Ok, I confess, I am NOT on Twitter, and I hope to stay that way [I figure that with Austenprose and Jane Austen’s World  regularly twittering on Austen out there, that might be just about all that cyberspace can handle…]   Since Facebook, which I am on, mostly as friends of my children’s friends, seems to now have been taken over by us BabyBoomers, Twitter has become the premier communication tool, at least until something else comes along, next week perhaps.  My problem, as all my friends and cohorts will happily tell you, is that I have never been one to keep my sentences short, i.e. I babble endlessly on [often about Jane Austen] and though annoying, most of my friends seem to accept me as I am.  Hence, the whole concept of Twitter leaves me, what can I say? –DUMBSTRUCK!  Sort of like Haiku – I just don’t get it!  Why say something in 20 words or less when you can go on and on so as not to risk being misunderstood?!

A number of years ago, a book called ShrinkLits, by Maurice Sagoff [Workman Publishing, 1980 rev. edition, originally c1970, and STILL in print] offered to the reading masses “seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size,” with cartoon-like illustrations by Roslyn Schwartz.  Jane Austen does not appear [whatever was Sagoff thinking??!] – but he did reduce Bronte’s Jane Eyre to a few waxing poetic lines:

 

 

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte

My Love behaved
   A bit erratic;
Our nuptial day
   Brought truth dramatic:
He had a wife,
   Mad, in an attic.

I fled! I roamed
   O’er moor and ditch
When life had struck
   Its lower pitch
An uncle died
   And left me rich.

I sought my love
   Again, to find
An awful fire
   His home had mined,
Kippered his wife
   And left him blind.

Reader, guess what?
   I married him.
My cup is filled
   Up to the brim
Now we are one,
   We play, we swim.

The power we share
   Defied all pain;
We soar above
   Life’s tangled plain –
He Mr. Rochester,
   Me Jane!

[ShrinkLits, pp 44-45]

Ok, so this is funny, as are the other sixty-nine…

Instant Lives by Howard Moss, wonderfully illustrated by Edward Gorey, published in 1974 [Saturday Review Press], is another such book, in which Moss “spins out elegant, erudite, irreverent descants on the lives of the great composers-painters-authors-poets-performers,” [from the jacket] – all lives summarized in no more than two pages.  Moss had the good sense to include Austen [the Brontes are all lumped together] – but I have always found this little write-up quite sad, though Gorey’s illustration of Cassandra toasting a marshmallow over the fireplace grate and Jane wandering about the room with the galleys of Sense & Sensibility alone makes the book worth having ~ here is an excerpt:

            ‘You’re so wordy, Jane,” said her sister. ‘No wonder you have trouble with men.’
            Smugness aside, the derogation the remark conveyed was not lost, of course, on Jane.
            ‘My dear Cassandra,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you polish off these mephitic sweetmeats – it would only make your figure the more bizarre.  I have a deadline to meet, you know.’  And with that, Jane swept out of the room, the galleys trailing behind her like a bridal train devised by a couturier impaled upon typography,
            But , in Life, there would be no bridal train for Jane Austen.

[Instant Lives, p 4-5]

This seems a tad nasty, don’t you think? And certainly irrelevant to the value of those galleys… but Cassandra does seem to be encouraging less wordiness – the mother of Twitter perhaps…

But I do bring this all up for a reason – there is a new book out called Twitterature  [the title = Twitter + Literature]  [Penguin, 2009] authored by two University of Chicago students, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, who obviously have way too much time on their hands – or perhaps not enough time to actually READ the classics they reduce to twenty tweets or fewer [though they do say that it helps to get the humor in the tweet if you have actually read the book, so hopefully they have done so].  They recently set up a Twitter page for the book, so you can follow their continuing adventure in literature reduction. 

You can find it in one of two covers:

I’ve not yet seen the book but understand from reviews that Austen makes the grade –  I am curious to know how the authors reduce Jane Austen in the tweeting universe – here is one example:

Elizabeth Bennet muses: It’s as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well.

And a few others to give you the idea:

Sherlock Holmes says: Continuing investigation. Made brilliant deductions on many snorts and very little evidence. Notice salt deposits on factory owner’s shoes?

On the Road has just the one: “For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac.” [Now I would say that for Pride & Prejudice, but I am “prejudiced” you might say…]

[comments from Guardian article]

So I will likely get this book, just for the fun of it and to add it to my collection of literature in short-takes, but I more likely agree with this reviewer from The Wall Street Journal who said:  

“Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave.”

[as is Jane…] 

Further reading: 

• Penguin US website
• Penguin UK website
• Guardian.co.uk

[Posted by Deb]