Long and short or fast and slow? As a slow writer myself, I wonder if the fantasy is really the long romantic quest, or rather the genius to be able to write *lots of* beautiful books. Certainly, that is what I wish for in my Christmas stocking. I think we can all write well if we take forever to do it, and we can all write poorly if we rush; the fantasy is to write profoundly *and* prolifically. So don’t we all find the balance between the vision and the possible that our lives can tolerate? And don’t we all have regrets for the book that could have been, or the book that will be “someday, somewhere, somehow”?

I actually did have 1 good thing to say about Twitter in my post but I didn’t say it but now we have a whole thread going so maybe I will post it as a separate piece.

say friend a is tweeting about this, that, thus, and such, and starts tweeting back and forth with her friend b. say b has her twitterpage locked down so only friends can read it. i don’t know b, i don’t have her friended, so i can’t read her tweets, right?. so i’m only seeing one half of the conversation which is… obnoxious to say the least. (the majority of my twitter exposure, i admit, are those of my friends who insist exporting their tweets to their livejournals, so talk about really only seeing one half of the conversation…) in irc, everyone is seeing what everyone is saying (unless it’s in /msg), and to me is a much more open dialogue.

and too there’s that whole asynchronous bit. which has its moments, i agree. but if i want to have a dialogue about something… 140 characters ain’t gonna cut it. i’ve seen friends use two or three tweets to get across one idea. why limit yourself? i’m all for being concise, but there is such thing as too concise!

(besides, the irc character limit is… well, more than 140 characters!)

I just checked Ekirch’s online CV and it doesn’t look like he spent 20 years in romantic isolation, doing nothing but scouring archives for stuff about night, the hopeless eccentric dismissed by his peers. He’s written 2 other books in 1981 and 1990, won prizes for an article and two prizes for “outstanding faculty” member. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1998 and a director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for School Teachers in 1995.

1) There’s no content in 160 characters of banality (there’s no “there” there)
2) Half of the tweets my friends tweet are replies to other people, which means I am basically reading half of an IM conversation… just get onto the IM client of your choice and have your conversation plz. Leave me out of it.
3) the only way to comment is to tweet about it yourself, which again starts the whole IM-ness of the situation. how can you start a dialogue? what’s the bloody point? at least if you’re going to blog about your waffle recipe, i can chime in in a comment that *everyone* can see why i think it’s crap, or how i’d alter it. I’d rather see my friends have a dialogue about my postings than just blast them off into the ether where they may or may not get read. In fact, not getting comments on posts in my LJ makes me a sad panda.
Dialogue. It’s not just for novels and movies anymore.

Thank you. I’m so glad to see I am not alone in my twitterhated state.