Because sometimes flash fiction and haiku are just too oppressive.
From Steve Rhodes at NBC Chicago:
2 Tweet or Not 2 Tweet -- Two University of Chicago students present the classics in 20 tweets or lessYou mean like this (all of these done by me; took about an hour)?
By STEVE RHODES
The crumbling of civilization as we know it by the tools of digital technology in the wrong hands continues apace, this time with the news that two University of Chicago freshman "have landed a publishing deal to Twitter the classics of literature," the Mail & Guardian reports. Or is that tweet the classics?
Or are Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman just smarter than the rest of us for getting there first?
...
Indeed. "Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less," is set to be released later this year by Penguin, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Rensin and Aciman are 19-year-old freshmen.
"Imagine if your favorite character from the Great Works (and a few not-so-great works) had an iPhone, a Twitter account, and a sense of humor," they say on their Web site.
…
“Kare9a @ train? Ruh-roh! ” -- Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
“STFU or --∞∞∞∞O” -- Herman Melville, “Billy Budd”
“@beginning#hevn-n-urth” -- Yahweh, “Bible”
"4 luv-o-God, Mn3sor!" -- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
“Evrythin iz Awsm!” -- Voltaire, “Candide”
“Alphakidz r dorks! Betakidz rool!” -- Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”
“lawz or kill?” -- William Golding, “Lord of the Flies”
“Me+axe > pwnbroker+Lizaveta!” -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”
“rickrolled by world… l8tr, itz all good 4 sum" -- Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”
“Like ≠ =” -- Madeleine L'Engle, “A Wrinkle in Time”
“Okies r dbags” -- John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”
“RNsance hearts tyranny :-(“ Graham Greene, “The Third Man”
I wish these clever students success and prosperity, and I know the arc of our cultural deliteratization from "book-as-thoughtful-engagement" to "book-as-collectible-netsuke" was locked in long before this Year of Our Lord 2009, but man, if I’d known they were handing out books deals for this kind of five-finger exercise, I’d have bailed on the whole “writing” thing years ago.
Cuz bookz r a bitch!
Or as Ray Bradbury put it in oldspeak:
"What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
- Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451"
- Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451"
