PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2009
Copyright © Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195745-6
Introduction
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Iliad by Homer
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
Beowulf
Candide by Voltaire
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Emma by Jane Austen
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Medea by Euripides
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Odyssey by Homer
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Glossary
Twitter Format
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
TWITTERATURE
‘Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave’
Wall Street Journal
‘The trouble with Twitter is, I think, that too many twits might make a twat’
David Cameron
‘This is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect University of Chicago students to come up with’
Professor W. J. T. Mitchell
‘A tool to aid the digestion of great literature’
Guardian
Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin are students at the University of Chicago. Alexander’s work has appeared in The New York Times and the New York Sun. He would like to be a writer, own a pair of John Lobb shoes, and live out his days reading and writing with his brothers in the Mediterranean basin. While Emmett’s dream is to be a sea captain, he has settled on a mastery of card magic and shaggy-dog jokes, and penning the Great American Novel. They are both nineteen years old.
Dedicated in Loving Memory
to the Victims of the R.M.S.Titanic
Life can offer us no greater treasure than art. It is all that is beautiful, and all that allows a man’s soul to take leave of the quotidian trifles that molest his waking mind, to be lifted to the highest peaks of experience, and to peer briefly into the sublime. It is that which removes man from the static residue of time and casts him into the gentle waters of the eternal. It is to hear and to speak softly in the beauteous tongue of antiquity, and yet to foresee all that will unfold through the illimitably growing passage of our universe.
In short, art is pretty sweet.
What a tragédie, then, that so many modern people find the great works of literature inaccessible, overwhelming, and even, perhaps, dull. It is not a defect of their character, nor any special ineptitude that has disposed them in this manner; rather, these great texts – timeless as they may be – are, in their present form, outdated. Who but college students, hermits and disciples of the disgraced John Ludd can muddle through them with any hope of understanding? This is what we seek, through our humble efforts, to remedy.
While some may describe the reinvention of our world’s Great Works to suit the ever-evolving brain of the modern man as ‘a triviality’, ‘a travesty’, or ‘that sucks’, we prefer to think of ourselves as modern-day Martin Luthers. Herr Luther took the Holy Scripture itself, and seeing that the classic Vulgate no longer spoke to the souls of his contemporaries, he translated it into the vernacular of his time. By doing so, Luther unleashed a revolution of faith and literacy upon sixteenth-century Europe that had not been seen before and has not been equaled since.
In our own way, and in our own time, we hope to do the same.
However, it’s probably best if we stay clear of the Bible.
You may be wondering, good sirs, what exactly we intend to do with these great works of art. What one must keep in mind is that the literary canon is not valued for its tens of thousands of dull, dull words but for the raw insight into humanity it provides. While perhaps an unwieldy tome was the best method of digesting this knowledge during a summer spent in the Victorian countryside in the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Three, times have changed. Virginity must not be distracted with books, nor damsel-chasing pacified with poetry. Instead we must run free into the world and not once look back.
And so, we give you the means to absorb the strong voices, valuable lessons and stylistic innovations of the Greats without the burdensome duty of hours spent reading. We take these Great Works and present their most essential elements, distilled into the voice of Twitter – the social networking tool that with its limit of 140 characters a post (including spaces) has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge – and give you everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world.
For indeed, does any man have such great pretense as to suppose that he may digest all that it is right and proper for him to have digested in the stunted mortal fit granted to him by Providence? Perhaps in the eighteenth year of your life you sat on a porch asking yourself: What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me, why must he mince words and muse in lyricism, and, in short, whack about the shrub? Such questions are no doubt troubling – and we believe they would have been resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com, well versed in the idiosyncrasies and idioms of the modern day. And this, in essence, is what we have done. We have liberated poor Hamlet from the rigorous literary constraints of the sixteenth century and made him – without losing an ounce of wisdom, beauty, wit or angst – a happening youngster. Just like you, dear reader.
\In brief – and we mean this literally – we have created our generation’s salvation, a new and revolutionary way of facing and understanding the greatest art of all arts: Literature.
And allow us now to open
The eternal aperture,
To the brilliant soul of common man,
We present to you… Twitterature.
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FALLING UNTO THE ABYSS!!!!! I’ll talk more about why in several hundred pages to avoid any confusion.
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OH MY GOD I’M IN HELL.
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’Tis Pandemonium down here. Would ROFL but it’s very hot.
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I’m bored. I’m the chairman of the board. My compatriots are r-tards. Inaction? Is that the best we can do? We art fucking demons!
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Sitting on our asses waiting for an apology from G-d isn’t exactly renegade. Pussies.
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Anyone heard anything about Earth? Good? Bad? Will be there tonight bringing the MOTHAFUCKING RUCKUS. If anyone wants in txt it.
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On second thoughts, I’m going alone.
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So there was a fight. Sometimes you invent gunpowder and you think SWEET but then they whip out JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF and BAM! We’re in hell.
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How do you defeat your own son, born to YOUR OWN DAUGHTER! Freud would have a field day.
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Did you know I can change shapes? BAM: halo, wings, grace. Looking sharp, looking the part. Time to go kick some Promethean ass.
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What? The almighty knows everything? Asshole sent Gabriel – the mothafuckin archangel himself – to warn Adam and his first lady.
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It’s comforting to know that women were just man’s first really good idea.
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I’d like to cite Angry Mob v. Frankenstein – we are not responsible for all your nonsense.
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Turns out the woman’s dumber than the man, but she has this thing that if she doesn’t give it to him, he starts to obey. I shall exploit that.
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Dressed as a snake. She’s going for it… Yes! She ate the forbidden apple! Guess God wasn’t paying attention. Omniscient, hah!
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So I won. They’re getting kicked out. Boo hoo.
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They’re holding hands and crying. I wish someone would hold my hand 
.
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Beelzebub just isn’t what I want. Stop crying! I didn’t cry when I got kicked out of heaven and lost Parad— I FOUND A NAME FOR MY MEMOIRS!!
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Another day. Gotta go out selling.
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Typing feels weird today.
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Uh-oh. There are some white spots on my stomach…
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I seem to have transformed into a large bug. Has this ever happened to any of you? No solution on Web MD.
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This is so weird. I read that this kind of thing usually reflects a deep disgust and discomfort with one’s body. Is this true? Ana/Mia/bug??
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Family not happy with my condition! Father and mother may want me dead.
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Sister leaves me food!!! Thank god.
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Sorry no updates. Bug time is weird. Lose track.
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Sister very timid and confused – what’s up with that? – but still leaving me food.
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Looked outside today. Men living in my house! Who let them in? Sis plays violin for them! MORE DEGRADING THAN BEING AN INSECT.
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That’s it. I’m going out there. Wish me luck.
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OMFG, my father totally threw an apple into my back.
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REPEAT: THERE IS AN APPLE LODGED IN MY FUCKIN’ BACK!
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I am dying – the pain grows greater every day.
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If I die my family may be able to move on. I curse the day I inexplicably transformed into a gigantic, six-legged metaphor!
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And the rest is silence…
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(Now that I’m gone my sister is a capable woman with a promising future. Guess the real ‘metamorphosis’ was hers!)
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Ever have weird flashes of memory from childhood, like getting tied to a tree in a forest and crawling a hundred miles to safety?
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I have a lot of weird thoughts herding sheep all day. Boring, boring, boring. Shit, someone’s coming…
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It’s the king! He’s yelling at me as the sheep bleat and I tweet. Cell phone use probably upsetting both.
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If someone tries to kill you but you kill them first, that’s self-defense right? Even if you’re a shepherd and they’re, uh, King of Thebes?
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Anybody have Johnnie Cochran’s number?
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PARTY IN THEBES!!!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is ALL OVER ME! Total MILF.
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Who’s the DJ in this place? Why does he keep playing ‘The End’ by The Doors?
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Who are these people who keep coming up behind me singing ominous choral pieces? I’m busy trying to mack here!
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Hey, this lady is the queen. Getting some royal booty. Weird: She seems not the least bit upset that I killed her old husband!
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Slow day preparing to be king.
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ACK! Having more flashes of childhood memory. I see my parents arguing about some prophesy where I kill them. Is it just me, or…?
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These bizarre emotions have opened a whole new bag of issues. Must tell Sigmund next session to forget about abandonment and focus on this.
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Oh my God. These people will NOT stop singing behind me. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! BTW: How do they know my name?
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An old guy outside the palace keeps yelling about ‘your mother’… ‘killed your father’… ‘inces—’ well, shit.
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MY EYES MY FUCKING EYES AGGGGHGHGHGHGHHHH!!!!!! I was totally not expecting that to hurt so much.
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Oh well. Must keep on trucking to Colonus. Wish I had a seeing-eye dog. Glad I learned touch-typing.
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While my senses bend at the sublime,
And quake before the ocean’s trepidation…
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My spirit blazes wrath of the divine,
Soars greatly, loves, swoons, rages, and bangs your wife.
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Lost 100 followers with those last two!! Sorry guys!!! Will try to be more direct!
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My journey has begun. I’ve set off into the world with 100 gallons of ink and paper. My companion is vomiting overboard.
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I grow weary of Englishmen. They have no appreciation for the vastness of the earth. Wine, servant, MORE WINE! Going on a bender tonight.
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What a world we’ve been given! Were I God himself I could not engineer one finer than this!
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The wind caresses my face like the arse-fart of a Peloponnesian princess.
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Today I ate six biscuits, boxed an hour, and wrote a letter to Napoleon.
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Met an Albanian leader. What wisdom inhabits him! Yet he does enjoy killing the innocent for no reason at all. We have become close friends.
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Tambourgi! Tambourgi! the Albanian minstrels chant. I do believe that knowing this song gives me immediate insight into their world.
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Greece. Note to self: upon arrival home, seduce sister.
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These Greek eight-year-olds in my garden are H-A-UG-H-T HOT.
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Second note to self: try to separate real life and poem to avoid confusion. Maybe change name from Byron to Harold?
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I’ve purchased traditional clothing. These local women fall at my knees and beg to be my concubines.
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I have grown to love this part of the world, and how much richer and more tender it is than England.
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Also, got a sweet tan from the Aegean sun. FTW.
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Keep posted for the next two cantos in six years.
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I hope I don’t get distracted by a wife in that time. Gosh, I would be the worst husband ever. But I’m a great lover. Isn’t that ironic?
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You know what would really put a halt to my poetic aspirations? Tuberculosis. Oh Keats, thank god I won’t end up that way.
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It’s all this Mediterranean air that’s keeping me safe. Yes, I definitely can’t get tuberculosis down here.
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My new black robes can pass as the most austere in all the region. The maid went to town today.
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Moved into the Mayor’s house to tutor kids. Wife mistook me for a starving peasant girl.
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Impressed everyone by memorizing Bible. Winged it on Horace, though. Easy to know Latin when nobody else knows it.