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 staff writer James Folta, the truth about a great Tweet, and what makes it work so nicely:
Seth Simons, a writer I admire, published a wonderful piece in 2023 about the stickiness of Kyle Gordon’s megaviral “Planet of the Bass” video. The piece explores why the odd Euro-phrasings of the video are so memorable, which he attributes to the effervescence of “fucked up little sentences,” his application of the older, Russian formalist idea of defamiliarization. The fucked up little sentence has “a special sort of comedic energy,” writes Simons, that can destabilize us when we encounter it, a shock that “reorients our relationship with language, which in turn reorients our relationship with everything language reveals—you know, the world.”
Simons’ theory works so well because it includes not just why these phrasings stick out to us, but also why they stick with us: “I love them for the same reason I love good poems: you never would have seen them coming, but once they arrive it’s like they were always there.”
Which perfectly articulates the pride of place this Patrica Lockwood Tweet has in my mind:
.@parisreview So is Paris any good or not
— Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) January 9, 2013
Lockwood, fluent in the broken rhythms of posting, created a great little fucked up sentence. The odd and curt scansion of “any good or not” is sticky on its own, but I love how she includes the tag, a move straight out of the annoying reply guy/“may I speak to your manager” playbook. A venerated literary magazine, forced to muck around on Twitter with the rest of us, is left open to customer service queries in the same way a distant relative might badger the Cuisinart Facebook page about their busted blender.
It’s a great joke, a parody of a tweet that defamiliarizes The Paris Review so deeply for me that whenever a new issue hits my mailbox, I can’t help but wonder if this is the one where they finally publish the review.
But despite the love, the Paris Tweet couldn’t beat the Portman/JSF emails for James:
