TOP SHELF: On the tweeting fence

I'm all about the Facebook, the blogging and the online content but I've never quite got my head around the Twitter.

Firstly, I don't know anyone, not even my own mother, who would want to know what I'm doing/thinking/eating/scratching every second of every day. Secondly, I don't know anyone, not even my own mother, who I would want to know what they are doing/thinking/eating/scratching every second of every day. So unless your some kind of psychopathic stalker with a fetish for instaneous information, Twitter and the act of 'twittering' seem as useful as boobs on a bull.

And then came this...

(I'm afraid you'll have to click the link as the video refused to embed properly)
http://media.smh.com.au/national/breaking-news/twitterature-or-literature-815266.html&from=strap

Everything about this book screams "WRONG!! WRONG WRONG WRONG!" I mean, taking 80 of history's most famous and revered literary works and reducing them to a summary of twenty 'tweets'? Why don't you just take Monet's Water Lillies painting and do a dirty big crap on it? The concept of this book seems so immoral and so insulting to those literary works which have established what is classic and modern literature, it makes me want to slap these silly boys around the ears with a whipper snipper.

And yet...

The idea of combining pop-culture with the classics is strangely seductive. I can't help but confess that despite the debaucherous essence of this book, I am intrigued. Despite all my better judgement over what is literary, I am curious to see how Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin have gone about re-writing titles including Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, Charles Dicken's Great Expectations and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (still not sure how that made the list of top classic titles, but whatever) into parodied snippets of 20word tweets. These boys are undeniably well-read (which only adds to my illicit attraction towards this book); amazing considering the pair are students at the Univeristy of Chicago and are all but nineteen years old.

Nineteen years old with a published work by Penguin?

And I'm right back to hating them again.

Twitterature - Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin
Published by Viking/Penguin
Due to be released UK November 2009 / US December 2009
http://www.twitterature.us/uk/index.htm