Man, soon we won’t even have those sealed-off cancer boxes to smoke in at airports. Expect already harried travelers to be even more pleasant in the future. (Until, you know, they die off.)

by Esther Zuckerman

Greetings. I’m going to be tweeting for a while about the misadventures of ‘Citizen’, a character who was cut from my novel, Lowboy.less than a minute ago via web

John Wray
John_Wray

So began novelist John Wray’s great, strange experiment in Twitter narrative, which last weekend attracted the notice of the New York Times. Started nearly two years ago, the project is still going — not a novel exactly, but some new form of serial storytelling. In 2009, Citizen woke up in the apartment of a dentist; in 2011, he found a condom, a coffee mug and a discarded math book on the street. On St. Patty’s Day he was passed by a “hooligan in an acid green wig” wearing an especially grotesque t-shirt.

For what is a highly personal medium, Wray’s approach to Twitter is mostly impersonal. If he does happen to tweet as himself and “let the mask slip” — as he put it in an email — he’ll eventually delete the post. In his feed, there are few hashtags, few links and no mentions of the misadventures of Charlie Sheen, Rebecca Black or Wray himself.

I met up with him at the Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn to discuss the project. Here, in Wray’s own words, is a history of his… Twovel?

On the project’s origins:
When my last novel came out [my publisher] rigorously suggested that I start a Facebook account and a Twitter page. Since I always do what they tell me, I said “okay.” I set up my Facebook page in a pretty standard way, although I really never post on it. I’ve never kept a diary ever in my life, essentially because it always depressed me to just kind of look at the minutiae of my day, and I had the same feeling a few times that I tried to do a status update on Facebook. Like, you know, “time to get new high tops,” “that Charlie Sheen, what a nut.” All of that stuff just kind of bummed me out, so on Facebook I don’t really do that, I just parasitize other people’s YouTube links and stuff. The same held true for Twitter. Frankly, I didn’t want to tweet about myself so I decided I was going to try and do some kind of fiction project.

I had this character I’d felt close to in my last novel Lowboy, but who ended up being extraneous to that novel. I saw some potential in him. I wanted a character who would clearly be fictional, but also would be close enough to me at least in age and background and demographic that if I wanted to give an opinion, to crack a joke essentially as me on Twitter, I could just put the words in his mouth. This character Citizen seemed to fit the bill pretty well. He’s come a long way and changed quite a bit from the role that he originally played in the novel.

I’ve lost my edge, Citizen realized. I’m completely edge-free. Which means, mathematically speaking, that I’m infinite.less than a minute ago via web

John Wray
John_Wray

What to call it:
It’s not really a novel, it’s not really a story. I don’t know exactly what to call it. Eventually someone will come up with some Internet-appropriate term for it, like a Twovel or something. People don’t know what to call it and there are so few of them out there it seems that I guess there’s no great need to come up with a name.

The term ‘Twitter novel’ is problematic because it functions very differently from a novel; it functions very differently from a story; it functions very differently from a prose poem or a paragraph. I think one reason why so many early attempts to write a long-form fiction project in Twitter have tanked is that people trying to write them simply transposed what they knew about writing a novel or a short story into Twitter form. They didn’t think of it as a distinct medium, a distinct genre. It does have very different requirements, in my opinion. What I tried to do when I started out, and what I’ve stuck to pretty much because it seems to work, is viewing each tweet as something that both advances the story and is self-contained. I think of each tweet as a set up and a punch line — whether or not it’s a comic tweet. Most of them tend to be because it’s fun to make jokes, and certainly the most successful people on Twitter in my opinion by far are the comedians. I’m a big fan of Sarah Silverman and Tim and Eric and Louis C.K. and all sorts of people. I’ve found that the story of Citizen has become more playful and more comedic as it has evolved.

Where it’s going:
I’ve had different ideas about that at different times. I haven’t actually tweeted that often, the total number of tweets is only — right now I think it’s 120. That was because after an initial kind of excitement about it I just became distracted by other things, but recently over the last month I’ve been getting back into it again, I’m not exactly sure why. I think my friend Colson Whitehead, who’s a very, very savvy and entertaining um, um — what’s the name for someone who tweets again? There’s a new name, isn’t there? It’s a terrible word — anyway, let’s say, person using Twitter, is just clearly having a lot of fun with it. He’s doing something very different with his Twitter page, but seeing what a success he’s made of it kind of lit a fire under my ass a little bit. I’m not sure whether a project on Twitter that doesn’t promote me as a personality first and foremost has the same potential as what he and other people are doing. It’s probably always going to be for a specialized audience, but who knows? There does seem to be a correlation between how often a person has tweeted and how many people are paying attention, but then again I don’t really want to overdo it.

His new band was derivative of a band that was based on a band that had ripped off a band that had once, long ago, had one regrettable idea.less than a minute ago via web

John Wray
John_Wray

Wray has gone months without tweeting and then jumped right back into the story.
That’s a way in which it’s slightly different from both an online diary, the way many people use Twitter, and a novel or a fiction project that might be made more difficult by taking long periods off. To me, in a way the Citizen storyline is almost like a video game like Grand Theft Auto or something. If you pause the game you can go away indefinitely and then you come back to a certain situation, a certain set of conditions that apply and you just kind of reactivate your avatar and keep moving. I don’t know why I think of it that way, but it seems to work that way. Unlike my novels, I actually have no idea where the storyline is going and that’s what I like about it.

Yesterday, my girlfriend was harassed by some drunken cheese dicks on the street. I immediately thought, “well the next tweet I do — he’s on the street anything can come his way — how about some [guy] in a St. Patty’s Day t-shirt with green beer foam on his chin.” So in a way, when I want to, I can acknowledge what’s happening in real time in the story. I’ve considered having Citizen comment on other things that are happening in pop culture and so on, but in general I try not to do that because I don’t want to get too close to what other people are doing on Twitter or people to say, “oh Citizen is just John, that’s just him calling himself that” because that’s not really what I wanted to do. But occasionally something comes along. I really am trying to be playful with it and not try to make too many rules for myself.

Wray uses typical Twitter style sparingly. He has hashtagged twice — once #FatBoys and once #Drake.
That was a very deliberate experiment to see whether, for example when hashtagging Drake, particularly since it was a diss, I was curious as to whether some Drake fans would be like “fuck you” or send me some hostile messages, but I guess Drake really is so soft that his fans don’t exact retribution.

Now he’ll kill me.

He also, obviously, has to work within 140 characters.
The extreme restriction that it places — or I should say I think a better way of putting it is — the extreme economy that that requires of a writer. That is one of the most beneficial things from a literary standpoint of the whole Twitter set up, because it really forces you to consider what’s necessary and what’s not in a given line of writing. The novel that I’m working on is huge and sprawling, and the fact that Twitter’s format is so diametrically opposed to that, it’s actually very healthy for me to realize how much you can say in a very small space. That said 140 characters really is outrageously constricting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a really good entry that was 180 or 176 or 168. 140 is just, that’s designed for basically two sentences, and I usually find that the twist that I want to get into my tweets is best served by three sentences and it’s very hard to fit three sentences into a tweet. Especially because I decided from the very beginning that I was going to write in complete sentences and I wasn’t going to use any lols or omgs.

There’s always a temptation to get rid of an apostrophe or use yr instead of your, but at the beginning I decided that I wanted something that made no stylistic compromises. And it turns out you can do it with a little bit of attention and care.

Citizen had two thoughts looking down at the condom: 1 what a waste those things only get used once. 2 I am destined for a life of solitude.less than a minute ago via web

John Wray
John_Wray

If someone were to start following Wray on Twitter today he or she would be dropped right in the middle of the Citizen story, but, as Wray explained, it’s not necessary to read the entire narrative to get caught up.
I think one of the successful things about the way I’m trying to do it is that that’s really up to them. The situation is really so straightforward: Citizen is just kind of a peculiar eccentric character who is wandering around a city that may or may not be New York and at times he seems little bit like someone you might want to go sing karaoke with, at times he seems really creepy and the sort of person you’d cross the street to avoid. I like not really coming down on one side or the other and the idea of people forming their own opinion. But really that’s the whole situation. Odd young man on the loose in the city, that’s all it is. And I think you get that in one or two tweets, and as I said I hope that most tweets are entertaining or at least intriguing on their own. So of course I think it would be fun for someone to go back and start at the beginning or anywhere because there are some tweets I’m pretty proud of earlier on that I would like people to read. It’s kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure. You could almost read it backward.

Wray will riff on the same topic or keep Citizen in the same scenario for repeated tweets.
If there’s a subject or a situation or a scene that seems fertile I try not to rush through it. I don’t feel the need to change the scene every day, because frankly nobody’s following it that closely. They are getting these tweets in the middle of a bunch of tweets about the future of e-books or about Charlie Sheen. They probably don’t really remember what happened the day before so that gives me a certain freedom to really stir the pot if I feel like it.

Besides the lessons of working in a highly constrained format, Twitter has taught Wray about “improvisation, really, and spontaneity.”
I once asked Haruki Murakami about his process of writing and he made me helplessly jealous by saying, “I get up early in the morning I put on a ’50s bebop record and I just don’t know myself what’s going to come out that day, I have no idea where my stories are going.” I don’t think that I could write an actual novel that way, but I have tried to put that into practice when writing Citizen’s story, it’s worked really well. It’s been really fun and liberating.

Though Wray has made the conscious decision not to Tweet about himself, there are elements of his personality that are in Citizen.
In so far as he’s connected to me, I guess he’d be more of a caricature. Basically the things that he goes on his little rants about, the things that he hates, like dreamcatchers and Uggs and Drake, are actually things that annoy me. So in that regard he’s a lot like me, but his more self-destructive side or his more paranoid side I hope is not like me at least in my normal chemical state.

I try to keep it free form enough that if something is on my mind that I think it could be entertaining and I think it could potentially fit into the aspect of me that is reflected in Citizen’s character, I have the flexibility to work that in. Because in writing a novel, you know, what you happen to be thinking about that day is not necessarily appropriate to work in there, so I definitely like the idea that if I want to go on a little rant about the end of the world or something that I can have Citizen do that for me.

Esther Zuckerman is a writer and student. Her tweets are not fictional.

Bay Area rapper Lil B’s “cooking” dance seems to be reaching full-fledged ubiquity. We’ve seen Justin Beiber make reference to it, P. Diddy did it when he introduced Lil B’s performance at South by Southwest last week, and lots of other rappers are doing it in their videos. (Above, Atlanta’s OJ Da Juiceman gives it a go.) The basics of the dance are mostly hand-and-wrist motion, like you’re holding a pot and stirring its contents. It’s meant to mimic the actions of cooking crack.

Here’s Virginia’s Pusha T, in the video for his song, “Cook It Down,” from the new mixtape, Fear of God.

Lil B made a ten-minute video about how to do the dance last summer, in which he also reminded everybody to eat healthy. But the moves actually get a better presentation in the video for his song, “I Cook.”

Here’s someone named DTuyer’s mom doing the cooking dance last weekend:

The roots of the dance go back farther than you might have realized, though. Here, in the 2007 video for the Gucci Mane song “My Kitchen,” we see a young Waka Flocka Flame showing off his stirring style. (Most distinctly at the 2:09 mark.)

That’s a great song. OJ Da Juiceman, also a member of Gucci’s crew, gets mentioned in the lyrics there, too. Da Juiceman’s new song borrows heavily from Master P’s 1997 hit “Ghetto D.”

Around that time, 1997, which was a couple years after Raekwon the Chef posed with a Pyrex pot for the artwork that accompanied his Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… album, I saw the great Brooklyn duo M.O.P. perform a show at Tramps, a since shuttered club in the Flatiron District. Towards the end of show, some thirty or 40 members of M.O.P.’s posse had joined them on stage. (The “P” in M.O.P. stands for posse, actually. The “M” and the “O” stand for “Mash Out.”) And as the rapper Lil Fame shouted his rhymes during the great song “Downtown Swinga,” the part that goes, “Strugglin’!/Slingin’ that crack rock/Jugglin’!/Keepin’ them crack spots bubblin’…” I noticed one of the guys next to him (maybe it was their associate Teflon, or their manager Laze E Laze?) lean forward and enact a certain motion with his hands.

The next day at work, I noted this to my friend Shani, with whom I’d gone to show. I had thought the guy was miming the lighting of a crack pipe (I had actually thought the lyric was “keepin’ those crack pipes bubbling…”) Which had surprised me, because the smoking of crack, as opposed to the selling of it, has always been generally looked down upon in hip-hop. And this guy had looked very exuberant as he was doing it.

But no, Shani corrected me about the lyric, that it was crack “spots” that were bubbling, and explained that she had understood the guy to be giving a cooking display. I’m pretty sure she was right.

Man, Lil B was like four years old in 1997.

“Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire. They commemorate it every year down the block from my office, but this year it’s quite heavily attended. So right now, there’s a huge procession going down Broadway, a very solemn one. And naturally, there are a bunch of fucking cabdrivers and delivery guys honking at them for taking up too much of the road.”

The critical debate over whether “guilty pleasures” should actually be something to feel guilt about is as extensive as it is tedious, but the fact remains: trash is trash. That said, not all trash is equal. Some trash, either through flawless craft or extensive prurience or sheer cultural impact, enters a canon of its own. It becomes Classic Trash. These are the books you and your friends passed around in high school, the dog-eared volumes you were worried that your parents would catch you reading even though they surely had copies of their own. In celebration of these great and terrible works, we are thrilled to introduce a new recurring feature in which we will dumpster-dive our way through these timeless tracts of tawdriness. Leading the discussion will be Awl pal Nicole Cliffe, who many of you know better as the proprietrix of the delightful website Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. We will gather together on Friday to discuss the first selection: Grace Metalious’ 1956 stone-cold trash classic Peyton Place. If you’ve ever wanted an excuse to delve into the garbagey epics, consider that wish granted. Get reading! We’ll see you next week.

Let’s try to be optimistic about the weather, shall we? Sure, it is cold… it’s March. That’s how things work. But, at the very least, it should be mostly sunny into next week. And who doesn’t love the sun? (Okay, maybe Doug Yule.) Yes, the rain will return after that, but we are moving into April. I promise you if you can just hold out for a bit, you will eventually get to the place where the streets are filled with the odor of human urine, the traditional harbinger of warm temperatures. We’ll get there, people!

Is there a bleaker, more blighted place than Britain? Not if you read their newspapers, no. It’s a place where small children attack postal workers, men in monkey suits molest minors for mobile marketing, incest is only narrowly avoided and brutish blokescatcall random women in the street. Sometimes the place seems so grim that it’s hard to even find the funny side to things. But then there are days where the jokes write themselves. (In blood. With knives.) Sigh.

I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s “I like the sexist drunk writers” bullshit. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what bitch?Fri Mar 25 01:42:58 via TweetDeck

Ayelet Waldman
ayeletw

He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects.Fri Mar 25 01:43:27 via TweetDeck

Ayelet Waldman
ayeletw

If you say “Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon” in the mirror that is the Internet, Ayelet Waldman appears. With an axe. Katie Roiphe — whose first book, You’re Actually Just a Whore: Raping Doesn’t Happen at College, was so ridiculous that she should never have been published again — wrote this week about her mother’s newest memoir, which sounds like a captivating racy tale of bed-hopping in 1960s literary New York, thought it’s also an excuse for Roiphe to further her latest interests, the perceived virility or flaccidity of the male novelist. In related news, there was an n+1 party this week.

Fans of political comedy rejoice: There will be a fourth series of Armando Iannucci’s stunningly brilliant “The Thick Of It.” More sweary Peter Capaldi! Now if only we could be sure that they’re going to show it over here somewhere.

“Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before. He reveals that women menstruate and men do not.”
 — David Brooks is right about the commentaries in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s manifesto, The Green Book. Some of them have indeed been thought of before. But the overall gist of his column in today’s Times

, that “The paradoxical fact is that if you want to stay in office as a dictator, it is better to be a narcissistic totalitarian than a run-of-the-mill autocrat,” seems a little banal itself. This seems like a point made by everyone from Karl Marx to George Orwell to Living Colour. And I’m not even sure why it would be considered a paradox.