way.”) and the big questions (What the fuck is a ‘handling fee’?) While some ‘weird tweeters’ might be dissuaded by Listi’s formal use of punctuation and capital letters, the editors of this journal feel relieved to have a compatriot in syntactic formality. We wonder if, like us, Listi has lost sleep debating a switch to the hipper “no caps, no periods” style.
@santinodela by Santino Dela
Genre: wild spewing tweeter comes of age
If you miss dropping acid and fucking on roofs, you should follow Santino Dela. If you want to go to jail for the revolution, but, like, not leave your house, this is the feed for you. Do be forewarned: Dela is prolific, and his tweets are likely to become the wallpaper of your feed, upon which everone else’s tweets are overlaid. But if you love this feed for its neon, wide-eyed wonder (and sometimes world-wearyiness), it’s a feed that will love you back. The editors wish to see Dela juxtapose 10-40 of his tweets at a time paratactically on one MS Word doc and call this a poem. Maybe the poem will be titled: MY DAD IS MY SON or TAKE A SHIT IN MY HANDS or I WAS INDUCED BY BILL COSBY or THE MYTH OF THE LOST ALIEN CHILDREN or THE FUNNY THING IS THAT WE ARE JUST PEOPLE WHO HAPPEN TO ALSO EXIST DIGITALLY ACROSS TIME AND SPACE or CORK MY DICK. We think it will be a rad one.
@jewishpoet by Stay Gold Pony
Genre: gentle psychic fracture of a pizza-eater quietly building a bomb on a bus with no Plathian undertones
Stay Gold Pony is definitely the captain, in our eyes, of the pizzatweeters—that sect of tweeter who lives and dies by the pizza. This feed doesn’t even tweet about pizza very often—definitely not as much as other pizzatweeters—but its tone is very ‘pizzatweeter-y’ with a touch of strychnine. The question of Stay Gold Pony’s feed seems less focused on What is the meaning of being? and more How do we deal with it? “As I open this fruit leather and begin eating it the dogs quiet down”. “i rise with the sun and greet my haters respectfully: ‘good morning to you’”. “dont worry dude i got us covered with my emergency stash *pulls out stack of third eye blind cds*” Following Stay Gold Pony is fun. And if you follow a lot of pizzatweeters, you should be following this feed for context.
Tags: NYRT
I enjoyed this, Melissa. I like your reviewing style.
feel like your primary brand is kindness and generosity.
feel like your secondary brand is youth.
feel like your tertiary brand is r&b.
those are winning brands.
you cannot go wrong with those brands.
if you spike those brands with organic self-loathing (not forced, but organic) i think you will have some winning tweets.
i still don’t know what a tinychat is :)
thank you, Melissa. in typical self-conscious style, i already edited away my comments about myself =/ haha… thank you for your encouragement. a tinychat is a small franco-american feline.
rescinding my ‘like’ if the joke goes
@spencermadsen:disqus i see that you just tweeted! how does it feel now that you’ve been canonized? any added pressure?
@stephen_tully_dierks:disqus just looked at your feed. your tweets are already really strong.
you are very kind, Melissa. you are good at poetry, tweeting, blogpost-writing, and i imagine many other things
thank you for the support melissa. feel like i have to step up my panic game now
I liked this Melissa. :)
I like this article? Will this be a daily, weekly, or monthly installment?
Thank you! That’s going to depend on my levels of laziness, hunger for attention and time. But I foresee a monthly “journal”
i feel honored to be included in the first ‘new york review of tweets’ hehe. i also feel like i can’t thank you enough for this melissa. you’re an amazing person and this is a true boost. it was a pleasure meeting you and i hope to see you again sometime in the future.
awesome, thanks for writing this, hope there’s more
Broder! remember when you tweeted about michael jordan having to listen to string cheese incident in his hummer? That’s when I decided to tweet in earnest. Thanks, honored.
These are cool feeds, and monthly exposure to the editor’s boosting would be fine. Two questions:
a) There are many smart, funny, pleasurably provocative feeds — far too many for me sensibly to follow (that is, to let sink in). Of course, one can “follow” dozens (hundreds) of feeds and just scroll past them on one’s twitter-home, just like one can have dozens or hundreds of “friends” on facebook.
How do other people handle the super-abundance of capable tweet feeds? Different accounts? (–like one for concepticules, one for politics, one for humor, one for acquaintance-chat, and so on.) Or do most people just cruise onto and off of feeds ad hoc, as something catches the eye?
b) What’s the current ‘reply’ ethos?
Of course, abuse is reasonably to be ‘blocked as spam’ (meaning twitmo if one sends another tweet to that account), and, equally of course, people treat personally neutral messages as ‘abusive’ if they don’t understand them, and, even more of course, people who don’t think of themselves as rancorous but who indulge in unprovoked hostility find hostility in response to their own ‘abusive’. That’s all normal on the playground and in the boardroom and everywhere else. People are hard-wired to be asymmetrically sensitive.
But do most people who tweet want conversational interaction (other than ‘thumb’s up!’)?
Feel honored to be included in the first volume of the NYRT. Feel compelled to admit that I do indeed feel conflicted about my use of capital letters and punctuation in my Twitter feed. I stand naked before you, HTML Giant.
Mel next time yr in the Chi I would like to buy you dinner is this a rude way to see ths
Wonderful parody. Thanks.
Good morning deadgod!
lol you saying ‘editor’s boosting’
Ok, going to approach your questions:
a) Everyone is different in their approach, but here’s mine: I don’t like to follow too many people b/c then the feed moves too fast for me. I prefer to savor. I mostly follow people who I have met in the flesh and whose company I enjoy in the flesh–provided I also enjoy their feeds (I’ve unfollowed quite a few lovely humans who only tweet news, links, promo stuff, b/c I don’t wanna see that in my twitter feed. Save that shit for facebook. Facebook is for your salon.com link; twitter is for doughnuts, Jonestown, electric light, orgasms, roast beef, self-hatred, imho). I don’t follow any news organizations or literary journals or blogs–not even htmlgiant or la petite zine. I know where they are. If I want to see what’s going on there I can find them (also, Dan Lichtenberg and I are @lapetitezine so I don’t need to read my own tweets). That being said, there are a few people I love irl who are terrible at twitter, like my darling sister, very hashtag-y, who I will not unfollow because I love them too much. There are also a number of people I have chosen to follow, having never met in real life, because I really dig their feeds and feel some sort of chemistry with them. Some of these people (@retsoor, @kristenisk, @lorianlong, @ryanpcall) I’ve then become close to irl, or over email, as a result of twitter. So for me it’s a confluence of factors. You will find your way! Feel it out. Follow, unfollow, and let your intuition be your guide!
b) I think this is totally an individual preference thing. I personally don’t @ ppl b/c i am ocd, a Virgo (“Virgo: If everything needs to be perfect how come your life is always in complete disarray? Fuck off and smoke cigarettes.”) and am trying to impose order and control in an entropic world, where control is an illusion, by keeping my feed pristine. Also, I don’t need to doubt myself any more than I already do…and public conversations lend themselves to self-doubt…at least for me.
Well, I mean ‘boost’ in the best way. I think in in-depth courses, the professor should always be a fan of what she or he is teaching (surveys are different), and, were I ever to be paid for my analysis, I’d never review a book I didn’t at least mostly like. I want to be informed through enthusiasm, you know?
There are many feeds I dip into that I wish I had more time really to “follow”. It’s priorities. Might be getting tired of the straight comedy (which isn’t all that funny), and ready to gravitate to the (in my view) genuinely literary achievements of what I clumsily call ‘concepticules’ (eg Leidner).
reading this comment section is like eavesdropping on a group of immensely talented people filled with self-loathing
santino is livetweeting an acid trip right now, if anyone is old and home eating soup like me https://twitter.com/santinodela
A journal is a worthwhile endeavor.
I hate twitter but liked this, thanks.