The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
A few days ago, writer Teju Cole posed a question to his Twitter followers: “One living writer or musician as the focus of your unconditional affection. Someone all of whose work you buy. Who would that be for you?”
The question incited responses from many people, including journalists, magazine editors, and novelists.
...moreFor some writers, Twitter isn’t a newfangled distraction but rather an extension of the art they’ve been making all along.
Lydia Davis, whose stories often span only a few sentences, plans to give the microblogging platform a try as a new medium for her super-short fiction.
...moreLocated, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming couplets.
It’s unclear whether the account is a bot or a human with computer assistance or what, but the results are golden.
...moreThe San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s current cover story is about the culture surrounding Twitter bots that artificially inflate your follower count: who buys them, why, and where you can buy them yourself.
The story’s author, Caitlin Donohue, picked up a few thousand profane, banal nonhuman followers for $26, a process she describes as “like an Internet boob job,” and which seemed to send positive ripples into her real life.
...morePreviously, we blogged about Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt’s Twitter mystery. As it turns out, Rumpus contributor and interviewee Scott Hutchins wrote one as well, a San Francisco noir called “The Nanny.”
They were both part of the five-day Twitter Fiction Festival, which the Los Angeles Times calls the “first official effort to organize and present a creative event that uses the social networking site…as a forum for art.”
Read the rest of their coverage to learn more about how a 140-character limit places restrictions on fiction writers—and lets them be inventive in unexpected ways.
...moreCheck out Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt’s Brooklyn Twitter mystery.
You have until the end of today to help decide if the death in question was a “#suicide, #homicide, or an #accident?”
...more“140 characters too short for heartbreak but ideal for heartburn” – @Joycecaroloates
It’s happening: Joyce Carol Oates, writer and recent recipient of the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, has joined twitter this month. Oates’s twitter personality is wise and poetic.
...moreYou do now. Join occasional Rumpus contributors Elisa Gabbert and Sommer Browning as they live-tweet “The Shining,” tonight at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Why don’t I include the other time zones? Because we do the conversion automatically.
Follow the hashtag #redrum or follow Elisa and Sommer (I do!) at their respective Twitter handles @egabbert and @vagtalk.
...more“Homophobic language isn’t always meant to be hurtful, but how often do we use it without thinking?
So asks NoHomophobes.com, a website “designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society.” The site tracks, in real-time, the Twitter usage of the terms “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay.” Last week, the word “faggot” was tweeted a depressing 218,946 times.
...moreThe Atlantic covers a recent study that uses twitter to analyze where the United State’s most profanity prone individuals reside:
“The Ukrainian-based web development firm Vertaline, aiming to answer that question, scanned tweets posted from across 462 specific locations in the U.S. The team then isolated particular phrases from those tweets — one of those phrases being, yep, “fuck you,” which they tracked between July 14 and July 24, 2012.
...moreThe LA Times reports that Twitter has released a how-to-manual titled “Twitter for Authors.”
The guide details six tips particularly geared towards writers, some of which include the not-so-helpful “Be Authentic, Be Yourself,” and “Above All, Have Fun.” Nowadays many authors use the social networking site as a means of self-promotion, and entire transcontinental book clubs have sprung from its 140 character limit.
...moreChoire Sicha writes about reading Twitter as a text, and the strange access it gives us to the once private “sexy back rooms” of “high-end” cultural institutions.
“Biesenbach has made his name as an exceptionally gifted cultural truffle hound—he’s not so much a journalistic beat, on the Moby model, as an institutional network unto himself.
...more“On Twitter, playland of masqueraders, we are what we choose to divulge. Or to conceal. It’s nice to have some choice left, about something.”
Margaret Atwood writes about her adventures in the “Twungle,” the “Enchanted E-Forest,” the “Twitterwoods.”
(Via The Millions)
...moreYou may have used your cell phone to have a heart-to-heart with someone else, but have you every opened up and talked it out with that very phone? A new collaborative video project from Eric Slatkin asks us to do just that and, like his “I check after” Twitter project, provides a chance for us to reflect on “the unintentional relationships we’ve gained to a piece of electronics.”
...moreThis morning, a Cormac McCarthy impersonator showed up on Twitter, duping some twitterers until Vintage and Anchor confirmed that it was not the real McCarthy. In fact, the writer does not own a computer. You can check out the collection of “fake” tweets.
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Do you still remember the Internet of last week, just another barrage of all-over-the-place political and cultural events in which millions of people watched, reacted and interacted online?
...morePerformance art is taking on twitter. Faux famous author accounts are in and they’re taking over. Laura Ingalls Wilder is pioneering the field with her twitter feed (@halfpintingalls) and not only do her tweets stay true to the Little House on the Prarie lifeystyle we love so much, she’s funny too.
...moreThe recent massacre at a casino in Monterrey, Mexico marks the pinnacle of drug war-related violence.
The response to this tragic episode by the American media reveal the frailties of our news coverage—this story was seriously lacking the attention it deserved across many of our media outlets, a silence that unfortunately dictates a scarcity of American tweets.
...moreHow long did it take you to write your college essay? Or your grad school essay? I know I agonized for months over the perfect 500-800 words that would make admissions people fall in love with me.
140 characters is all it’s going to take for one Twitter-savvy MBA candidate to get a full ride at the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management in the fall.
...moreAmong myriad literary twitter feeds, the Rumpus shines, listed as one of the “thirty-three twitter feeds to follow,” by Poets and Writers. Thanks P&W!
...moreA twenty year-old French law that sought to keep the news media from promoting commercial enterprises is being newly reinforced.
This means that using “Facebook” and “Twitter” on air is strictly forbidden. This seems like a good way to stave off potential conflicts of interest, however with ubiquity having rendered these terms into (basically) general nouns, it might be difficult to find a vernacularly-fitting way around them.
...moreCathy Davidson wrote a response to Bill Keller’s article on the pitfalls of twitter, “The Twitter Trap.” She defends technology with some historical and neuroscience-based evidence, calling for a restructuring of our habits, instead of a complete dismissal of current technological changes.
...moreThis week in San Francisco, Twitter IRL, SOMArts asks How Do You Value Art?, more art at Hotel Biron, and even more art (and readings!) at Sub-Mission’s Skate This Art.
Monday 10/11: Celebrate your inner nerd at the Commonwealth Club’s fireside chat with the founders of Twitter.
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A lot of people have taken to sending direct messages to Sugar on her Twitter feed. Instead of the regular question and answer column this week, Sugar answers multiple questions she’s received via DM:
A lot of people have taken to sending direct messages to Sugar on her Twitter feed. Instead of the regular question and answer column this week, Sugar answers multiple questions she’s received via DM:
“I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time e-mailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact—and I bet I’m not that unusual.
...moreWe mourn the death of poet Leslie Scalapino. Our condolences to her family and friends, and to all who were moved by her work.
PEN American announced the release of Burmese poet Saw Wei, imprisoned for “inducing crime against public tranquility” for one of his poems.
...more“We are living in a moment of seismic linguistic change, and attention should be paid—but not to errors. Our changing language signals evolution, not degradation. ‘OK,’ the most popular American word in the world, was invented during the age of the telegraph, because it was concise.”
Anne Trubek asks “Should We Care About Grammar and Spelling on Twitter?”
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