i'm grateful that literature is alive and well and thriving in many forms

One of the many things I'm thankful for today⎯books. Just finished The Help and A Gate at the Stairs, both novels I was sorry to finish as I so enjoyed being part of their worlds. I read them, however, without turning a page, downed them while biking around Central Park, hooked up to an ipod. At writer's conferences, I meet people who insist it's not reading unless you're holding dead trees in both hands. But I think that's like claiming that you can't hear Coltrane unless you listen to him on vinyl.

Of course, like most avid readers, I do love to turn pages. I just read The Humbling and The Anthologist in that delicious, tactile, old fashioned way. But reading the old fashioned way isn't always an option. Or, even the best one. David Griner, an advertising executive, is publishing a relative's diary in the form of tweets. Each day, an entry from a farm girl's 1937 "Line a Day" diary appears and, since the dates are coordinated, it is as if you're looking over her shoulder. The reading experience is enhanced by the fact it's published in a way that allows you to read the entries on the date that she wrote them. (Today's entry: To-day was Thanksgiving. Got off from school. -Nov. 25, 1937)

Next week, Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) is premiering a new story on Twitter. "Some Contemporary Characters" will be tweeted over the course of three days on Electric Literature, starting on Monday at 10 AM. A preview:

There are things in this taxable and careworn world that can only be said in a restrictive interface with a minimum of characters:

Saw him on OKCupid. Agreed to meet. In his bio he said he had a “different conception of time.” And guess what? He didn’t show.

It's the first time a writer who's a name in the handheld publishing world is debuting a piece of fiction on twitter. I'll be tuning in, thankful that literature, despite doomsayers, is being given new opportunities to thrive. Happy holiday, everyone.

image via Black Clock

happy bloomsday

It's Bloomsday, observed all over the English-reading world to celebrate the life of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce and his novel Ulysses, written about an ordinary day in Dublin on June 16, 1904. (Name comes from protagonist: Leopold Bloom.)

Joyce picked the day to commemorate his first date with his girlfriend in which they, in keeping with wholesome courting practices of the era, walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend. (Send ring, indeed-- Nora soon became his wife.)

By chronicling a character going about his everyday business, Joyce wrote a book in which nothing or everything happens, depending on your point of view. It was originally serialized in a magazine out of Chicago, then published as a book (cover pictured) in Paris a few years later. When the published book was imported by boat to the US, the shipment was seized and declared obscene by New York Society for the Suppression of Vice because it contains a scene in which the main character masturbates. The ban was reversed years later by a forward-thinking Judge who declared it not pornographic, but emetic (adj: causing a person to vomit.)

I thought this was the perfect day to try out a new site Adverblog kindly pointed me to--Read At Work, which disguises books as every day office computer documents. But, alas, Joyce isn't yet  on their shelves. You're in luck, however, if you want to read Orwell or Tolstoy while appearing to pore over Powerpoint docs.