thoughts on some tweets that I like

In a The New Yorker interview with Salley Rooney I recently read, there’s a section that physically describes the author, detailing her quirks, gestures, and speaking habits, her ‘bright and crisp’ voice, the way that there is ‘something autumnal about her’. This kind of writing about writing fills me with an ephemeral rage. I think my problem is that writing is fundamentally unsexy—at its core, the act is little more than spending hours at a keyboard with bad posture—so prestige magazines like these feel the need to ‘glitz up’ the profession, to portray normal awkward humans as esoteric celebrities. Still, there’s lots of writing in this world that appeals to me, and I want to learn how to talk about it. I’m frustrated by the inadequacy of cushy write-ups like The New Yorker, but also by my own inability to describe exactly what it is I like about the writing I consume. So, in an ongoing challenge to myself, I’m attempting to explain why I like the writing that I do. Today’s post will be focused particularly on tweets I’ve liked. Please consider this a The New Yorker-tier puff piece on Twitter posts that I think are good.

1.

                    

Megan Boyle is to tweeting what Lorrie Moore is to the short story, I feel, both masters of their craft. Megan has consistently displayed the ability to chart daily events/emotions in ways that are funny, unique, and often surprisingly wrenching. I like how the sentiment Megan expresses here is both singular, hyper-focused in its detail, and universal—it doesn’t just trigger familiar memories in me but plants them, giving me déjà vu for an experience I never had of a sweltering summer crankiness textured by vaguely failing relationships. I also like how Megan isn’t longing for some generic creature comfort but instead an unorthodox, even distressing event. I think this is an accurate depiction of ‘craving’. I don’t think people really have rational desires. I think our brains and logic are at best schizophrenic, jarring and ape-like, that we lust after certain angles of displaced sunlight without context for the gloom surrounding them. As an example, nostalgia to me feels like the interior of a Kia Spectra at night lit by passing headlights, which then in turn reminds me of the smell of mown grass during summer, the muffled carpet softness of a friend’s house during a sleepover, a cool basement flickering with the candlelight of a Nintendo Wii—yes, I long for the 2008 global recession.

 

2.

Fascism is obviously bad, but I think it’s easy to forget that at the basic, individual level, we’re all a little authoritarian. I don’t think people actually like the fact that other people with different opinions than them can vote. I don’t think anyone I know seems pleased with the results of the American democratic process thus far. I suspect, at the end of the day, we all have a fragment of a desire for a stallion that will bash our enemy’s fucking skull in. Tweets like this, curdling in their infantile anger, are captivating to me. Prince Edward eloquently captures a real sincerity here that’s become so rare in the sweeping ironic detachment of current Twitter; the sheer, childlike honesty of bile. 

 

3.

Early 2010-era Tao Lin tweeting seems unparalleled, a period that I look back on with the same sunset fondness that historians usually afford ancient fallen empires. Tao here is an utter maestro of the Twitter formula, playing his 140-character limit elegantly as a Chopin piano piece—the precise and perfect use of quotation marks, the hilarious comparison implied between holidays and sporting events. I think Tao’s strength as a writer in general is his ability to re-examine the mundane shit we take for granted from a distant, alien-seeming perspective. He can investigate the average daily experience, be it a mall, restaurant, or subway, and expose its underlying insanity with these simple yet stark observations. Since ~2016, it seems Tao’s tweet output has dramatically reduced, but instead of a negative I see this as a sign of health and progress in his life, signifying his escape from the internet’s hellhole sucking. Alternatively, I also enjoy viewing his new tweeting format—which seems to have moved away from these extraterrestrial-like snatches to more straightforward, ‘advice’-based tweets like his March 27, 2022 post at 3:14 PM: ‘I recommend increased paranoia against corporations and governments’—as a stylistic shift, the way authors can evolve from book to book, a maturation of craft.

 

4.

As a matter of principle, I generally don’t like tweets about Twitter, but I have a soft fondness for this variety of detached belligerence. I often think things like ‘ten seconds of my life would kill the average person’ while debilitatingly hungover at work. A good tweet must accurately pick apart the workings of our society while also being completely insane.

 

5.

I think the majority of people go through their lives with the same borderline megalomaniac-level of delusion expressed by this post. In fact, to break that illusion might render the daily grind of work, rent, and stagnating relationships unbearable. Beyond the basic realities tweets can explore, I’m fascinated by their anatomy, the way that through character limits and idiosyncratic grammar, they mirror poetry, where the author can play with the space of the page to create an effect that transcends straightforward prose. Alex’s scattered syntax here, how his words squeeze together claustrophobically yet gasp with a maniacal grandiosity thanks to the disjointed comma and otherwise lack of punctuation, is nothing short of masterful. This tweet is not a sentence or statement but an intrusive thought, burrowing, expanding, yet disappearing even as it’s uttered: it is the snow of dandelion seeds in summer. Life, love, the universe’s howling unfurling—everything is balanced perfectly in this tweet.

 

6.

This, to me, is the Ulysses of tweets. As stated previously, a post is much like poetry—immune to convention. A tweet’s power as an art form, then, is limitless. Even (especially??) emojis have relevance here, and I’m awed by Bionis Interior’s choice to use them in addition to emoticons, a feat of hieroglyphics. There’s also a narrative journey at play, as is typical of these longform posts, Kabuki theater compressed into less than or equal to 280 characters. In the first act, we explore society, the whole: white women conjoining with the world, a merged dissolution. But even as we join, we must separate. There can never be complete instrumentality, a truly equal civilization, and so we snap back, snakelike, to the individual. Our protagonist's murmured monologue is less a threat than an escape, the dogma of the alone. For those unfamiliar, the display name of this account, Bionis Interior, is a reference to the video game Xenoblade. So, too, is the dual-wield backstab multiplier effect of silver daggers (with accompanying shock damage). This tweet’s conclusion, then, is not a roar of resistance to conformity, but a collapse into itself—the final retreat into the video game playground of loneliness. This is more than a post. It contains rising and falling actions, poetry, multiple screenplays, slabs of ancient texts unearthed. It is a star whose glimmer could be mistaken, from a far enough distance, for a single falling tear. Sometimes the weeping can be so cosmic we never notice it. Sometimes galaxies resound, again and again, and we never hear even the echoes of their echoes.