Sam Anderson's Literary Twitter Experiment

I like to think that Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, was at least partly inspired by my Paragraph of the Week series:

I’m late to the Twitter party, but a few weeks ago I decided to start an experiment: tweet the best sentence I read every day. (NB: Someone else had already claimed my actual name, so I had to go with my alter ego: ShamBlanderson.) “Best,” in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing. My first tweet was a factoid from a New Yorker story about Whole Foods: “The key variable in deciding where to put the new stores is the number of college graduates within a 16-minute drive.” (I love the specificity of sixteen minutes.)

Other examples include: "'In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one.' (adorno)"

 

I really like that one. It reminds me of what Rob Walker is doing over at Murketing.

 

In all seriousness, though, Anderson's stated motivation is very similar to what I hoped to accomplish by highlighting a paragraph each week: "The object is to use Twitter as a daily note-taking system: to document, organically, the various text-streams I actually pay attention to — novels, magazines, blogs, whatever." I just think a paragraph is a meatier portion to record.

A Quick Spelling Lesson

Just because I always screw this up, here's Mr. Bryan A. Garner on the proper spelling of the third Monday in February:

Presidents' Day; Presidents Day.
The spelling with the apostrophe is better and more common. Until 1971, Lincoln's Birthday (12 February) and Washington's Birthday (22 February) were both observed as federal holidays. In 1971, President Richard Nixon proclaimed that the two holidays would be combined into one, "the Presidents' Day," honoring all past presidents of the United States.

[snip]

The singular possessive--President's Day--is clearly wrong but still occasionally appears.

Good to know. And, also, it's crying shame that Garner only has 239 Twitter followers. He is the best person in the whole world at knowing Modern American usage.

Live-Tweeting

I have some longer posts planned (including one about reading on an iPhone) but for your more immediate The Daily Snowman fix, follow me on Twitter to read about the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic from Madison Square Garden tonight and a conference titled Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies tomorrow morning.

Twitter is for those that think young

Sorry for another post about Twitter, but there is just a special type of irony inherent in characters from Mad Men twittering completely in 1960s character. This irony must be recognized.

See, for example:

• Betty Draper, because she updates most often.
• Joan Holloway, because I love her.

And yes, these accounts are not updated by the show's actors, but whoever is providing these updates is doing a great job.

Twitter as National Consciousness

And here's the coolest thing I've seen all week, via kottke: a The New York Times mapping of key words used by Twitter users during the Super Bowl. Take a moment to explore this interactive graph. Then come back to read a few observations of mine.

• Note, first of all, how perfectly designed this graph is. The presentation is clear, the categories (player names, commercials, etc.) are exactly what I am interested in knowing about, and the geographic distribution clarifies any partisan behavior. The writers behind the Free Darko book mentioned at a book reading that they had no idea how to create graphs before working on their book. So the first thing they did was study as many graphs and charts from The New York Times as they could. This is a great example of why that turned out to be a good idea. Another thing this chart is a great example of: the value of the Times in general. I'm not sure if any other media outlet could have put together a presentation like this on such a fascinating topic, but I do know that no one else did put it together.
  
• But the real genius of the presentation is in lining up the word-mapping with the game situation. Italo Calvino in his novel If on a winter's night a traveler... satirizes people who read books by counting up the number of specific words used. So if a a book uses a preponderance of military words, you can be certain that the book focuses on war. In the context of the book, it's a biting critique of those who don't truly read. But on this twitter-graph it's almost true. I know exactly what happened when I see the map covered with "Fitzgerald" or "Holmes" or "Springsteen." I am able to see the dominant thought pattern of the more than one million twitter users at a particular time. That's the strongest representation I can imagine of the intimate thoughts of a significant portion of our population. This graph, to a large extent, displays what around one million people were thinking across the course of four hours.
  
• Sports fans (or, I guess, regular people while they watch sports) overuse the word "go." We as a sporting nation should be able to devise a more thoughtful sentiment than: Go team from my geographic location!
  
• Twitter, famously, only allows 140 characters per update. I would think in this environment of concision that more twitterers would use "Bruce" instead of "Springsteen" during halftime. Your followers would all understand whom you're talking about.

Incoming: SuperSize Edition

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• Best part of attending a The Daily Show taping: Watching Jon Stewart bust a gut during John Oliver's recorded segment.
• It would be way awesomer if TNT wasn't taken away from our cable-less TV right when I started wanting it, i.e., the NBA season opener.
• Hey, cool, I got a link on Deadspin, the second to last bullet point: http://tinyurl.com/62pj45 I'm living the dream.
• My "I <3>
• I think I added spices to my zucchini soup too early.
• Nope: the soup is awesome.
• Just went for a yog.
• Sunday Night Football Extra kinda sucks.
• Day Man, a-whoa-oh.
• Brinner!
• Video Chat makes g-chatting from the bathroom more unpredictable.
• There's a guy named Steve Sachs at my office. I hope Police Chief Wiggum doesn't arrest him, causing him to miss the big softball game.
• I hate when my favorite blogs go extinct: http://tiny.cc/kblFa

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• In the spirit of "Not Quite What I Was Planning" (http://tiny.cc/hmoAT), my temporary six word memoir: I like to do cool things.
• Light bulb shopping.
• Light bulb shopping was delayed due to my FRONT DOOR NOT OPENING. As if I needed an excuse to go back upstairs and watch more TV.

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• Automobile turn signals that blink too fast make me nervous.
• I like Slaughterhouse 5 so much that I almost said I should have read it long ago. But I'm happy to be reading it now for the first time.
• Oh goodness, "On Chesil Beach" is a damn good book. I read it in about twelve hours, at least seven of which were sleeping.

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• DFW: “I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
• Just watched seven hours of The Godfather. I feel bad for Michael C.
• Finally, a manager uses his closer in a high-leverage moment, even though it's not the ninth inning. Good job, Francona.

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• Wore my black/gray reversible fleece for first time this season. If you see me from now until ~May, there's a 28% chance you'll see it also.
• After reading the touching DFW memories from his students over at mcsweeneys.net, I emailed my favorite college professor. We had coffee.
• Just saw Casablanca for the first time. It holds up spectacularly well (after 68 years) except for the music and the hats.

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• I like my bed at least 50% more, now that I changed the direction on some of the supporting wheels, keeping it mostly in one place.
• Ain't no party like a publishing party.
• Jeter's speech closing Yankee Stadium may have been this generation's Luckiest Man speech. Athletes should give more speeches. (Not really)

And, just for fun, this is kinda awesome and creative.

Jennifer Banash has created microblogs on Twitter for three of the characters in [her Young Adult novel], Madison, Casey, and Drew. The characters make reference to the real world—"read the interview with the director of American Teen in the Times this morning"—as well as their own exploits.

I also just heard last night, at a publishing party, that the author of the upcoming book Captain Freedom, G. Xavier Robillard, has created a network of in-character blogs for personalities from his book, including one written by Captain Freedom himself, and one which is a general site for his nemeses, The International Society of Supervillians.

I like this trend, and thank Stephen Colbert for introducing it to us. Stephen Colbert: is there anything he can't do?