Aside from singer Roseanne Cash’s creation of the Twitter hashtag #JaneAustenAtTheSuperBowl, it’s unlikely that Jane herself would become addicted to the social media – but then, we’ll never know. After enumerating the literary feuds famous writers verbally carry on, Jennifer Schuessler in her article for the New York Times, “In Book Circles, a Taming of the Feud,” dissects the Twitter campaigns that novelists wield against each other.
Can you be a fan of Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, if you know they have been carrying on a Twitter campaign against Jonathan Franzen under the hashtag #Franzenfreude? Even when you know Franzen is the better writer, Weiner and Picoult books offer a different emotional release that readers need now and then – don’t they know this? On the other hand, Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner, seems a little catty criticizing the chicklit genre in her tweets. Even a healthy eater needs chocolate now and then.
Eleanor Lipman sent me an email asking me to follow her twitter feed, as she posts a poem a day:
Starting today, I’m tweeting one poem per day (140 characters, natch) of a (partisan) political nature, from now until the 2012 election. They will be rhyming couplets, and, I hope, entertaining.
I discovered I could google “Elinor Lipman twitter” and get to her tweets without joining the ubiquitous network.
Why tweet? Is it the electronic version of the haiku that can have as many letters as you can fit into 26 words? Could anyone compete with an Ogden Nash limerick? In her article, Schuessler says today’s tweeters require that “you don’t think about what you’re saying.”
I have not yet succumbed to the power of the tweet. For the most part, it’s too hard to limit my idea to 140 characters – does that include commas? If I did, I might tweet:
If U want 2 know whatever pops into my head – what I think about anything – and U want my insights/suggestions, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about -here is my advice
Oops – no more characters left. Do you tweet?
Related Posts:
The No Charge Book Bunch 