I’m tweeting presently as a character in a Twitter movie, spending hours a day tweeting as someone I’m not. Sure does mess with your style. Now I find myself naturally falling into the style of that character, a colorful old man. It’s the old man thing that’s getting to me, because I’ve realized a lot of the things I say are like an old man already, like lordy or dearie.

Oh lordy (in a young way).

The movie is being written and cast and beginning some filming now. We had an outline, and while the rest of the gang began work on auditions, the website, the script, and soon the filming, I started tweeting, doing exactly what the protagonist does in the film. This the the story of the story, as it’s made, since we don’t know the final form of the script, it being only a synopsis so far.

Don’t know why I’m so set on it being a secret I’m doing this, or a partial one, since I am telling my friends it’s me. So if it’s okay my friends know I’m tweeting as whatshisname, why is it not okay for everybody else?

Don’t know exactly. I do know I want it to be as much like that guy as possible. Positive realage, fakewise. It’s great fun to write, very spontaneous and interactive. A combination of storytelling, acting, conversation,  twoetry, and doing the limbo. Did invent a language in my spare time: Twinglese. You just put ‘tw’ in front of everything. Ha. Twike twis, twy twonfused twiend. Tworry, twit twinda twucks, twas twa twanguage. But what the hey, sure was easy. Tolkien here I come!

Considerably easier to get under that limbo bar when it doesn’t exist.

Amazing how my writing experiences have prepared me for this role. It’s a lot like the letter game, except with tweets. And I do have a penchant for roleplaying, as in Wisdom Boy or Lone Wolf III.

This is nothing like writing by yourself. Much more collegial and friendly, a social forum. It’s a public performance artform, based on an outline, but much of the subplot of the story is being built up by interaction with other tweeters. They say something, then the character plays off that, and so the story is the result partly of chance or fate, which is kinda cool in this postmodern era.

Hello World!

LWIII

And so I watched as well as read my way through Intro to Shakespeare. Our professor was a massive bardaholic, an ancient fella with a huge passion. His belief was that the only way to begin to understand a Shakespeare play was to read it seven times. So I did that with Romeo and Juliet, right in a row. The sacred 7.

Talk about word heaven. Don’t know about understanding, but I did get steeped in the sound. So much so that for two weeks I dreamt in iambic pentameter. My soul no longer had its seat in modern times, but was sucked by the sound back to times of yon. And anon and stuff.

Which brings us to the present. When I first joined Twitter I had the good fortune to find @IAM_SHAKESPEARE,  a guy who auto-tweets one line of Shakespeare every ten minutes on the dot, consecutively, all 120,000 of them. The entire godlike ouvre.

Twitter is so great. Readus Interruptus, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of earvision. Every ten minutes, without fail if you’re watching your timestream, you get a reminder of what the human race is capable of, such music, such humor, such terrible insight, the kind that gnaws at you and makes you wonder and go yeah. I had to get me some of that.

So I started tweeting back to Shakespeare, playing with his words. I would take a word or four (it has settled pretty much on three, as the personal mini-form has evolved) and snag it from William’s latest line then use it to start my own poetical plagiarism tweet.

As an example I’ll paste in my last, posted less than 5 seconds ago from web:

A deep indent you make in me, a place inside the mystery where you are. Once I was there but now are you. Am I blue? No freakin’ way. Yay!

Not my finest hour but a good example. I try to stuff as much rhyme into the piece as possible. 140 characters. Rhyme on. I don’t even mess with slants to differentiate lines. A waste of the form which follows from its short function. A perfect “twoem” ends with a period at 140 characters exactly. Sometimes I leave out punctuation to fit it all in.

That last one was from the line “It shall not wind with such a deep indent,” spoken by Hotspur in Henry V, in reference to a river. We just recently finished Hamlet, the most glorious collection of words ever slapped between a cover, by my lights. That was awesome. A little like dancing with the muse in person.

I find the quality of my quasi-verse often declines abruptly towards the end of the tweet, but that comes with the territory. No arguing with 140. And no diddling around forever. Part of the high-wire property of this format is the good chance I’ll write a real dog. Happens frequently, I’m afraid, but it’s the nature of this expression. Postmodern art and all, y’know. You have to make it suck occasionally to keep your hand in.

Here’s ten of my favorites from the past few months:

Again to lie with myself, I plump the pillow finely, sigh and rub my ass divinely. To sleep with me then, again. And so it goes, alone.

1598 was the year grandpaw exploded. Ate a whole pig. Done turned the house pink, insides anyway. Not much use for a blown-up gramps.

Tell my story, an thou will’t. Give your listeners a stilt to climb thy words, and a wrap against the wind, for these are chilling rhymes.

Will not wrong my simple song by singing it to you, nor shall I ever pen a poem to your beauty too, for my words are of love and you hear hate.

Madness is poor when madmen prove insane, and left their ticket to the normal train in their neighbor’s coat. The mad castle has no moat.

Very soft society, for it builds on rumor and mends by trends, a body of nothing but hot air long-exhaled. We are by our own rat, tailed.

Enter Hamlet and his duck: “Bad luck, mad quacker, I am no whacker of the dad, not bad like you, you ducky goose. O my feathery caboose!”

Wonder-wounded hearers gape away, for I have something strong to say and your ears must stand it. I can land it, I promise. Just let me try.

For no man is an I, land where he will, only I can be that. I am me, you cannot be, nor can I be your I too, for we are always I and you.

To my bow I bend my thought, see that recurved shape that wrought such hidden power, backwards-bending, thus with power arrow sending.

LWIII

…with thanks to @Guy_Vincent, who showed me how to look at a tweet as its own artistic format.

It seemed like he had to have everything his own way and that way was not my way because I like stuff to be up front and to make sense but he didn’t like it that way he liked it when stuff didn’t make sense and things that he said where like strange cloth wrappings that went all soft and turned everything into a bizarre funhouse of nothingness that didn’t really mean anything to begin with but was an awful preconditioned reality that he already knew but I don’t already know anything that is so horrible so it doesn’t matter but really it does matter which is why I’m doing this because I would like something to matter someday but that doesn’t matter either because those are just words and words are just a count so that I can get my daily sufferage of time and nature in a basket of awful feelings of sorrow and horror and the feeling of failure that I say I hate so much but don’t really because I do it so much so I must really like it because is everything really so horrible that I can’t do the things I say I like but have to do all the things I day I don’t but really do? I don’t know if that can happen that way because of the bad essense that I am and when I am bad I’m really bad but not so much because I’m not as bad as some other people who are bad but I am kinda bad but that is okay since what we see is what is there and when it’s not there it’s okay too because we need to wonder what is going on here when we just hurry and get things done even though the words are fun to play with and thoughts come slowly if at all but those words do come and here we are now so what matters what happened before since every moment is a new moment that comes to us we know not how and here it is and now it’s gone so now is all we haver right now and this is the time of the life when we finally get going and all our furious anger is left in the lee of the cliff that stands at the end of time and when that time is over it’s the end but not really since every beginning is an end and all ends are beginning always so we can start to keep saying it’s the start of things when we do this in ways that seem so weary but are also very smooth and smart because all of when we go somewhere we go to places we know not of because we know not of every single moment when the new comes in and come it does because it does come in but not as we may have hoped because this is the way that we can type as fast as possible but it doesn’t seem to be that way yet it is because it always is the way it is or seems to be even though what seems to be is not always what is when we wonder about the things that happened or didin’t happen when we go to places where we have not ever been before and those places are not so great but also they are very great so we wonder if that is possible because of possibility is sometimes not possible but also it is possible so that is also true to find the meaning behind the matter of not mattering or nattering as ways of finding the truth is also not the truth and I wonder if I can go to my Outlook and get the chess game that chess game is a very good one even though it may seem at times to be really hard it also is not so hard because it’s always harder than it seems though it also is very easy because all I’m doing is putting words one after the other even though I want them to make sense it doesn’t matter if they don’t because I’m just making up stuff to hit my count and that count is good even though it may seem like it isn’t a good count it is because good counts go to good counties and Broomfield is a good county because it’s its own county and that’s pretty cool even though most cities are not their own county because counties don’t count. So hurry up and finish this word count thing and get back to wondering about the story. I like the idea of a wind that eats stories. And I’ll just pop in a few more words so I can get over the count I thought I was going to get.

Sigh,

LWIII

It’s in the steam punk genre with more that a smidgen of pustule chic. What it reminds me of is the postmodernist concept of “the abject” by Julia Kristeva. The personal abject is those parts of a person that are excreted, things that were inside of us that eventually go outside, such as mucus and feces. If you’re interested in the social abject, go here.

It also reminds me of the story that the first time Ravel’s Bolero was performed in public, some people ran screaming from the theatre. How can a book be so horrible, so consumed by rot and scum and filth? I don’t know, but it does seem to be a logical end to horror, such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson and his Jekyll and Hyde evolving over time into this, abberation as normalcy. Unearthly levels of violence to the psyche, at least for an old guy who’s used to old ways.

I bet when Miéville was a kid he was majorly into popping zits.

I tweeted on this book yesterday @TomYHowe Perdido Station: bloated vile mutant slimy scum turgid viscous poisoned bilious insectile viscid spewing excretion putrid chancreous feces

That was just an example of the author’s standard diction.

Puke on,

LWIII

Everything I love is anti-cool. I love kindness and thoughtfulness; sincerity and generosity and understanding and warmth – childishness with a passion. Boy, what a dork, huh?

I also care immensely, and if you show you really really care, man, whew, talk about uncool. Wouldn’t be so bad if the only thing a youngamerican cares about anymore wasn’t being cool. Of course that’s been true ever since Elvis made the scene, so it’s not new. That was true in my day, too, and I sold my soul in High School to be cool.

Been paying for it ever since, trying to recover the real me, who was sucked down the cool drain and frozen for eternity. Pretending not to care as the highest virtue…how did this happen?

What brings this up is a guy on Twitter who followed me, called ihatepoetry, or something like that. Didn’t really bother me, since anybody in their right mind these days kinda hates poetry, since it rhymes with poser. But then I checked out his website and was appalled at the venom of his anti-poetry poetry.

He claims to be a comedian, but in my book humor is supposed to make you laugh and feel glad, not turn you suicidal. The cool people (those scoffers and scorners) apparently took this young budding artistic type – since his talent with words shines out of his hellish screeds – and drove him into the dirt with sarcasm before he had a chance to save himself. Judging from his poems I bet he never, ever writes anything meant to be beautiful and uplifting, since if he did he would barf all over himself. Sarcasm has sunk into his bones like Beethoven from A Clockwork Orange. Nothing but demeaning things from him anymore. Destruction, not creation. Abuse, not use.

Sarcasm is death to the open heart of a writer.

Sad again,

LWIII

When her mama asked if she had brushed her claws before bedtime, she said of course Mama, I used the roof. And when her brother told her to hurry up, they were late for school, she said she was trying, but her tail got so heavy it sunk into the ground and now she was stuck.

Nobody could ever get the truth out of her, but they didn’t mind so much, because they liked her stories. Her homework was flew to the moon by a golden hummingbird-frog. She was late cause a cow stepped on her and it took so long to get unsquashed. The reason spring came early that one year was because Old Man Winter had forgot his trousers in the mailbox and had to stay home.

Some of her stories was funny, and some were sad. This is the story of a sad one.

LWIII

Last night I had a dream. I was at some sort of art school, a dream art school that was a combination of theatre, literary, graphic, frog, and applesauce, or something. You know how dreams are.

I had met a fellow student who was kinda famous, some sort of prodigy. I felt really lucky to have him as a friend and was kissing his ass madly, trying to be as cool as him so he’d like me. For some reason, even though I kept doing stupid stuff per normal, he still liked me, and took me up to his dorm room/intellerstallar spacecraft or whatever.

Man it was amazing there, shelves and shelves of beautiful doohickeys: steampunk meets Mr. Limpet and the fairy princess. Lots of dream-models of traveling stuff, tiny trains and whimsical planes and elegant little dancers. I was having problems with my own work so the place morphed into my dump that was full of mostly blank notebooks and a few scrawlings.

He said he wanted me to write something down, and in my haste to find a pen and something to write on, I knocked down my tall freestanding shelves with my notebooks piled high on them. What a mess, blank pages everywhere. I had to hurry because he had told me already, and I needed to write it down before I forgot.

Finally found a Sharpie and an old envelope or something. When I wrote it down, very carefully, strange points came up at the top of ever letter, some weird dream auto-calligraphy. This is what I wrote:

That’s very important. Might not seem like much now, but that’s because you’re awake. If you were asleep you’d go OMG! Curtains rise.

I woke up after he told me that and got out of bed and wrote it down (with a Sharpie on an envelope, strangely enough, but without the pointy letters). Then, when I really got up later, I thought I remembered it, so didn’t check the envelope. Just hopped onto Twitter and shared the news thusly:

The beginning is the part that you see.

I kind of like that better, because it’s easier to understand while awake. If you think about it, every moment is a beginning. Everything you see at every moment is beginning. Ends are something of a literary or human fiction. The problem is to see that. But as soon as you do see it, it’s like – yes, this is the beginning! And once you can see that, you can begin.

For esthetic types, writers or painters or frog/applesauce guys, this phrase is even more cogent. Because that’s exactly what one does at the beginning of an artwork. You see the beginning. Oftentimes that’s all you can see, and frequently it’s all you need to see. Since you’ve seen it, everything else flows organically from that first moment of sight.

Begin now,

LWIII

Grew up singing “Here I come to save the day!” Mighty Mouse was always on the way in my imagination, and he’s still nibbling away down there, trying to poke his way into reality. Not sure I ever saved any days, but I sang that a lot anyway, and always wished to save at least one day.

We are God’s little mice after all, running around and scampering all over each other down here on earth, sometimes being naughty, and wishing we were bigger.

Timothy Little, my mouse-hero from Little Did He Know, last NaNoWriMo’s production, is going to get a sister in mousehood this November. Her name will be Story (Agatha Pipswhistle, or something) and her book will be called The Story of Story.

Mouse on,

LWIII

Her name was Story, and What Might Have Been, and What Could Be, and It Is. You may have heard her tale once. It has been going on for a long long time, yet she remains ever-young.

And then it came to pass,

LWIII

Well, come to find out it is a legend, a true one, as true as magical realism can get – which is a lot truer than regular realism, since it includes magic and miracles. No idea why this one tale is so special to me, who has perused so many tales in his life it’s a miracle he ain’t grown one.

Maybe it’s because I like words, love the Southland, am a sucker for love stories, tall tales, and immaculate beauty, and have a keen appreciation of myth and fable. Also love asskickers, btw. 

I ran across this magical gem of trade paperbacks as an accident, really. When I was kinda new to Twitter I chummed up to a guy named @George9Writer. He was friendly, helpful, seemed a nice guy, and as a fellow writer I thought I’d give him a hand up by ordering his first ever book (poor fella, a self-publisher like me, welcome to schmucksville). Turns out he gave me a hand up – a hand up into one of the best novels I ever read in my life – and boy am I grateful.

Thank you George LaCas. I will ever be your friend and avid reader. Really looking forward to my second runthrough of Legend in a week or three, after my ravished soul has got a chance to settle down, let the ol’ language bone cool off some. I know there is more glory to be had.

Whew,

LWIII

(do have to warn you he edited it himself, so it’s only a modern classic and not a masterpiece, which may actually add to its charm for me)