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The blogosphere has lately been all a-flutter about Twitter. Twitter poetry! Twitter book clubs! Twitter books (”Twitterature,” perhaps?)! Twitter ghost writers!
Wait, what?
The New York Times reports that many celebrities do not, as one might think, actually Twitter themselves. Instead, they hire Twitter ghost writers. Yeah, you read that right. I think Shaquille O’Neal, an obsessive Twitterer himself, has the best response to this phenomenon: “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”
Professional writers, on the other hand, have fully embraced the microblogging tool. Booker Prize-winning writer Ben Okri is publishing his new poem on Twitter, at the leisurely pace of one line a day. Author R.N. Morris is taking it a step further by publishing the entire first chapter of his new novel A Gentle Axe, 140 characters at a time. Not interested in reading books on Twitter but still want to mingle with other fiction-lovers? Then join Picador’s new Twitter book club, where you can discuss books like A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs every Tuesday with other Twitterers.
PS: After reading all this, it probably isn’t much of a surprise that I created a Lit Drift Twitter account too. If you can’t beat ‘em…
When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking [New York Times]
In The News: Anti-Social Reading, Twitter Poem [The New Yorker]
Dispatch from the Twitter Lit Frontier [GalleyCat]
Picador Launches Book Club on Twitter [Poets & Writers]
I first saw this article in the New York Times and was so disappointed by its subject matter–the headline seemed so promising. I thought it was going to be about a celestial phenomenon….it wasn’t. So I helpfully rewrote it: http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com/2009/03/nytimes-headline-when-stars-twitter.html.