On Twitter (lit. and fig.)

Author's Note: The first half of this is for people who don't use Twitter; the second half is for everyone.

Perhaps because I've been so resistant to Twitter that when a friend recently implored to me to see it for its creative merits (not its [at this point passe] trendiness, notoriety, ubiquity, etc.), I decided to finally give it a shot. The allure of haikus, 140 character fiction, throw away insights from media giants hardly seemed worth an exploration. But I was convinced by the idea that I should see how people are experimenting with the form (and secretly I hoped I would be inspired by it). I signed up on Tuesday night at the bar and have learned the ropes pretty quickly.

Off the bat, it's fun (I suppose) to see what Susan Orlean is doing; she flits about in this particular New York social echelon (her cats, the Westminster dog show, and good parking karma all being topics thus far) that I can't help but be curious about. Nathan Englander has been funnier than Aziz Ansari to this point. Seeing what crawls across Mother Jones or Atlantic Monthly's feed, be it instant news or sharp-tongued cultural criticism gives me access to stories quickly and so I'm becoming news savvy at a quicker rate than normal.

Seeing what news stories trend on a lot of sites is also a compelling plus for a writer. Today's events Bahrain, Libya, Iran are all things I would read about tomorrow; I'm learning about what's happening while my subway takes me to the next place. Moreover, since I'm only following about 40 people/media orgs at this point., Twitter is a customized aggregator (something I'm too disorganized to create on my own); it would normally take me hours to sift through all these sites, now I can read on if I find something that grabs me or I can take a pass and never be bothered with it again. My real human friends on Twitter have been pretty reasonable so far as well.

Although I (suspect I) will sour on it eventually, I do want to convey something that I think my friend was alluding to about the experience. He spoke of the discovery of interesting new voices on there (in a more telling, less leering, more compact way than Facebook allows), and while I've yet to really explore my way into the lives of strangers, something did happen that I thought I might share.

Granta, previously a faraway European source of highbrow nonfiction writing that I only ever stumbled upon after my attention span had already exhausted itself in other places, had a tweet (there I said it) called A Letter from Gaza by the Libyan writer Hisham Matar, written in May 2009.

The piece is short (read it), it covers the span of two letters, one by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer (later killed, we're told, by a Mossad car bomb) and one by an Israeli reserve soldier (who has just ransacked a house in Gaza during the 2009 war). The format of Matar's story is also like a letter, without a particular addressed party in mind it seems, which has this special amplification because of how Matar describes the strength of Kanafani's letter writing:

The mechanism by which the epistle leads its author (and the reader) to this conclusion reveals, with the inevitability of a natural process, the intimate reality of a man whose breath had been quartered by defeat. The prose has an air of being told in spite of its teller. Like all good letters it is not intended for anyone other than its recipient. Writing a short story that turns the reader into a transgressor, a spy, is, of course, a literary trick and an indication of Kanafani’s exceptional talent. In fact, I am convinced that were this author’s short but prolific career allowed to run further, his luminous talent would have shone more brightly still.

Matar's work has the same effect, so it bears some feeling of homage, to Kanafani and to Gaza, the subject of all three letters. The letter from the Israeli reservist, as it turns out, was written by someone I know. Matar doesn't know him and since the politics have their leaden place within the story, my points of contention are actually meted out through Yishai's (the reservist) letter. He is faceless in Matar's description, but I have a knowledge of his good nature and the burden of his duty (conveyed in the letter). In my mind, I can both wrestle with Matar in a few different ways and still respect him from afar.

Beyond the superb style (without cheap political language), I found a writer whose work I'd like to read more of. I have now been induced to write about it, share it with you (on my blog as well as, yes, on Twitter [AllMyChandler is my handle]), perhaps share the story with Yishai, and to keep exploring to see what's out there. I also wouldn't have found the piece had I not finally relented and joined in this now well-worn social media venture. Technology seems to be where new convergences of coincidence are manufacturing themselves. It may sound dirty, but it definitely made my day interesting.