The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Related Content

• The Best Things I Read for Free in 2008
• David Foster Wallace's Last Novel
• Billie Holiday - An Illustrated Life
• There Was No Joy in Mudville -- an interview with local author Kurtis Scaletta
• Don't Quit Your Day Job-Job

Aside from my usual motivations – narcissism, loneliness, and a desire to be (dorkily) en vogue – I’m not sure why I tweet.

(For a lesson on what tweeting is, here is James Lileks' piece from the Strib)
From what I can tell, a lot of the posts that people post are a bunch of inside jokes. Sometimes it seems like I follow more and more people’s threads just so I can understand more of the inside jokes. Then I get this complex because the people I choose to follow don’t follow me. And all of a sudden it’s high school all over again. At which point I log on to Facebook and console myself because the cool kid from when I went to Southwest has an ugly girlfriend now. Like with teeth missing.

If I try to laugh along with the people whose inside joke I now get – LOL, guys! haHA! – then it’s creepy, because they don’t know who I am. Shame cycles ensue. So maybe the lesson here is that only people with a lot of friends, and a lot of friends on Twitter, should tweet. Just sayin’. Because as a mode of actual communication, or whatever it's supposed to be for, I'm just not sure how effective it is.

And yet, I can't stop tweeting. Maybe I'm waiting for some publishing industry exec to notice my charming command of language. Maybe I'm waiting for some supermodel to notice...my charming command of language. Probably I'm just bored. I can't tell if I go in to Twitter more to post my own opinions, or to read those of others.

I think I’m waiting for some really virtuosic tweets. Shaq’s threads really amused me for a while, and right now I’m pretty into ?uestlove from The Roots. But all in all the novelty wears off quickly – the voices and even the posts become predictable. It’s not as good as reality TV, where you can actually see some celebrity dirt; when the celebrities control their info, it’s not as interesting.

Oh, hey, guess what? This is books blog. Kind of. So… Text message novels have made it pretty big in Asia and then there was that one in Finland that was published, yeah? Why not Twitter novels? Aside from the fact that tweets are limited to 140 characters, and if you wrote a narrative you would need to do it backwards because new posts go at the top of the page so what you write the most recently is what people read first. But then I think, nah – anyone who has the talent to write a real novel should just write a real novel, instead of trying to cash in on a new medium and end up with a story that will probably just have a lot of naked angsty twenty-somethings doing drugs and each other in front of a computer.

So far there have been no successful Twitter novels. Weird. But there is a set of rules for how to start one. Also weird. But what about flash fiction? I think I could get on board with some twitter flash fiction. How about that famous story allegedly by Hemingway: “Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn.” That was practically made for Twitter. If I come up with anything in the next couple days, I’ll try it out on my thread. Otherwise, if you guys know any prolific flash-fiction tweeters, you will do me a great service by posting their addresses in the comments section.

So far, @pencilthin has my favorite books tweet of the day: “walker library smells like poop”