Pulling together the 64 original Literary Twitter moments and incidents to create our winter game, What Was Literary Twitter? The Bracket, required the vast institutional memory of the entire Lit Hub team, who each had their personal favorite e-dramas to add to the list.
From our podcast wizard and host extraordinaire Drew Broussard:
For me, the truly fun times on Twitter were over by 2016. (Sure, there was still juice in the tank for the rest of that decade, but a super-poster got elected President and things kinda went downhill after that.) When I think back on the first decade-ish of the site, I fondly recall the tweets that had a certain kind of art to them. Dril, of course. Horse_ebooks. Plenty of memes that will be passed around until the end of the internet…
…and then there’s Bret Easton Ellis.
It is really no surprise that the poster boy for Gen X LA nihilism took to the platform like… well, like Jay McInenery to cocaine, I suppose. And speaking of Bolivian marching powder: “come over at do bring coke now” might very well be my favorite tweet of all time. Posted in the wee small hours of an LA December morning in 2012 and purportedly due to a half-asleep Ellis not paying attention to his screen (…uh huh), it is to my mind the perfect encapsulation of a form at its height. Stunningly intimate access to the life of a famous person? Check. Pithy and immediately memorable? Check and check. Slightly hallucinatory, due to spelling/grammar errors or colloquial speech or similar? Check, and how.
I’ll still say it to people sometimes, largely as a non-sequitur, and to those in the know, it always provokes a laugh while those not in the know give me a raised eyebrow. Like all the best tweets: if you know, you know.
And here’s Drew’s complete bracket, where the “bring coke” Tweet goes far, but can’t edge out bad art friend:
[Click to enlarge]
