From The Paris Review:
On February 13, just after midnight, the Daily Kerouac Twitter account tweeted, “As I’m writing this, the radio says there’s a foot of snow falling on Long Island.” A Twitter user named Susan replied, “Turn off the radio, go outside and listen to the snow.” As I read the exchange, I happened to be less than a mile from Kerouac’s home in Northport, New York, where, on February 13, it was not snowing. The conversation seemed suspended somewhere between now and the early 1960s, when Kerouac first wrote the lines in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. I couldn’t help but picture some version of Kerouac sitting at his typewriter receiving Susan’s reply on an iPhone. It was a bizarre sensation.
Daily Kerouac is one of several literary tribute Twitter accounts devoted to tweeting quotes from authors. Sometimes these quotes are consecutive sentences from longer works, other times they’re non-sequitur snippets chopped off midsentence. Shakespeare has at least three tribute accounts, the largest of which, @Wwm_Shakespeare, boasts 158,000 followers. The most popular Oscar Wilde account has upward of 160,000 followers while Sylvia Plath has nearly 200,000 and @_harukimurakami clocks in at 235,000. I have a personal fondness for the Frank O’Hara account. There’s a Virginia Woolf bot that tweets quotes in Korean and a Lovecraft bot that tweets in French.
. . . .
“Form equals function,” as writing professors love to say, and quotes on Twitter function differently than those presented in their intended context. They’re recontextualized on every follower’s unique timeline, bookended by anything from Trump-adjacent catastrophes to celebrity gossip to the everyday minutiae of the people you actually know. In this way, the Twitter timeline is an equalizer.
“Whether you’re following fifty people or a hundred people or even thousands, they all [take up] the same amount of space,” Mark Sample, an associate professor of digital studies at Davidson College who has created a handful of literary Twitter bots, including the aforementioned @WhitmanFML, told me. “So seeing a tweet from Jack Kerouac or Herman Melville makes them feel like they’re personalities as much as anyone else on Twitter.”
As a result of this sense of familiarity and accessibility, users are likely to interact with these long dead literary greats. “I’ve seen people do that with Herman Melville,” Sample tells me. “Obviously [they ask] rhetorical questions; I don’t think they expect an answer, but there’s also something about Twitter itself that makes it easy to do that. It’s easy to reply, it’s low stakes.”
Link to the rest at The Paris Review
PG is endlessly interested in the endless variety of human behavior.
For better or worse, the internet has broadened his understanding of the range of things people do.