Wednesday
As I’m currently knee-deep in book revisions, I turn over today’s blog post to my Victorianist son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who teaches English at Georgia Gwinnett College. I’m transcribing rather than photographing Toby’s tweets because, despite reader Dana Cole’s instructions, I haven’t yet mastered the process. If you want the full effect, complete with gifs and emojis, check it out for yourself at https://twitter.com/PhDhurtBrain. But here are the literary ones (and a few teaching ones) that had me laughing over the past week or two.
For instance, there’s this one featuring a Gogol short story for a punchline:
French Literature: your nose is a sexual pun
English Literature: your missing nose signals sexual disease
Russian Literature: your nose is impersonating an officer and womanizing around town. The police catch it fleeing the city, and may soon ruin your plans for marriage.
Toby loves imagined dialogues, often involving an author or a character:
Editor: hey, wow, really interesting rough draft of Notes from the Underground
Dostoevsky: “rough” draft?
Here’s one about the prolific Victorian author Anthony Trollope:
Me: let’s just keep this between us; it’s kind of embarrassing
Anthony Trollope: *writes an entire novel about the awkward social faux pas I just made
“Suuuuure”??
Toby followed this up with the observation,
Being friends with some writers must’ve been the absolute WORST
Toby is an Elizabeth Gaskell fan:
I like to imagine that if Gaskell had actually finished Wives & Daughters, it would have ended with Molly Gibson turning towards the camera and shouting, “MARRIAGE IS A BRUTISH FORM OF EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE PROPERTY THAT TURNS WOMEN INTO OBJECTS!”
And a special one for Valentine’s Day:
Me: hey, can you help me out with a love sonnet for Valentine’s?
Shakespeare: sure, this one is about how my poem turns my love into an object
Me: hmm
Shakespeare: this one is about how all love is a lie that lovers tell one another
Me: so, uh, maybe next year, but thnks
With the follow-up comment:
It really is one of the best jokes that Shakespeare’s sonnets get referenced on Love when they’re all deeply suspicious/skeptical or evenly openly cynical on the topic. Like, “I love you so much that this long list of insults about your looks doesn’t even get in the way.”
I had to look up MILF for the following tweet. It means “Mom I’d like to F***”
Tiresias: now, ah-hem, have you heard of the concept of the “MILF”?
Oedipus: ick, disgusting, why do you ask?
Tiresias: no, umm, no reason at all, goodness look at the time
And another on Oedipus:
Oedipus: woah, that’s a crazy story, babe! I can’t believe your ex left your baby to die of exposure on Cithaeron. Same thing totally happened to me!
Jocinda: ?
One of my favorites involves a member of the Frankfurt School:
Me: I just feel such malaise
Therapist: modernity
Me: existential dread
Therapist: modernity
Me: everything feels like a copy
Therapist: mod-
Me: wait a second! You’re not my therapist, you’re Walter Benjamin!
Walter Benjamin: SMOKE BOMB!
This one is accompanied by a great gif of two adolescent girls but it’s good even without it. Tobias’s favorite Bronte, it must be said, is Anne, partly because she’s not obsessed with the supernatural. Here he imagines them all discovering what it’s like to be dead:
Ghost Charlotte Brontë: this is AMAZING!
Ghost Emily: Right?! OMG lol
Ghost Anne: whatever, you two.
Charlotte & Emily: SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT
Anne: *sigh, this is soooo Gothic
Ghosts (as you will see) are a regular theme in Toby’s tweets. Here’s a dead Charlotte communicating with her biographer:
*Elizabeth Gaskell, sitting down to write the biography of Charlotte Brontë
Gaskell: The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to-
Ghost of Charlotte Brontë: GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT GHOSTS EXISTING?!
Gaskell: ??♀️ [palm face plant]
And:
Gaskell: so the child dies-
Brontë: AND COMES BACK AS A GHOST!
Gaskell: no. just typhus, then his mother becomes ill and-
Brontë: COME ON DOWN TO GHOST TOWN!
Gaskell: No! It was her opioid addiction! But there is one ghost.
Brontë: !!!
Gaskell: the Holy Spirit.
Brontë: …
Toby has a follow-up to this one:
I’m trying to manifest the Gaskell-Brontë buddy period drama we all deserve. I really want it to be like X-Files with Brontë being the Mulder character always seeing Gothic shit happen, while Gaskell is reading like Workers’ Rights pamphlets.
Dickens gets regular shoutouts on Toby’s timeline:
Editor: So, I started proofing your manuscript, and I just don’t think it can be the “best” and “worst” of times simultaneously, right? If there’s some “best” in the times, it’s probably moving more towards middling
Charles Dickens: *quietly covering up the rest of the paragraph
Another tweeter, one Doug Hering, got two Toby responses after posting this Samuel Beckett episode:
In 1938 Samuel Beckett was stabbed on the street by a pimp and would have died if not for his thick overcoat. Later he found himself sat next to his assailant at court and asked why he did it. The pimp shrugged, which Beckett found hilarious. This is the Beckettest anecdote ever
Toby responded:
Beckett was quietly the best comedian of the 20th century.
Like, he spent his whole career writing one joke (meaninglessness) and then was delighted that he got to live his joke.
And then there’s this reference to Shelley’s famous elegy of Keats:
Shelley: what do you think?
Ghost of Keats: well…
Shelley: please, don’t be afraid to be honest
Ghost: it’s just, you know
Shelley: it’s the name, isn’t it.
Ghost: ya, I get it, I do, it’s very nice and all, but my name is not “Adonais”
This one isn’t funny but, for those of you who know George Eliot’s novel, it’s right on target:
Daniel Deronda is the cruelest book I’ve ever read. Just 784 pages of dramatizing what happens to a woman who tries “to get everything she wants and nothing she doesn’t”
And here’s one about NFTs (non fungible tokens), which I was born too early to understand. Author, painter, furniture maker and wallpaper designer William Morris, however, would have been appalled:
*William Morris dream travels to 2022
Morris: and is there a vibrant market for artisans now?!
Me: well, you can purchase a digital receipt of monkey drawings
Morris:…
Me: it also destroys the environment
And a follow-up:
I can imagine no specific thing that William Morris would’ve loathed more than NFT’s. Almost an entirely perfect anti-Morris concept.
Here’s one on Ursula LeGuin’s best-known short story:
The high point of Western Civilization was Ursula LeGuin’s tangent on orgies in Omelas.
Here’s the LeGuin passage Toby has in mind:
I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas–at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.
Here’s one that is more thoughtful than comic:
It remains funny/not funny that the resolution of Pride & Prejudice involves “saving” someone by forcing them into an ill-conceived and loveless marriage because the alternative is worse.
And here’s one for English teachers:
I like to imagine the classroom is like a heist film. My students are a ragtag band of misfits, and I’m some ancient loon who nonetheless knows the plans to cracking the vault with the McGanty fortune.
“Ye’ll never crack that ther bibliography with Chicago! Yer gonna need MLA for this job!”
Can you identify the following fairy tales?
School board: whew, I think we’ve censored everythi–
Here’s a story about a wolf eating a child.
SB: well-
In this story two children cook an old woman
SB: now that’s-
A man’s eyes gouged out
SB: these things-
Just a deluge of women being kissed without consent
SB:…
Toby has a novel allegorical reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”:
The Emperor’s New Clothes is the most revolutionary children’s tale. An incredibly persuasive theory of power, the intentional stupidity it demands of inner cabals, and just how fast it can dissipate in the face of even the simplest communal awareness.
And some good comments on Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”:
On the one hand, the boy acted irresponsibly, but, on the other hand, after the first event the town should really have implemented a better early warning wolf detection system.
Your Apex Predator Child-o-Matic Sensor System has provided two data points, both false positives, the one thing you can be sure of now is that any data from the system will miss an actual confirmation.
I conclude with a final ghost tweet:
*New version of Hamlet told from the perspective of Yorick’s ghost*
Ghost: I mean honestly the whole family kind of sucks. Just look at this guy moping about the graveyar– hey, wait, that’s my–what the?! Motherf$*^%er!