The Twittering Author

The particularity of a writer on Twitter: this is not People magazine’s best-dressed list or a dance competition, an improv comedy show or a submarine mission. These are words, the fodder and folly of writers and the element in which they should excel. We can only expect so much from Lindsay Lohan’s tweets, an update on her sobriety, at best. And, while, yes, Twitter was designed for just such exhilarating celebrity news, this social media is also a neatly crafted space for writers to test their wordsmithing skills. As for the metalsmith, the work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.

Some authors — the more famous ones, mostly — have found an ease in creating public personas on Twitter. Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers) and Margaret Atwood (270K followers) both excel at engaging with Twitter users and, essentially, being “normal,” link-sharing, retweeting people who happen to write bestselling books. These are not the Twittering authors who interest me.

No, I am interested in the lesser known. The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.

Let’s begin with the poets, who have less presence than the (always louder, longer, always clamoring) novelists. I present D.A. Powell, an award-winning poet and 2011 Guggenheim Fellow (2.2K+ followers):

@Powell_DA: I constantly doubt my vocation, even though I’m not a young nun.

@Powell_DA: Sometimes I forget my own esophagus

Powell’s last book of poetry, Chronic, garnered the following remark from critic John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times: “There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both.” Freeman may as easily have been commenting on Powell’s Twitter account. Few writers (few anybody) have successfully used Twitter to interact with readers by exposing their vulnerabilities while maintaining a high standard of language and revelation — but Powell has. Sometimes, I, too, forget my own esophagus. The reminders of the little things, like esophagi, are exactly the gems I expect from a poet as great as Powell.

I would not be surprised to read either of these tweets in one of Powell’s poems. The former, a confession of doubt despite success, both reveals the poet as a real person — the tweet received 4 replies and over 10 retweets — and, in characteristic cheekiness, reiterates his cleverness as Powell turns only 64 characters into a commentary on life choices.

Enter Arda Collins (350+ followers), a young poet whose less prolific Twitter account nonetheless offers up:

@ardacollins: Vespers at Target.

@ardacollins: I just went into my toolbox and took out a hammer and I have no idea why. In a parallel universe I am doing something w. a hammer now.

In Collin’s first book of poetry, It Is Daylight (a Yale Series of Younger Poets winner), she excels at creating just the same unsettling dichotomies, a world (or a parallel one) that is both trivial and inexplicably captivating. What would Vespers at Target be like, I wonder — the combination of America’s religious past and consumerist future? In only 18characters, Collins conjures a wholly original scene that teems with images and sounds embedded in the readers’ memories, or, at least, in their imaginings of Target and vespers. I can see the choir in front of the lawn furniture, can smell the glowing scented candles.

And have we not all retrieved our hammers, our fountain pens, a roll of cellophane, and promptly forgotten why? Give a poet the chance, and she will create a new universe to explain our actions.

Will 140 characters ever be enough to tell a story? Probably not, but the poets, at least, have long found solace in compressed images and simple but weighty strings of words. Enjoy Collins and Powell, but when the tweets tease you or leave you with a lack, read their books.

*

In the next installment on tweeting writers: the unconquerable Blake Butler gives me pleasurable headaches, and Ben Greenman writes a lot of puns. . . .

Pamela Ryder's A Tendency to Be Gone

“I had him once to hold. I have a stone to hold. From this day forward. We go forward, we watch the road, we listen for the hills. I listen to the stone: there is no singing. Once there was singing; we were singing. We were kneeling and we sang the words we knew. There was a ringing bell, fingered rings, him never to be slipping through my fingers, my folded hands. There was a hymn, a hollow sound. There was a joyful noise. There was a moon-white paper marked with my name, his name. The paper was unfolded, unfrayed. We were not afraid. We would take a chance. We would last. We would stay awake, see signs.”

The words move you and the stories carry you away. That’s what they’re for, to take you somewhere else, maybe somewhere new, whether it be down the road or a thousand years ago. Stories create new worlds or they make our world new, imbued with magic, with wonder.

My mother asked me for the hundredth time in the almost month since I’ve been back what I want to do, what interests me. I told her, Nothing matters so much as stories.

“My father is out on the curb, picking through the throwaways. He is what I have folded. He is holding a shirt to his shirtlessness. He is showing me what to save by taking a stitch in time.”

Pamela Ryder’s A Tendency to be Gone offers stories that matter, the kind that transport you, that move you, emotionally, geographically, temporally. No two stories are the same in terms of style or even content — from lyrical to declarative to almost Victorian, she builds reality around us. And though the collection is diverse, it is cohesive.

The title sticks in my head and it’s very appropriate for the collection. There is a strong sense of things past, of something gone, of leaving, as well as a greater force at work, whether it be god or devils or the enormity of nature, the insistence of Time. Within these she weaves lives, sometimes broken, other times breaking, but always searching. For what?

Ritual and repetition, signs, significance of any kind: these are people possessed. They need something, anything, and maybe they don’t know what it is. Maybe they never knew or will never know. Maybe they had it and can only hope it will come again. The enormity of their surroundings swallows them as the prose hits all senses and we fall into it, into these worlds, these places, completely consumed by a collapsing house, the neverending wilderness, the countless rocks and hills.

“She takes me under. Pushes me into the place she wants my mouth. She wants me drinking from the river. She wants me head-down in the water, mouth to stone and split-legged in the dark. She finds the pebble of me, the slippery banks of me where I am winged and unescaping. Where I am sliding stream-bottom stones, stirred on by the scent of something wounded. I am face down and willing. I am unfolding, unstruggling, undone.”

Her ability to describe settings, to allow that setting to seamlessly become a body, a human body, to be sexy and profound at the same time continually impresses me. I read the collection again this last weekend, and it’s better than the first time — richer, fuller. The stories opened up to me in new ways, differently than the first read where I was mostly just riding the prose, enjoying its sound, its texture. But this time, this time the stories are more than just beautiful: they’re real and they matter.

“I will have a bed. I will make an unmade bed of stone. I will pretend a pillow for my head. I will pretend the stones will keep me safe and where I am: face down to the rock, powdered with the ashes where the rock was burning.”

Joe Wenderoth's No Real Light

I don’t get to read much anymore; or, when I do, it’s more often scholarly texts such as this. This is all fine and good until I can complete my doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, which will enable me to find a job somewhere far far away and buy loads of nail buffers.

Still, as a non-academic academic, there is a cultivated divorce in me, and I miss my people — the first time I walked into a Borders (ha) after my initial PhD semester and picked up a poetry collection, I actually wept.

Recently, though, I hid under my pink desk and found Joe Wenderoth’s collection No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007.) Wenderoth is best known for his Letters to Wendy’s(Wave Books, 2000), which sold a legendary fuckton of copies and contains things about thick drinks and meat all like:

May 20, 1997

I’d like to have my muscles removed. Resume the inanimate. Wendy’s allows me to extract myself from the retarded narcissism of animal thrivings. I sit still in a warm booth and get thought. All movement wants, in the end is stillness. The animate is just the failure of movement to get what it wants — one sleeping body. The road to heaven is paved with meat: the road to meat is not paved at all.

Reading No Real Light is a different experience. Rather than being flashy miraculous as Letters to Wendy’s can be, this book gently and quietly peels the skin from the face in layers. You don’t even know. Given my schooling, I found this particular piece wildly appropriate:

 Advice To The Dissertator

Quit the brilliant dream plot and stand on knives
until all the god-costumes have been lost
and hang in Museums.
Exercise, then, upon the Museum Grounds,
knowing more or less what hangs inside
and why.

And on the nights when you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and you’re all appetite or lack and my my, whose house is this that you’re living in, poems like “Luck” will save your ass with pretty screaming and you will be grateful. Really. Just get to it:

Luck

So a screaming woke you
just in time.
An animal’s scream, or animals’.
What kind of animal it was
doesn’t matter, and cannot,
in any case, be determined.
The point is you are saved.
Your mouth has been opened.

Lydia Millet On Karel Capek’s War With the Newts

I first encountered the bulgy-eyed protagonists of Karel Capek’s monumentally great — poignant! and hilarious! — 1937 novel War With the Newts when I was in my early 20s, living in L.A. and working as a peon copy editor at Hustler Magazine. Andrias Scheuchzeri, a species of newt first discovered (according to the book) by a ship captain in the waters off a remote island near Sumatra, was a salamander capable of walking upright — as well as synthesizing information and acquiring human language. His creator, Czech writer Karel Capek, is best known as the man who made up the word robot. A brilliant humorist and allegorist, Capek was also a journalist in post-World War I Prague, a contemporary of the more inwardly turned Franz Kafka, and one of the most imaginative early writers of science fiction. He was a pragmatic and actively political writer. “Literature that does not care about reality or about what is really happening to the world,” he wrote, “literature that is reluctant to react as strongly as word and thought allow, is not for me.” War With the Newts was his last novel; the best English translation is by M. and R. Weatherall, published in 1937.

Capek’s newts are naïve, childlike specimens when first encountered in the wild and put to work diving for pearls by the greedy, paternalistic Captain van Toch. Standing about the height of a “ten-year-old boy,” the newts have hands, tails, and a habit of smacking their lips; when they first meet humans they stand up on their hind legs in shallow water, wriggle, and emit a clicking, hissing bark that sounds like ts, ts. Pitifully eager to please, they’re subjugated, tortured and often massacred with impunity; their trusting natures make them the perfect victims.

Packed into filthy cargo ships to die of starvation or infection, bred for servitude, sent off to zoos and work farms and animal research labs, the newts gradually learn to distrust. But before they rebel, many are assimilated into human culture. With innocent admiration for the accomplishments of their human captors, they adopt bourgeois manners and customs; study etiquette; and enroll in universities, sometimes becoming respected scholars who — because they live mostly in water — have to deliver their lectures from bathtubs. Young female newts, who attend a finishing school wearing modest makeshift skirts donated by decency-loving matrons, come to worship their do-gooder headmistress as a saint. And one tourist couple vacationing in the Galápagos encounters an earnest and studious newt who goes nowhere without his well-thumbed copy of Czech for Newts, a phrasebook he has memorized. “This booklet . . . has become my dearest companion,” the newt tells the Czech couple, and proceeds to grill them on the details of Czech history. “I should like to stand myself on the sacred spot where the Czech noblemen were executed, as well as on the other famous places of cruel injustice.”

When the pearls the newts have customarily harvested for their masters become scarce, the newts themselves become the world’s most important commodity, traded by the tens of millions on the stock exchange. Different categories of newts fetch different prices: there are Leading, Heavy, Team, Odd Jobs, Trash and Spawn newts, with the Leading being intelligent, trained leaders of labor columns and the Trash being “inferior, weak, or physically defective newts.” farms all along the coastlines of the world produce newts by the hundreds of millions — until finally the newts’ undersea civilization expands and industrializes so extensively that newts far outnumber and outgun their human counterparts. Unfortunately for the human race, newts require coastlines: only there, in the shallow water, can they live. As their population explodes, they run out of coast.

And so the “earthquakes” begin. Cataclysmic seismic activity across coastal Gulf states from Texas to Alabama are referred to as “the Earthquake in Louisiana” and soon followed by earthquakes in China and Africa. Finally European radio stations pick up a croaking voice, and Chief Salamander begins to speak: “Your explosives have done well. We thank you. Hello, you people!” He explains that the newts have run out of room and now will be forced to break down the continents to create more living space. Indifferent to human welfare, the newt civilization is driven by a mindless urge to expand.

The genius of War With the Newts lies less in its plot or its wry political wisdom than in its exceptional newt portraiture. These talking salamanders are at least half human; their anthropomorphic charm makes them unforgettable. Exaggerations of pragmatic, economic modern man, they’re as devoid of passion as they are of morality. Newts is an extraordinary novel in its humor and its casual devastation, making old-fashioned religious apocalypses look romantic, wistful, and even optimistic when compared with the soulless apocalypses we’ve come to know lately, where mass murder is an arithmetic performed in the name of, say, cheap gas for our cars or the convenience of our lifestyle. Capek’s newts are a product of European literary culture, but in many respects they look a lot like Americans.

“The mountains will be pulled down last,” says Chief Salamander. “Hello, you men. Now we shall send out light music from your gramophones.”

*

Editor’s Note: “Lydia Millet On Karel Capek’s War With the Newts” is adapted from a piece written for Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, edited by J. Peder Zane (Norton, 2004).

On the Surface, Written On the Body Is a Love Story for the Repentant Commitmentphobe; For Me, It Is a Shelter from Adolescent Heartache

I first read Jeanette Winterson in college, for a course on the philosophy of art. We were assigned to read several essays from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. The title essay has stuck with me in the years since that course mostly because it offered the most understandable foundation for a class I typically felt lost in, but also because reading Jeanette Winterson felt like slipping into something eccentric and luxurious. Her storytelling style in this essay is straightforward, nearly confrontational for those who do not care about engaging in art. Simply put, art is a full-contact sport.

It turns out, love is too. I was 19 — hurt and confused by a spectacularly failed romance — when I bought Written on the Body. On the surface, it is a love story for the repentant commitmentphobe; for me, it is a shelter from adolescent heartache. An initially unsympathetic narrator gives us someone to hate, someone who is not the person we loved until we couldn’t. Watching the narrator reform gives us hope that people have the capacity to change.

It is by no means a perfect book. While it may be cathartic to project all of our hatred onto the narrator, having an unlikeable narrator makes for a frustrating reading experience. To Winterson’s credit, the narrator’s ambiguous identity allows us to hold a mirror up to not only the person we want to hate, but to ourselves, our flaws. Our discomfort with this narrator is part dredged-up memory and part recognition of something we don’t like about who we are or how we act.

A brief summary: Our nameless and genderless narrator has a history of abandoning relationships once the novelty wears off. Along comes Louise, vivacious and sexy and . . . married. To a man. Who works long hours, leaving his wife home alone most of the week. With the house to themselves, Louise and the narrator have their fair share of romps, narrowly avoiding being caught by Louise’s husband. Shortly after leaving him, Louise finds out she has cancer and she leaves the narrator as well.

To cope with Louise’s departure, the narrator moves into a tiny cottage and devotes every waking hour to the medical reference section of the local library:

“If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would recognise her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.”

Thus concludes the first part of the book. The second part, the reward for making it through the sometimes uncomfortable, unenjoyable first, is the catalog of the narrator’s newly acquired knowledge of human anatomy married with memories of Louise’s now failing body. Winterson plays with the concept of what it means to know a person inside and out, something we typically consider synonymous with intimacy. The second half of the book is divided into five sections, the first four of which relate to the hours dedicated to anatomical study; the last section is a return to the more straightforward narrative of the first half. Each of the four anatomical sections — one each for the cells, the skin, the skeleton, and the special senses — is written in a stream of consciousness that is at once tender and epic, occasionally dipping into the Bible and other mythologies. From any other writer, this approach might seem hyperbolic, but Winterson is able to make it urgently loving (and maybe a little bit sexy).

Here, the narrator literally learns about Louise, and every other previous lover, from the inside out. It’s the only possible way to compensate and / or atone for being, frankly, a shitty partner. Only through these self-imposed anatomy lessons does the narrator learn how to properly love Louise for everything she is.

Winterson’s style in the second half of Written on the Body is such a departure from the take-no-crap criticism that knocked my socks off in philosophy class. Instead, I was greeted with unanticipated tenderness, particularly in the latter half of the book. I was prepared to hate the narrator as much as I hated the boy who wronged me during winter break; but as the narrator’s steeliness was worn down during the exploration of Louise — her body, her disease, her mythology — I found myself coming around to the boy. I saw him as a human, deeply flawed and hurting from problems of his own.

I still have mixed feelings about this experience — was I in fact the frosty unlikable narrator who needed to learn how to love without putting up insurmountable walls? — but I am thankful for having lived through it. I am reminded of a concept introduced in Art Objects, Winterson’s theory that our negative responses to art have more to do with us and our lack of understanding than with the art itself. My recoiling from the narrator of Written on the Body is a mirror showing me something I didn’t like about myself. The narrator’s capacity to learn, appreciate, forgive, showed that I have the capacity to do the same and that the boy has the capacity to heal.

The narrator may not have been able to fully love Louise. I may not have been able to fully love this boy, nor he could he fully love me. But I can say that I am able to fully love myself, flaws and all.

Why Hitchens Matters (To Me)

I met Christopher Hitchens sometime in the fall of 1994. I was on the crew of what was soon to become the relentlessly obnoxious monster that is Hardball with Chris Matthews, now still piercing its way into your afternoons on MSNBC. At that time I was the audio guy, and I had to clip Hitch’s lavalier mic on set, as I always had to do with both host and guests on the show. I noticed this man stank of gin and cigarettes, and had a horrific and unfortunate case of dandruff as evidenced by his snow-dusted shoulders. And so I hooked up the lav, straightened out his dinner jacket (remember Broadcast News? For perfect lines and no wrinkles, SIT on the tail of your jacket), and instinctively (disgustingly?) dusted off his dandruff thinking: Jesus help you, mate . . . because when Chris is through yelling at you, you’ll be sporting the biggest bloody migraine you’ve ever encountered.

I confess my ignorance of who exactly Hitchens was, despite the fact that even then he was an established heavyweight and deemed “our George Orwell,” and despite my young-ish age (24), I should’ve at least heard of this man. But, like Fredo, I was weak and stupid. And so what went on for the next two segments on the show astounded me. I don’t recall exactly what the particular subject was, but Hitchens put on a display of lucidity and intellectual prowess coupled with an intimidating, gargantuan, Wikipedia-like genius for referencing, cross referencing, and tangential connections that left even Chris Matthews — himself no lightweight when it came to political history — at times shaking his head and smiling in amazement of Hitch’s concrete, logical arguments. I recall during that particular show that twice Chris Matthews was left speechless. Twice!

During the next six years I was lucky enough to be bumped to a substitute Director / Technical Director position, so I continued my professional contact with Hitchens, who had become quite a sought-after guest on the political talking head TV circuit. He took an interest in my experience having been born and lived in Ceausescu-era Romania, and his curiosity was particularly piqued by my mother’s stint as translator to Ceausescu during Henry Kissinger’s visit to Bucharest in the early ’70s. Off air, in the green room, or in between segments, Hitch and I developed a strange, fractious relationship — a type of fellowship that blossomed between cocktail hour and dinnertime in a first-floor television studio on 18th and K Street in Washington, D.C.

On Hitchens’s recommendation, I picked up George Orwell’s essays (I had already read 1984, Animal Farm, and Down and Out in Paris and London), which subsequently changed my life and my political and social inclinations. Hitch also introduced me to the writings of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Atul Gawande, Arthur Koestler, Martin Amis, and highly recommended, nay, made me swear I’d read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (I did.)

Although I never got to know Hitch as intimately as some lucky souls can claim, he and I shared this weird, connected rapport — a  relationship interrupted by television. I didn’t delve into his own writings until after I left the “business” in early 2000, and our on-again- / off-till-next-show fellowship ended. For some innate reason I figured if I’d educate myself via his writing, something between us would have changed. And I was right. After plowing through his collected works at The Nation, his scathing account of Mother Teresa’s life in The Missionary Position, and ferocious criticism of Kissinger’s career in The Trial of Henry Kissinger within the span of 30 days, I was terrified of Hitchens’s intellect. My instinct had been right; had I armed myself with prior information about this man, I wouldn’t have been able to open my mouth and utter a single word to him, like I brazenly did that day in ’94 in the green room of Chris Matthews’s show. Yes, yes . . . I am sometimes a feeble, wimpy, star-struck, groupie of a man. I am secure with that.

Today we lost one of the few remaining great minds. On the heels of the sad news, someone I follow on Twitter shot out into the universe the contemptuous: “Why in hell are atheists sad that another atheist has died?” And I answered: “Because he is one fewer cerebral human being who defended our unpopular position with the utmost elegance and logic.”

This afternoon I will mix and pour a giant martini in Christopher Hitchens’s honor. And if I happen to get lucky and find myself a wrinkly, ill-shapen, orphaned Pall Mall between the cushions of my couch, I will gleefully light it up and pollute my family with its odoriferous chemicals. Just this once.

Heather Aimee O'Neill's Memory Future

I started reading Memory Future when I was moving out, in between packing boxes. I’d reward myself with a poem or two, until packing boxes became me, sitting on my air mattress, reading the opening poem, “Certainty,” over and over. The poem begins like this:

“Jess would ask Lewis Carroll for a word
for word translation of Jabberwocky

or Buffalo Bill where he hid the gold.
Laure-Anne would ask Mary Magdalene

if she and Christ were lovers.
Anthony would ask Him:

Will you help me?”

Will you help me? I read, again and again. To say that I felt understood would be an understatement. I felt comforted by these words, but at the same time, I felt unsettled, unsafe. And there is a realness to that emotional tug-of-war I appreciate.

*

I kept this book with me after I moved out, too.

I kept it with me while traveling through California, New Mexico.

In a way, these poems became part of me. Of course everything you read becomes part of you in some way in that it affects you, but there are few books out there I consider friends.

Memory Future came into my life at a time I needed it most, when I was traveling West, traveling alone. I left Orlando to find a home within myself, to be able to understand how to use my sadness and anger to create happiness. Whenever I felt alone in my emotions, I’d pick up Memory Future and read from it, and it felt like the person I always needed was there, listening to me. I remember reading “From the Platform” while I was on a train to New Mexico:

“But you look straight ahead into

the dark lines of the tunnel,
book resting on your lap, eyes
full of the hazel green in your scarf.

You could live without me.”

It hurts, accepting this “living without.” And that’s what I love about O’Neill’s poetry the most, the pain that comes forth through her strong, declarative language. Her language is muscular, but also flexible. She delves into the love present in all stages of life, from childhood to adulthood, and she depicts this love in a way where happiness and sadness rely on each other. Both can be heavy, harsh.

“Living without” can be especially harsh. But there is a freedom there, in that without.

*

I am back in Florida, now, trying to re-invent my idea of home again, from the inside (of the body) out (beyond the yard, the fence, the road).

I still keep Memory Future in my handbag, knowing those words are still there if I need them.

Today I looked to “Winter in Spain” for assurance in my belief that travel can help heal, that home is bigger than what we see, that home encompasses not only space, but time. That partnership is not enough to build a home, and neither is travel. Something else needs to be present alongside these things. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s beautiful.

“. . . We talk and light a cigarette,
because we can, until the quick collapse
of poles and planks and us and we begin
again. I press her hand to mine and watch.”