The Stationers Guild

I had known it was coming, but didn’t know it was already here:  Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less.  Twitterature “\’twi-ta-ra-chúr\ n: amalgamation of ‘twitter’ and ‘literature’; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer.”

Written by two University of Chicago students (Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin),  Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less humorously twitterize just under 100 great works of literature into 20 or less tweets.    Twitterature  is published by Penguin Press and I do hope this great publisher won’t go the way of the Dodo with Kindle rearing its ugly head.

According to the authors, they distilled the Great Books “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.”

Clearly, this is no small feat, particularly when college kids seem to spend most of their free-time binge-drinking rather than contributing to our understanding of Great Literature.  Clearly these aspiring writers were out having a little literary fun, but it is surprising that Penguin would publish it.   Nevertheless, why should I be surprised anymore when The Library of Congress (yes, our Library of Congress!) has seen fit to archive every Tweet since 2006!  Have we gone mad?  I read in the New York Times that future historians are salivating at the thought of having uncensored and instantaneous reactions to daily events.  Isn’t that what reality TV is for?

Now there are a few who will see the humor in Twitterature and, perhaps, thumb through the book at the library or bookstore, but I suspect that many “Twits” will use it in much the same way that my generation used Cliff Notes.   One in four adults in the United States does not even read one book in a year and the average is only four!  Really, who can compete with Lady Gaga, Jersey Shore and the Kardashians for enlightened commentary on today’s pressing moral issues?  A further question:  Will digital media improve literacy?  I suspect not, and Jaron Lanier, who wrote You are not a Gadget, would most likely agree.

Richard W. May
Founding Member Stationers Guild

The news clip below highlights one of the major advantages of shopping online for stationery and custom invitations:  No need to get dressed up for the big occasion.

In fact, if you are shopping online, you can do so in your pajamas, nightgown or – for that matter – buck naked.  Just make sure your have your credit card handy, but perhaps you are using Google Checkout or Paypal to facilitate the sale.

As more shoppers embrace the convenience of shopping online,  even fewer consider the limitations of the online shopping experience.  It is one thing to download a book on Kindle or buy an iPhone, but quite another to buy “fresh” vegetables or “fine” stationery.  In the case of the Kindle or an iPhone, it is a narrowly defined “gadget” or “device” which may be available in several different colors or memory capacity, but all of those characteristics are narrowly determined by the seller.

Buying “fresh” vegetables or “fine” stationery is quite another matter altogether.   You can’t see “fresh” on the Internet; nor can you see or feel ”fine” stationery.  Paper is as much a tactile experience as a visual experience and, frankly, digital limitations of the Internet do not allow one to capture the color and design subtleties of “real” stationery or custom invitations. 

Where extensive customization is involved it is best to get dressed up and visit your local stationer to see what “real” paper looks like.  Many online dealers spend thousands of dollars in promotional online advertising to con you into thinking you are getting a “beautiful”  wedding invitation or “stunning” stationery.   If it sounds to good to be true, it probably isn’t.  Trust your senses: all five of them!  A dose of common sense also has been known to help.

The Internet is great for purchasing products with defined characteristics.  Once you begin to introduce customization into the purchasing decision or are faced with choices that require a value judgment or cause the forgotten senses (smell and feel) to be engaged, it is wise to consider shopping the old-fashioned way.

Richard W. May
Therese Saint Clair

George Orwell must be having a chuckle – maybe even a hearty laugh – at the hullabaloo that ensued when Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from it’s Kindle library because it didn’t have publishing rights to the digital reproduction.  Big Brother must certainly have been impressed by the ease with which faceless technocrats can deprive us of one our most sacred rights:  the right to read.   In his wildest imagination, Orwell could never have dreamt that Big Brother could control what people read with the simple flick of a switch.  Makes me start to wonder about the implications of Google’s digital library.   

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I don’t think I will be recycling my book collection any time soon.    For that matter, I’m taking a long position in personalized stationery even though the Post Office may not be around much longer.  I have even stopped converting my photographs to digital images and gone back to leather photo albums.   I’m stopping short of building a bomb shelter, but will seriously consider getting rid of the TV if they have anymore “reality” TV shows.   I guess Paula Abdul’s abrupt departure from American Idol is a sign that reality TV is even less silly and hilarious than life in digiworld.

Just when I thought that digiworld couldn’t get any loonier, I discovered that someone was actually converting John Quincy Adam’s 1809 diary entries into Tweets.  In today’s New York Times, reporter Katie Zezima writes that a college student has been taking JQA’s journal entries of his boat trip to Russia and coverting them to tweets on Twitter.  According to the article, JQ already has 4,800 followers (I’m not one of them) and “the number was climbing.”  This clearly adds a new dimension to the Twitter tag line “What are you doing?”  In John Quincy’s case it might be “I’m dead, but still chirping!”  I wonder how many more people will become followers of someone who has been dead for more than 150 years.   ”Curiouser and curiouser!” said Alice in Wonderland (Yep, I have the book).

As we race down the digital highway of new “awareness” and greater “sensitivity” and “connectivity,” I do hope that some of us will pause to consider the consequences.   We  refer to that as “stopping to smell the roses.”  Personally, I find digiworld as confusing and as transient as Alice. 

Richard W. May
Therese Saint Clair