Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Drew Kalbach. This is the final installment of Twitter MFA. Thank you for reading.
The Tweet draft:
my face is continually jealous of my face
Drew Kalbach’s Tweet draft utilizes a heavily deconstructed sonnet sequence to describe the dissolution of a romantic relationship between his face and his face. With its ABBA rhyme scheme–the pairing of ‘face’ and ‘face’ and the softly assonant ‘continually’ and ‘jealous’–Kalbach alludes to a Miltonic sonnet in 140 characters or less.
Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Colson Whitehead. Join us in two weeks for a discussion of a Tweet draft written by Drew Kalbach.
The Tweet draft:
This is one in a series of linked tweets about a small West Virginia mining town. Revolving narrators, characters in common, bittersweet.
It is not this Tweet draft alone that awes us, but the notion that Whitehead is mining the depths of his past in order to present to us a courageous work of Tweet. Whitehead, who hails from the small town of Manhattan, West Virginia, located in the Eastern Panhandle, is a Tweeter most capable of pulling off such a masterful rendition of the linked genre: the story-in-Tweets, an updating of the classic novel-in-stories genre we have seen so successfully employed by writers since Sherwood Anderson. Of Whitehead’s ambitious project, Hart Crane, who also has a highly visible social media presence, recently Tweeted: “@America should read @colsonwhitehead’s Tweets on her knees. They are an important update in the feed of her consciousness.” (Of course, it should be noted that this is Crane’s transparent ploy to get retweets from both Whitehead and America.)
Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Daniel Bailey. Join us next Friday for a discussion of a Tweet draft written by Colson Whitehead.
The Tweet draft:
i will gain street cred by shit-talking all streets in my hood on yelp.com. current mood: ti holding a baby. future mood: unstoppable
In reading Daniel Bailey’s Tweets, the reader imagines that Bailey is binge-Tweeting drunk from his bathtub. If he were a reportage-style Tweeter, or (god forbid) a promo-Tweeter, these excessive Tweetouts wouldn’t work. But Bailey’s laissez-Tweet style is like messy hair that looks really fucking good. So we’ve often wondered how ‘hard’ is Bailey ‘trying’? Is he a pre-drafter? An off-the-cuffer? A hybrid? Regardless, the Tweet draft that Bailey sent us, to use academic jargon, is ‘da bomb.’