Friday
Tobias Wilson-Bates, my youngest son, is a 19th century British Literature specialist who teaches in the English Department at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is also the funniest member of our family and one who has mastered the art of Twitter. I combed through some of his best literary tweets over the last few months and lament that I must pass up the ones with visuals, which are among his best. You can find him at Tobias Wilson-Bates@PhDhurtBrain.
Some of my favorites are imagined conversations with famous authors or characters. For instance:
Tolkien: I’ve got some great character names, Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf
CS Lewis: Nice! Really getting into the spirit of fantasy!
Tolkien: Right?! Also Sam.
Tolkien (brainstorming): Names are tough, hmm, what would a secretive influential political actor be called who wants to ingratiate himself with a ruler. Something inconspicuous. I’ve got it! Wormtongue!
Gollum: …
Therapist: I see, yes, so, is this “precious” in the room with us right now?
Toby has a lot of fun with the Brontes. For instance, this one on Jane Eyre:
Editor: so it’s like the Bluebeard story but in the end Jane marries Bluebeard?
Charlotte Bronte: yes.
Editor: do you think the readers will like it?
Charlotte: yes. because I will tell them to.
And on Villette:
Editor: I think we need to have a romantic ending
Charlotte Brontë: like, he dies at sea and she gets to run a school however she likes and read all day?
Editor: well
Charlotte: also her enemies suffer enormously
You can kind of see why Anne Bronte is Toby’s favorite Bronte from the following allusion to Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
Anne Bronte: the story needs something exciting
Emily: a ghost?
Charlotte: a mad ghost?
Emily and Charlotte: a mad person disguised as a ghost but there’s also really a ghost!
Anne: look, I’m just gonna make the husband have a drinking problem
At one point Toby gets into a twitter exchange with Liz Miller, who was his dissertation director at the University of California at Davis. Miller is referring to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s famous thesis that heroines in Victorian novels only have two options, marriage or death:
Liz Miller – Ladies, if he proposes in Chapter Three, wants to marry before the novel is over, and isn’t particularly concerned w/ waiting til novelistic closure to consummate your relationship, either he’s a villain or you’re about to die of consumption.
Toby: Chuckling for the thousandth time of @ecmille1’s observation that getting married before the end of a novel is the worst thing a character can do.
And then later in the thread:
Toby: At this point, if two central characters seem headed towards matrimony, I compulsively check how many pages are left and shake my head sadly if it’s a lot.
Speaking of villainous husbands, here’s Toby in a twitter thread on fairy tales:
Bluebeard is the best fairy tale bc it’s about extreme domestic violence and is so clear in the location and logic that even Disney hasn’t figured out how to sanitize and monetize it.
Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty are all iterations of the same morphological structure that almost always had a rapist king or the woman’s own father intent on raping her and the fairy godmother allowed her to escape in disguise. All profoundly sanitized by Disney.
All that’s left is the phantom of nonconsensual intercourse now romanticized as a kiss that awakens the princess from slumber.
I like how, in another tweet, Toby imagines the eye test in the movie Bladerunner being administered to Victorian authors. In the movie, if the eyes don’t emotionally widen at the question about a turtle getting hit in the road, then it’s a replicant and not a human:
Bladerunner agent using the Voight-kampff test on Victorian authors
Agent: would you kill a child for a greater social good?
Gaskell: little Tom goes first from starvation, then I get both twins with typhus before moving onto the-
To which another tweeter imagined Thomas Hardy’s response:
Thomas Hardy: question: does it *have* to be for the greater good?
And Toby following up on the Thomas Hardy suggestion:
If they suffer through childhood and then die as adults? Or, alternately, what if one of the children kills all the others? Do I still get those points?
In another tweet on Hardy, Toby mentions the very dark George Gissing:
“Nobody in the 19th century is as bleak as Thomas Hardy”
*George Gissing cracks his knuckles menacingly
Here’s an imagined interchange between the author of In Memoriam and the famous author who snatched her husband’s heart out of the funeral fire:
Tennyson: my grief was so great that I —
Mary Shelley: kept his preserved heart in a box!
Tennyson: — wrote a poem
MS: erm, oh, haha, yes, that’s, uh, how we grieve…
And here’s another imagined interchange, this one between the author of Christmas Carol and the noted social realist novelist Elizabeth Gaskell:
Dickens: and when he looked in, he saw the tiny crutch, but Tiny Tim was gone
Gaskell: because the opium wasn’t enough to conceal his collapsing immune system and his smallpox infection was inevitably escalated by chronic malnutrition, right?
Dickens: umm, well
And another Dickens reference:
Scrooge: what day is it, boy?
Boy: tis Christmas Eve 2021
Scrooge: and what is the minimum wage?
Boy: $7.25, sir
Scrooge: wow. This really seems more of systemic issue than something that can be solved with guilt philanthropy
Boy: right??
Here’s one I like:
Dickens (staring into the camera): $1 million dollars by midnight tonight or I add another character.
Moby Dick makes an appearance from time to time:
Ahab: guys, guys, I, uh, wanna apologize about that whale business
Crew: whew!
*scattered applause
Ahab: from now we’re Bitcoin mining and investing in crypto!!!
Crew: Noooo!! *screams, *sound of bodies hitting the water
Here’s another, which every teacher will relate to:
*nailing a gold doubloon to the wall “to the first one that sees the end of the semester!”
Here’s an interchange between Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous characters:
Dr. Jekyll: chain me here to end this madness!
Utterson: I shall!
Dr. Jekyll: also, just a small note, under no circumstances should you call him Dr. Hyde. That’s my credential!
Sometimes Toby imagines himself in the conversations:
Patient: doctor, I’m feeling depressed
Me: read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Patient: wait a second, what kind of doctor are you?!
Me: *smoke bomb!
And another with a similar ending:
Me: not all books are novels!
Student: how do you define the novel?
*the student looks up to find the classroom empty. wind whispers through the open window.
And then there are a number of stand alone observations, witty and smart both:
Charge of the Light Brigade is a poem about a lot of people dying for no reason that gets people excited about the prospect of dying for no reason. Like if Eye of the Tiger were a song to get you excited about being eaten by a tiger.
The more I think about the terrible fates of everyone on Odysseus’ crew, the more I think the Lotus Eaters had it right.
Will never not be impressed by Samuel Johnson saying the canon is made up of the works that have stood the test of time, while writing prefaces for a publisher to convince people that the works the publisher owned were in fact the canon.
Among its many interesting features, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair combines the author’s prodigious ability to skewer character flaws against the background of social class with an almost childish naïveté about how debt and empire function.
Make William Blake part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you cowards!
In response to the Virginia student who complained about Toni Morrison’s Beloved giving him nightmares—put in an ad, this incident helped Republican Glen Youngkin win his gubernatorial race—Toby made a point I make in my book. Sometimes literature is not supposed to be comfortable:
Begging the media to do interviews with Reader Response theorists. Literally an entire field ready to tell you about how having nightmares from reading Beloved is not a “bad” response.
To an article entitled “The Easy Seven-Word Phrase Every Woman Needs to Know to Exit Uncomfortable Conversations,” Toby responded with a line from Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
And finally, looking at the medium of Twitter itself:
Twitter is a lot like being a grad student bc it’s a lot of watching people have intense conversations about things you have only heard of in passing.
Toby doesn’t only write about literature. Since he’s the father of four, there’s a lot about parenting, and also about student debt, the state of academe, Covid, politics in general, and other interests of his. I’ll end with a tweet about my two oldest granddaughters because—well—they’re my granddaughters:
Was a bit confused this morning until my kids explained that they call words written in cursive “curse words”
Shades of Art Linkletter, for those of you old enough to know who he was.