9 Dead Writers I Follow on Twitter

There's a lot I love about Twitter, but it has one major fault: you have to be alive to use it. That might seem a strange complaint, but think about it: the vast majority of the most interesting people are dead. This limits what you can read on Twitter to people with a pulse (plus @colsonwhitehead). Or so I thought. 


Turns out, there are thousands of dead people on Twitter, many of them writers. And they are dead fun. These accounts tend to fall into three categories: quote machines, parody accounts, and estate accounts. Here's a brief sampling of each:


Quote Machines
Not since the bumper sticker has the pithy one-liner experienced such a renaissance. Jokes and flaccid self-help dominate the Twitterverse, so a little craftmanship is welcome in even the most carefully crafted feed. 


@Wwm_shakespeare
Note: You gotta knock the champ out. 
Representative Tweet: "I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour, that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life."


@samuelpepys
Note: Diarist of the Elizabethan Age. This feed gives a daily account of life in 17th Century England. Come for the slice of life, stay for the truly mesmerizing comma-usage. 
Representative Tweet: "Took up my wife and Deb., and to the Park. Being in a hackney, and they undressed, was ashamed to go into the tour, but went round the park."


@mrsdorothyparker
Note: I truly, deeply wish Dorothy Parker was alive for Twitter. Enough to make me want to smash my head on a toilet in hopes of designing a flux capacitor. 
Representative Tweet: "Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt."


@jacquesderrida_
Note: Add a little gravitas to your feed; it makes all the differance. Or just be reminded why graduate literary studies kind of suck. 
Representative Tweet: "we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence."


@kurtvonnegut
Note: Clever, inspiring, and despairing by turn. Sometimes all at once. Side note: I wish Tom Robbins tweeted. 
Representative Tweet: "To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot."


Parodists
Take one part authorial identity. Add two parts clever interloper. Stir and enjoy.


@Edgar_Allan_Poe
Note: Satire on the events of the day from the gutter of Romanticism. 
Representative Tweet: "Our savage selfish interior lives yearn to be followed, but dread w/ an ugly despair the tedium of following back."


@DrSamuelJohnson
Note: Imagine if the dean of English literary critics sat around watching TV. This would pretty much be the result. Also, I dare you to reverse-engineer the capitalization conventions. See you when you finish in 300 years.
Representative Tweet: "The Goodfolk of Brooklyn gad about clad as Lumberjacks, Jack-Tars & Mesmerists, to my Amusement & Mrs THRALE'S Wonderment"


Curators
This is an emerging category, and one I hope becomes robust. These accounts track events, articles, and goings-on about a particular writer. 


@janeaustenworld
Note: These good folk index the mind-bogglingly active world of Austen fanaticism and scholarship. From museum exhibits to arcane TV adaptations, they'll cover your Jane addiction. 
Representative Tweet: "Mrs. Smith, A Portrait of a Regency Woman from the Rising Merchant Class & Mrs. Poole, Georgette Heyer's Vulgar Creature:http://t.co/dYz"


@williamstyron
Note: This one is run by the honest-to-God literary estate of William Styron. Super, super smart move, and one that other literary estates should steal. I'm looking at you, people-who-control-the-David-Foster-Wallace stuff.
Representative Tweet: "Hilarious and cutting: Styron's play set in the Urological Ward of a U.S. Naval Hospital in the South, summer of '43http://bit.ly/gGkHoN"
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If you just want a quick glance at these, I've collected them all in a Twitter list (don't need to use Twitter to see). 


I'm sure there are other notable dead-writer feeds out there and would love recommendations. Who do you follow? Or what pulseless penman would you like to see Tweencarnated? 
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Through April 15, I am donating all referral fees generated through The Reading Ape to an effort to buy Rock City Books up in Maine. So if you have a little Powell's, Indie Bound, or Amazon shopping to do, click through the below links and a percentage of your purchase will go towards the effort.

Literary Fact of the Day Round-Up: August 2-15

Gustave Flaubert.
(Not pictured: his mother and his syphilis)

On the Ape's Twitter feed (@readingape), we feature a daily tidbit of literary history, the Literary Fact of the Day (#lfotd). Here's a recap of what ran over the last couple of weeks, in their original, tweetable form:

• The first 3000-copy printing of MOBY DICK did not sell out in Melville's lifetime and netted him less than $600.
  
• Flaubert suffered from multiple venereal diseases and lived with his mother for most of his adult life. Go figure.
  
  
  
• Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death for his radical ideas + was even lined up before a firing squad before his sentence was commuted.
  
  
• Ralph Ellison used to copy Hemingway's short stories by hand to get a feel for what it meant to write like him.
  
  
• "Un"paralleled: Shakespeare was the first to use "unreal," "uncomfortable," "unaware," "unearthly," "undress" among many others.
  
  
• Whitman paid to have the first 800 copies LEAVES OF GRASS published.
  
  
• Faulkner's most notable screenwriting efforts were adaptations of novels not written by him: TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and THE BIG SLEEP.
  
  
• M. Chabon got an 155k advance for MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, after one of his professors, unbeknownst to Chabon, sent it to an agent.
  
  
• Coleridge wrote all 300 lines of "Kublai Khan" in one sitting after waking from a dream at 4am.
  
  
• At Fitzgerald's funeral, Dorothy Parker reportedly said "the poor son-of-a-bitch," which was also said at the funeral of Jay Gatsby.
  
  
• Reading at JFK's inaugural, Robert Frost was blinded by sunlight and so recited "The Gift Outright" from memory.
  
  
• Allen Ginsberg once stripped naked during a reading of "Howl" as a retort to a heckler.
  
  
• In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks become the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 

A Daily Dose of Literary Trivia

For some unknown reason, we've started tweeting a daily literary fact, somewhat abstrusely called Literary Fact of the Day.

For the non-tweeting out there, here's a run-down of what we chirped last week: 

• Ezra Pound once claimed that he had never read any Russian literature.
• Elizabeth Bishop refused to have her poetry published in anthologies of women's writing.
• Hemingway's personal library had 7000+ volumes including (deliciously) THREE copies of FItzgerald's THE CRACK-UP. 
• Faulkner wanted the text in The Sound in the Fury to be in four colors---one for each of the narrators.
• In 1572, Cervantes was captured by Algerian pirates and enslaved for 5 years, before eventually being ransomed.
• In 2010 dollars, Mr. Darcy's annual income would be about $600,000 per year.
• Shakespeare's only son died in 1596 at the age of 11. His name.....wait for it.........Hamnet. (yup, with an n).

So if you're up for a quotidian morsel of bookish trifles, follow us @readingape or you can search the hashtag #lfotd. If you aren't aboard the Twitter train, never fear: we'll do a run-down from time to time of what you've missed.

You Can't Handle the Truth

As a Twitter newbie, the Ape is still figuring out what can/cannot be done with it (and by proxy, what should/shouldn't be done with it).

But today, following the #booksthatchangedmyworld hashtag, we've had our favorite early Twitter experience yet. And oh the wonders and horrors to be found there. If you are on Twitter, I highly recommend spending a few minutes *coug* hours *cough* gazing in stupified wonder. For the tweetless, here is a sampling of the books that have, apparently, changed the world of at least some tweeps:

• Pleasure by Eric Jerome Dickey ("I re-read it at least twice a year")
• The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad (generously tweeted by the book's author, the cad.)
• A Yaqui Way of Life ("It totally reinforced by belief in Native American shamanism and sorcery!")
• Sony Ericsson T300 User's Guide
• 1984 & Harry Potter. Tied. (I'm inexplicably fascinated by this. Damn you 140 character limit. Damn you.)
• the B.I.B.L.E. (about some sort of evangelical android, we assume)
• Crazy number of Judy Blume mentions. No one sticking up for Beverly Cleary? No one? 
• Every book by Iceberg Slim ("ESPECIALLY PIMP!!!")
• The Austism Book (ok, tearing up now, gotta wrap this up)
• And the two hands-down, runaway leaders: The Bible and Twilight. (Green Eggs and Ham and Pride and Prejudice seem to be fighting it out for third).

I should say also that there many, many really wonderful books being mentioned as well. But listing To Kill a Mockingbird, Slaughterhouse-5, and Catcher in the Rye isn't quite as interesting. 

Oh and in case you're wondering, here was our meager tweet: @readingape 

  

In biographical order: East of Eden, The Iliad, As I Lay Dying, Mrs. Dalloway, The Professor's House, Gilead #booksthatchangedmyworld

Book Blogger Convention 2010: One Primate's Reactions

As promised, here are some quick thoughts about the 2010 Book Blogger Convention:

• Keynote speaker and young adult Maureen Johnson was really entertaining. If I were a 12 year old girl, I would be racing out to get her books. I have to admit though that I'm not sure I learned much about blogging from it, but clearly the young adult bloggers got a kick out of it. 
• Ron Hogan, who runs Beatrice, was fantastic and I would have sat and listened to him all day. I have been reading Beatrice for more than a decade now, and he really is a pioneer of lit-blogging. Passionate, erudite, and encouraging stuff from him. Highlight of the day for the Ape, by far. Rumor has it he will be posting his presentation on Beatrice next week, so watch for that.
• I could have taken or left the panels (and indeed I did jet before the final one). I don't feel like I got anything out of them that I didn't looking at the panelists' blogs beforehand. Supremely nice and committed people, but that's why I read many of their blogs. 
• Biggest cheer of the day was for this line from Ron Hogan: "The war between critics and bloggers is over. And the bloggers won."
• Another spontaneous round of applause for NetGalley, of which I had never heard. Looks promising and we're going to give it a whirl. 
• The "keep doing what you're doing" and "be yourself" advice was ascendent. What if what you're currently doing sucks?
• Really happy group of attendees. We haven't been blogging long, but we can imagine how gratifying it was for people to meet in person after having years-long online relationships. It's hard to imagine a kinder, more congenial group of folks. Maybe kindergarten teachers.
• That said, the day felt a little self-congratulatory, though that's perhaps to be expected. This is the first one of these, and the excitement over the existence of the event itself propelled a lot of the energy of the day. Affirmation is necessary of course, but we're hard-pressed to say what we'll be doing differently around here as a result of what we heard.
• Random helpful tidbit: One publicist said to think of review copies as "for consideration" not "for review." That is, you should feel okay if you don't review a book you've been given. This sentiment was echoed by a couple of other publicists, along with an exhortation to pass the book along to someone else, really anyone else, if you don't review it. Or even if you do.
• Book bloggers love and want review copies. I might be wrong, but I think if they get no other material recompense for their efforts, a few ARCs would be enough. I love this about book bloggers--the books are the thing. 
• Mixed approaches to blog statistics. No one, including publishers and publicists, really knows how to gauge a blog's reach and influence with anything like accuracy. General consensus seemed to be to monitor your stats and use general trends rather than individual numbers. If your numbers are going up, great. If they are flat to down, maybe try some new things. 
• Use RSS. And full feeds. Don't screw around with this, just do it. Oh, how I wish you would listen McSweeney's.
• It might be selection bias, but the publishers in attendance seemed more than willing to work with book bloggers with interviews, tours, review copies, etc. The HarperPerennial folks were pretty tuned in. 
• Twitter seems to be the social media platform of choice, outpacing Facebook by a considerable margin as far as we can tell; it definitely was interesting to follow the live-tweeting, and do some ourselves, of the day.
• Not sure who said it (someone let me know if you remember because I'd like to give them proper due), but my favorite idea of the day was for book bloggers to consider themselves "book activists." We nodded vigorously.
• Couple of things we'd like to see next year: small group sessions, a presenter or panel on blog design, something about advertising and affiliate programs, a presentation from a publisher who works with bloggers directly, an overview of the history, present and future of book-blogging (OK, we'll admit it: we just want more Ron Hogan), and, most of all, we'd like to see there be a next year. 

Thanks to all those who put this thing together; I think you've started something good here. 

Oh, and if you're here on the Book Blogger Hop, well....welcome. Thanks to Jenn at Crazy for Books as always for hosting. 

Yummmm.....so Zeitgeisty....

I'm not really sure that reading a book through Twitter counts as, you know, reading a book, but this effort to get a bunch of people to read a book 140 characters at a time is noble. Their list of candidates is pretty good, but none of them seems particularly suited to snippets. Maybe a novel made entirely out of questions would translate well?