ttp://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hashtag.jpg”>
There are days that I miss it, because I have friends I care about in my life and this for so long was how I kept in touch with them. Plus most of them are funny and write entertaining tweets. I miss those. I don’t miss them as much as I miss them, my friends, but I miss them.
Ever since I took Twitter off my pinned tabs, deleted the phone app, and set up WordPress to auto-tweet my blog posts, I log on maybe once a week to check for any messages or things. Sometimes I need to see what Margaret Cho is up to. Every time, I start scrolling and reading tweets, scrolling and reading, and I think about jumping back in to the fray.
But then I’m always stopped by some feeling of mild despair. Here’s how it went this morning. I logged in to reply to a DM I got from a fellow essayist I’ve never met in person, about which of the Andy Kaufman[1] biographies was best[2], and then started reading some of the tweets in my feed. Here’s one that another fellow essayist I’ve never met in person retweeted:
“Stories do not begin with ideas or themes or outlines so much as with images and obsessions.” #obsessed
This is precisely the kind of passion-centric writerly claptrap that turns my heart to murderousness. I opened up a tab and started hunting for evidence of any of the hundreds of classic stories that began with an outline or theme. It’s so flat and certain of a claim that I knew it would be easy to disprove. But before I found anything I thought: What the hell are you doing? How can any of this ever really matter? Don’t you understand you’ve got real work to do?
I can turn off retweets. I can follow the “right” people. There exist with Twitter fixes for this kind of feed experience. No one likes a tweeter of exclusively his own blog content. I hear tell of writers successfully using Twitter as a networking tool. The problem I need, I think, the interterm break to think over is this: How can tweeting and interacting with one’s feed be a creative act without becoming an exercise in self-absorption, and are those mutually exclusive?
We can’t use the Internet to discover who we are can we? I, too, am not a fan of iTunes 12. Few things are as vainglorious as the term superuser, but if you ask me the problem with Apple is that it keeps continually saying fuck you to its superusers with each successive OS and app upgrade. Good thing I’m teaching McPhee’s Oranges tonight. Otherwise, I’d be even less full of faith.
UPDATE:
For what it’s worth, in putting together tonight’s discussion notes, I came across in the New Yorker, on structure, which talks about his beginning a story with an outline (ABC/D) and Edgar Allen Poe’s beginning “The Raven”, in a sense, with a theme.
[[]]The Pittsburgher in me always misspells this Kaufmann.[[]]
[[]]I’ve read zero of them.[[]]
- ef=”http://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hashtag.jpg”>There are days that I miss it, because I have friends I care about in my life and this for so long was how I kept in touch with them. Plus most of them are funny and write entertaining tweets. I miss those. I don’t miss them as much as I miss them, my friends, but I miss them.
Ever since I took Twitter off my pinned tabs, deleted the phone app, and set up WordPress to auto-tweet my blog posts, I log on maybe once a week to check for any messages or things. Sometimes I need to see what Margaret Cho is up to. Every time, I start scrolling and reading tweets, scrolling and reading, and I think about jumping back in to the fray.
But then I’m always stopped by some feeling of mild despair. Here’s how it went this morning. I logged in to reply to a DM I got from a fellow essayist I’ve never met in person, about which of the Andy Kaufman{{1}} biographies was best{{2}}, and then started reading some of the tweets in my feed. Here’s one that another fellow essayist I’ve never met in person retweeted:
“Stories do not begin with ideas or themes or outlines so much as with images and obsessions.” #obsessed
This is precisely the kind of passion-centric writerly claptrap that turns my heart to murderousness. I opened up a tab and started hunting for evidence of any of the hundreds of classic stories that began with an outline or theme. It’s so flat and certain of a claim that I knew it would be easy to disprove. But before I found anything I thought: What the hell are you doing? How can any of this ever really matter? Don’t you understand you’ve got real work to do?
I can turn off retweets. I can follow the “right” people. There exist with Twitter fixes for this kind of feed experience. No one likes a tweeter of exclusively his own blog content. I hear tell of writers successfully using Twitter as a networking tool. The problem I need, I think, the interterm break to think over is this: How can tweeting and interacting with one’s feed be a creative act without becoming an exercise in self-absorption, and are those mutually exclusive?
We can’t use the Internet to discover who we are can we? I, too, am not a fan of iTunes 12. Few things are as vainglorious as the term superuser, but if you ask me the problem with Apple is that it keeps continually saying fuck you to its superusers with each successive OS and app upgrade. Good thing I’m teaching McPhee’s Oranges tonight. Otherwise, I’d be even less full of faith.
UPDATE:
For what it’s worth, in putting together tonight’s discussion notes, I came across in the New Yorker, on structure, which talks about his beginning a story with an outline (ABC/D) and Edgar Allen Poe’s beginning “The Raven”, in a sense, with a theme.[[]]The Pittsburgher in me always misspells this Kaufmann.[[]]
[[]]I’ve read zero of them↵
- ttp://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hashtag.jpg”>There are days that I miss it, because I have friends I care about in my life and this for so long was how I kept in touch with them. Plus most of them are funny and write entertaining tweets. I miss those. I don’t miss them as much as I miss them, my friends, but I miss them.
Ever since I took Twitter off my pinned tabs, deleted the phone app, and set up WordPress to auto-tweet my blog posts, I log on maybe once a week to check for any messages or things. Sometimes I need to see what Margaret Cho is up to. Every time, I start scrolling and reading tweets, scrolling and reading, and I think about jumping back in to the fray.
But then I’m always stopped by some feeling of mild despair. Here’s how it went this morning. I logged in to reply to a DM I got from a fellow essayist I’ve never met in person, about which of the Andy Kaufman[1] biographies was best{{2}}, and then started reading some of the tweets in my feed. Here’s one that another fellow essayist I’ve never met in person retweeted:
“Stories do not begin with ideas or themes or outlines so much as with images and obsessions.” #obsessed
This is precisely the kind of passion-centric writerly claptrap that turns my heart to murderousness. I opened up a tab and started hunting for evidence of any of the hundreds of classic stories that began with an outline or theme. It’s so flat and certain of a claim that I knew it would be easy to disprove. But before I found anything I thought: What the hell are you doing? How can any of this ever really matter? Don’t you understand you’ve got real work to do?
I can turn off retweets. I can follow the “right” people. There exist with Twitter fixes for this kind of feed experience. No one likes a tweeter of exclusively his own blog content. I hear tell of writers successfully using Twitter as a networking tool. The problem I need, I think, the interterm break to think over is this: How can tweeting and interacting with one’s feed be a creative act without becoming an exercise in self-absorption, and are those mutually exclusive?
We can’t use the Internet to discover who we are can we? I, too, am not a fan of iTunes 12. Few things are as vainglorious as the term superuser, but if you ask me the problem with Apple is that it keeps continually saying fuck you to its superusers with each successive OS and app upgrade. Good thing I’m teaching McPhee’s Oranges tonight. Otherwise, I’d be even less full of faith.
UPDATE:
For what it’s worth, in putting together tonight’s discussion notes, I came across in the New Yorker, on structure, which talks about his beginning a story with an outline (ABC/D) and Edgar Allen Poe’s beginning “The Raven”, in a sense, with a theme.[[]]The Pittsburgher in me always misspells this Kaufmann.[[]]
[[]]I’ve read zero of them↵