Twitterature Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Catcher in the Rye

  The Da Vinci Code

  Paradise Lost

  The Metamorphosis

  The Stranger

  Oedipus the King

  Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage

  Slaughterhouse Five

  Harry Potter (1-7)

  The Red and the Black

  Macbeth

  The Hobbit

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  The Great Gatsby

  The Iliad

  Hamlet

  The Overcoat

  The Old Man and the Sea

  The Inferno

  A Hero of Our Time

  Beowulf

  Candide

  Doctor Faustus

  Emma

  Enderʼs Game

  Great Expectations

  Heart of Darkness

  King Lear

  Lysistrata

  In Cold Blood

  Medea

  Nineteen Eighty-Four

  On the Road

  Notes from Underground

  Of Mice and Men

  Robinson Crusoe

  Romeo and Juliet

  Anna Karenina

  Sherlock Holmes

  Eugene Onegin

  The Crying of Lot 49

  The Epic of Gilgamesh

  The Odyssey

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  The Sorrows of Young Werther

  The Sound and the Fury

  The Story of My Life

  All Quiet on the Western Front

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Ulysses

  Venus in Furs

  Waiting for Godot

  Watchmen

  Mrs Dalloway

  Crime and Punishment

  Wuthering Heights

  Lolita

  Gulliverʼs Travels

  The Wall

  Pride and Prejudice

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Frankenstein

  All the Pretty Horses

  Swannʼs Way

  The Aeneid

  The Devil in the Flesh

  Dracula

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  The Waste Land

  Lady Chatterleyʼs Lover

  Jane Eyre

  Aliceʼs Adventures in Wonderland

  The Tempest

  Madame Bovary

  Death in Venice

  The Three Musketeers

  Twilight

  Moby-Dick

  Don Quixote

  The Canterbury Tales

  Sgt Pepperʼs Lonely Hearts Club Band

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TWITTERATURE

  “The classics are so last century.”—The Guardian

  “Sincerest apologies to Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce: how were we to know it would come to this?”—Mashable.com

  “The trouble with Twitter is, I think, that too many twits might make a twat.”—David Cameron

  “Twitterature makes me want to punch someone, preferably the ‘authors.’ They’re in Chicago. I’m gonna take a road trip.”

  —@damig, Twitter

  “A move likely to be greeted by book lovers with a mixture of horror and why-didn’t-I-think-of-that jealousy.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Just f *#%ing shoot me now.”

  —Mike C., grouchyconservativepundits.com

  ALEXANDER ACIMAN was born in 1990. A sophomore at the University of Chicago, he was graduated from Horace Mann School in New York City. He has worked in the offices of several publications, including The Paris Review and the late New York Sun, which he and the city of New York mourn every day upon noticing its absence from every newsstand as the copper sun rises to greet the metropolis. He has published many articles in both his high school and college newspapers, as well as three feature article-essays in The New York Times and one in The New York Sun. He is also a devoted follower of Napoleon Bonaparte. He believes that there is no better way to start a day than with a run or a bike ride, and is known on occasion to enjoy a game of bocce or to engage in pugilism. He would like to write, own a pair of John Lobb shoes, and live out his days reading and writing in the Mediterranean basin with his brothers.

  EMMETT RENSIN was born in 1990. He is a sophomore at the University of Chicago, before which he attended the finest parochial school in all of Los Angeles. A Huffington Post contributor and ordained reverend, and unable to tie his shoelaces at the tender age of sixteen, he gave it all up to pursue his true dream: putting stickers on books. This he did with care and devotion for many long hours, ensuring that every book in the reference library of the world-renowned Museum of Jurassic Technology at which he was employed had its lovely laminated ascension number neatly stuck upon its spine. He emerged from this a brighter and more worldly man. Rensin contributes to the University of Chicago’s Chicago Maroon as well as the Huffington Post but takes care to balance his stresses with the relaxing arts of coat collection and Richard Nixon enthusiasm. Such balance is necessary, as extremity might cause Rensin’s untimely death and prevent him from accomplishing his three life goals: penning the Great American Novel, mastery of card magic, and telling the perfect shaggy-dog joke.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © Alexander Aciman and Emmett L. Rensin, 2009

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Aciman, Alexander.

  Twitterature : the world’s greatest books in twenty tweets or less /

  Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16282-8

  1. Best books—Humor. 2. Twitter. I. Rensin, Emmett. II. Title.

  PN6231.B62A36 2009

  818’.607—dc22 2009040344

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedicated in Loving Memory

  to the Victims of the R.M.S. Titanic

  Introduction

  Life can offer us no
greater treasure than art. It is all that is beautiful, and all that allows a man’s soul to take leave of the quotidian trifles that molest his waking mind, to be lifted to the highest peaks of experience, and to peer briefly into the sublime. It is that which removes man from the static residue of time and casts him into the gentle waters of the eternal. It is to hear and to speak softly in the beauteous tongue of antiquity, and yet to foresee all that will unfold through the illimitably growing passage of our universe.

  In short, art is pretty sweet.

  What a tragédie, then, that so many modern people find the great works of literature inaccessible, overwhelming, and even, perhaps, dull. It is not a defect of their character, nor any special ineptitude that has disposed them in this manner; rather, these great texts - timeless as they may be - are, in their present form, outdated. Who but college students, hermits, and disciples of the disgraced John Ludd can muddle through them with any hope of understanding? This is what we seek, through our humble efforts, to remedy.

  While some may describe the reinvention of our world’s Great Works to suit the ever-evolving brain of the modern man as ‘a triviality’, ‘a travesty’, or ‘that sucks’, we prefer to think of ourselves as modern-day Martin Luthers. Herr Luther took the Holy Scripture itself, and seeing that the classic Vulgate no longer spoke to the souls of his contemporaries, he translated it into the vernacular of his time. By doing so, Luther unleashed a revolution of faith and literacy upon sixteenth-century Europe that had not been seen before and has not been equaled since.

  In our own way, and in our own time, we hope to do the same.

  However, it’s probably best if we stay clear of the Bible.

  You may be wondering, good sirs, what exactly we intend to do with these great works of art. What one must keep in mind is that the literary canon is not valued for its tens of thousands of dull, dull words but for the raw insight into humanity it provides. While perhaps an unwieldy tome was the best method of digesting this knowledge during a summer spent in the Victorian countryside in the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Three, times have changed. Virginity must not be distracted with books, nor damsel-chasing pacified with poetry. Instead we must run free into the world and not once look back.

  And so, we give you the means to absorb the strong voices, valuable lessons and stylistic innovations of the Greats without the burdensome duty of hours spent reading. We take these Great Works and present their most essential elements, distilled into the voice of Twitter - the social networking tool that with its limit of 140 characters a post (including spaces) has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge - and give you everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world.

  For indeed, does any man have such great pretense as to suppose that he may digest all that it is right and proper for him to have digested in the stunted mortal fit granted to him by Providence? Perhaps in the eighteenth year of your life you sat on a porch asking yourself: What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince words and muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub? Such questions are no doubt troubling - and we believe they would have been resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com, well versed in the idiosyncrasies and idioms of the modern day. And this, in essence, is what we have done. We have liberated poor Hamlet from the rigorous literary constraints of the sixteenth century and made him - without losing an ounce of wisdom, beauty, wit, or angst - a happening youngster. Just like you, dear reader.

  In brief - and we mean this literally - we have created our generation’s salvation, a new and revolutionary way of facing and understanding the greatest art of all arts: Literature.

  And allow us now to open

  The eternal aperture,

  To the brilliant soul of common man:

  We now present you . . . Twitterature.

  The Catcher in the Rye

  by J. D. Salinger

  @HoldenLolfield

  Fucked up for the last time. Theyʼre throwinʼ me out of the old school! Still havenʼt seen a goddamn horse! LOL!

  Do you ever wonder what they used in Egypt to embalm mummies? Itʼs special ancient mummy juice, thatʼs what it is.

  Left school. Totally yelled some nasty shit down the hall - thatʼll show em! Headinʼ 2 NY soon. Hit me up.

  Surrounded by phonies. Everywhere!

  I tried to bone some kidʼs mom. She wasnʼt havinʼ it. I have this really gay lumberjack hat now, though.

  Checked into a dingy hotel; itʼs pretty crappy. Pay per view isnʼt working. I guess Iʼll just call a hooker?

  Whoa: never ever try to short a hooker. These guys called pimps come and fuck you up.

  Still surrounded by phonies! I bet youʼre all phonies, too. Ugh.

  Think I have mouth cancer - will keep you all updated.

  Anyone know where ducks go during winter? Do they freeze??

  On a date with a girl I donʼt care about. So bizarre that nature makes me do such funny, contradictory things. Hypocrisy to the max. Deep.

  Decided to run away from home. I told my sister about it. Sheʼs here.

  I think some dude just tried to fuck me. Yeah, some dude just tried to put his dick in me. Disgusting.

  Heʼs a phony too, of course.

  Sister insists on going west with me - I said no way. Women canʼt be cowboys!!

  On second thought, west probably as phony as east.

  Life is full of frustration and contradiction.

  I miss those pricks I swore at in school. :( Even though they were phonies.

  The Da Vinci Code

  by Dan Brown

  @CatholicGuilt

  Heading to Paris! A man is dead and the police think only my superhuman knowledge of cryptology can solve this one.

  Oh fuck - the police think I killed him!!!

  These idiots donʼt understand this is a CODE! Thankfully, this banginʼ - er, beautiful - French girl is helping me out.

  Driving to a bank. Good time to exposit the history of all these crazy Catholic secret societies to this French girl - maybe get her hot??

  HOLY SHIT!!!! We stole the Codex for a large-scale conspiracy that is conveniently in my area of expertise!

  A historian explained rest of complicated conspiratorial legend. Itʼs good we keep track of all this. For the ladyʼs benefit, of course.

  WTF!! A FUCKING ALBINO!! My cushy tenure at Harvard did NOT prepare me for all this action!!!

  You know that old Italian dude who painted the picture of the smiling lady? Heʼs the key to all of this. LOL, who would have thought?

  Police wonʼt stop chasing us! Will tweet all locations; just donʼt tell the Popo! Or the Pope.

  Oh man, this gal is hot. But itʼs harder than I thought to find romance amidst a global plot to conceal the truth about Jesus Christ.

  Taking a breather to solve some puzzles. ʻA Popeʼ, anybody? Thereʼs so many! Mad props if anyone can solve it.

  Thanks to @dudeonthebus. Oh goddamnit, another cryptex? Jesus fucking Christ. Literally.

  Canʼt someone tell this albino and the cops that weʼre just TRYING TO SOLVE A MYSTERY? Itʼs like a crossword! Everyone needs to CTFO!

  Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles all day long.

  So youʼre looking for something. Got a smokinʼ hot French babe with you. Then it turns out what youʼre looking for IS that babe. Yeah!

  Jesus. The lady is a direct descendant of Christ. All good. Oh what? Another puzzle? Bring on the sequel!

  Paradise Lost

  by John Milton

  @MorningStarlet

  FALLING UNTO THE ABYSS!!!!! Iʼll talk more about why in several hundred pages to avoid any confusion.

  OH MY GOD IʼM IN HELL.

  ʼTis Pandemonium down here. Would ROFL but itʼs very hot.

  Iʼm bored. Iʼm the chairman of the board. My compatriots are r-tards. Inaction? Is that the best we can do? We art fucking demons
!

  Sitting on our asses waiting for an apology from G-d isnʼt exactly renegade. Pussies.

  Anyone heard anything about Earth? Good? Bad? Will be there tonight bringing the MOTHAFUCKINʼ RUCKUS. If anyone wants in, txt it.

  On second thought, Iʼm going alone.

  So there was a fight. Sometimes you invent gunpowder and you think SWEET but then they whip out JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF and BAM! Weʼre in hell.

  How do you defeat your own son, born to YOUR OWN DAUGHTER! Freud would have a field day.

  Did you know I can change shapes? BAM: halo, wings, grace. Looking sharp, looking the part. Time to go kick some Promethean ass.

  What? The almighty knows everything? Asshole sent Gabriel - the mothafuckinʼ archangel himself - to warn Adam and his first lady.