Source: This Is Colossal

Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream

It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.

Last week Twitter announced that at the end of November the company will host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

According to Twitter, it has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter notes it has even inspired some literary criticism.

To get into the spirit of things, and without getting into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this tweet-length short short story:

On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the desolated creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.

Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.

On your virtual travels, don’t fail to visit the site of New York-based photographer and fellow traveler Malcolm Kirk. Galleries on the site focus on Iconic Figures — revealing studies of prominent figures in the arts and sciences, from Marcel Duchamp and Saul Steinberg to Richard Feynman and Arthur C. Clarke, including the famous portrait of Andy Warhol that the iconic and ironic artist turned into a series of silk-screened ‘self-portraits’ that hang in major museums throughout the world; Man As Art — a record of tribal body decoration in Papua New Guinea that was published in a large-format hardcover book documenting islanders’ visually stunning tribal body decorations, headgear and carved masks; Silent Spaces — a documentation of aisled barns dating back to the 12th century; and Enclosed Gardens — a pictorial essay covering some of the world’s most magnificent gardens, self-assigned projects that each involved years of research.

Books by Malcom Kirk:
Silent Spaces: The Last of the Great Aisled Barns (Bullfinch Press 1994)
Man As Art (Chronicle 1993)

We read on buses (and trains and planes and subways*), so Bogotá is taking the logical next step in putting books where we use them.

* The Underground New York Public Library is a virtual gallery featuring the reading-riders of the NYC subways. The New York Public Library, the real one not the virtual one, maintains its smallest branch in the Metropolitan Transit Authority located down a flight of stairs, just outside the turnstile entrance to the No. 6 train on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 50th Street.

UPDATE: There’s an addendum to a 2010 posting about the book exchanges that you find at Starbucks in various parts of the world, although not, apparently, in Southern California: Roadside Assistance: Call the Starbooks — Starbucks book exchanges (The Detourist 2010-06-10).

Brian Fawcett‘s angry, bracing Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow: a daring act of intellectual guerrilla warfare.

A poet by trade (see, A Poetry War in Prince George 2012/04), Brian Fawcett has a side job deconstructing modern civilization in a stunning series of fiction and non-fiction books and stories (his Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown won the 2003 Writer’s Trust prize for Canadian non-fiction). Cambodia, a volume that uses thirteen riotous, edgy, mildly experimental works deploring the mind-destroying impact of consumerist culture and sensationalist mass media to annotate a powerful denunciation of the agonies, extraordinary even measured against the exalted standards of 20th century atrocities, endured three decades ago by Cambodia’s people at the hands of its murderous Khmer Rouge overlords.

The book’s awkward layout — short pieces run across the top of its pages, the long essay along the bottom quarter its entire length — contribute to its subversive appeal. I can’t imagine what section of the bookstore you’ll find Cambodia: it’s at once an incendiary indictment contemporary society, a dissertation on the role of the fiction-writer — the artist — in the late modern era, and a thoughtful, passionate, well-informed and provocative meditation on the lasting poison of imperialism.

What it is not, strictly speaking, is a travel book, although it does capture the faith in human interconnectedness that animates so many of us to caravan to other cultures and places.

Habitual travelers, it seems to me, are frequently driven to explore other societies as a reaction to, almost as a kind of protest against the accelerating homogenization and debasement of their own. It wasn’t so long ago that you wouldn’t have needed to travel much beyond the other side of the next hill to encounter an alien world. Now mass media is forging a universal culture whose shallowness — language coarsened, simplified; bland, anything-goes-as-long-as-no-one-is-truly-offended aesthetics; wealth and power exalted, the cloak of powerlessness meekly donned; dehumanizing indifference to violence and suffering; feeling and “faith” triumphant over fact, seance before science, history reconstituted as subjective fiction; critical thinking feared and rejected; memory and imagination annihilated — causes Brian Fawcett to worry that, on a planet where “Cambodia is as near as your television set,” we risk the loss of “our right to remember our pasts and envision new futures.”

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Collier 1986) by Brian Fawcett is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

Hearing the news that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland that sparked JM Barrie to create Peter Pan, is to be turned into a center for children’s literature got Emily Temple thinking about all the real-life places that have animated works of literature.


Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The rest of the story: 10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics by Emily Temple (Flavorwire 2011-08-06).

As an aside: it would be fun, wouldn’t it, to plan a summer trip to Durham, Maine (the inspiration for Salem’s Lot) and to locales such as the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel), around Stephen King Country: The Illustrated Guide to the Sites and Sights That Inspired the Modern Master of Horror by George W. Beahm. Available from Amazon

The url for The Detourist has changed. The real address for this post is now
http://thedetourist.com/2011/04/16/readin-writin-ramblin-travel-books_16/

Since 1998, a lifetime in Web years, Literary Traveler has anthologized travel books and essays with artistic ambitions, and arranged literary tours and literary events for readers who like to travel and travelers who like to read.

The many dozens of literary articles and travel profiles by and of famous writers are arrayed alphabetically from Louisa May Alcott to W.B. Yeats. A list of recently added authors, for example, includes Joseph Conrad, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Edward Gorey, Victoria Hislop, Che Guevara, Naguib Mahfouz and Mario Vargas Llosa. A sampling of recent articles -- Of Dreams and Dolls: American Girls and the Spirit of Exploration; Colin McPhee's Musical Life in Bali; Karl Marx's Revolutionary Brussels; Jim Morrison & Lipstick Kisses at Oscar Wilde's Pere-Lachaise; Origins of Crime & Justice in James Patterson's Washington DC; The Real Story Behind Dickens' A Christmas Carol; Shirley Jackson's Outsider Perspective of Bennington, Vermont -- reveals the range of interests explored by the site's contributors.

In the nature of things, most of the familiar names are in the public domain, but so what?; there are endless hours of classic travel writing on the site, including a series on Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway's Places, interviews with well-known writers like Alan Lightman, and links to recommended volumes for purchase.

Primarily or at least most usefully a subscription site, Literary Traveler offers two types of memberships: free and paid. A free subscription provides limited access to many of the articles; an all-access premium account including a monthly newsletter costs $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year.

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