From the UK;s Daily Telegraph newpaper’s Matthew Moore:
“Great works of literature are being shortened into 140-character “tweets”, in the latest diversion to grow out of the popular Twitter website. Classics by Charles Dickens, JD Sallinger and Jane Austen are among the novels to have been boiled down to a sentence by bookish readers of the micro-blogging site.
“Whilst the haiku-like brevity of the synopses will appeal to modern readers more accustomed to skimming their emails than working through 600-word tome, literary purists may be put off by the internet slang.
“Samuel Beckett’s bleak play Waiting for Godot is reduced to: “Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated.”
“The fuss surrounding the publication of DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 is summed up with the web acronym for websites that are not suitable for work: ‘Upper-class woman gets it on with gamekeeper.’
“Tim Collins, a writer who has collected some of his own potted summaries in a new book, said that while the compositions are intended to be tongue-in-cheek the platform opens up new possibilities for art and education.
“‘It’s very easy to knock Twitter as something you use to tell the world what you ordered in Starbucks this morning, but it’s more than that,’ he said.
“‘What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets.'”
Illiterates around the world will now no longer have to endure even the shortened “Cliff Notes” version of classics but can now get all they need from 140 characters or less. is it only a matter of time before books actually get written this way?
I cry to think that my favorite book, Zorba the Greek, may end up as “Dionysian Cretan meets Apollonian Greek and open a mine on an island. Woman is killed, mine fails, Zorba dies. Man learns life lesson.”
SL on VL
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