Friday
From time to time I’ll share comic literary tweets from my very funny English professor son, Tobias Wilson-Bates. So here goes, starting with his comment on Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant:
An insect: *dies in winter
Aesop: THIS IS DUE TO YOUR MORAL FAILURE!
Like many literary tweeters, Toby is fascinated about film adaptation possibilities. Here his suggestion for Charlotte Bronte’s classic. In the film Toby mentions, the killer hides his identity by improvising a story::
New Usual Suspects-style Jane Eyre adaptation where it turns out that Jane has been killing everyone who dies in the novel but gets away with it in the end by inventing Bertha Mason.
And in a follow-up tweet:
“red room” is obvious “Murder” backwards
Toby is fascinated by the fact that Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel, whom Dracula uses to acquire a London dwelling place, is a real estate agent. Toby wonders who the real vampire is here:
Jonathan Harker is inadvertently an agent of a grotesque parasitic social force, but then as part of that job he meets a vampire!
He then follows this up with a series of tweets along the same lines:
A new Dracula adaptation where he simply invests successfully in Real Estate schemes and does far more damage to society.
***
Harker: but raising rents THIS much is going to bleed your tenants dry!!
Dracula: *gripping the table and biting his lip
***Vampires don’t need to be invited across a threshold if they’ve just evicted you from it.
I like these two tweets on Coleridge’s famous poem:
Rime of the Ancient Mariner: or, The Longest Possible Alibi for Failing to Deliver a Ship’s Cargo on Time
And:
Mariner: what’s that? Did anybody else see this? Umm, NO! They were dead! Then how did I operate the ship? you ask. Hmm, well, you see, they were zombies for a bit at that point!
Coleridge and his good friend Wordsworth show up an a number of imagined dialogues on Toby’s twitter feed. For instance, here they discuss the idea for their ground-breaking collection of poems Lyrical Ballads:
Coleridge: first a far eastern fantasy!
Wordsworth: cloud
Coleridge: then a haunted ship of the dead!
Wordsworth: daffodils
Coleridge: are you writing poetry or just listing things you see???
Wordsworth: umm, old abbey?
And another on Wordsworth:
Romantics be like “I know a spot” and then take you to steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
As a 19th century scholar, Toby is fascinated by authors who took drugs, including Wilkie Collins, Coleridge, and Thomas Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. This interest has led to several humorous tweets:
Editor: I’m honestly worried your drug habit is affecting your work.
Wilkie Collins: it hasn’t! I’ve got a great new idea for a plot twist that will BLOW YOUR MIND!
Editor: is the plot twist drugs?
Collins:
Editor: Wilkie. Is your plot twist drugs?
And:
Wordworth: I will write on the growth of my mind
Coleridge: I shall illuminate the supernatural in Nature
DeQuincey: get ready for a mind blowing new idea; step one is drugs
Wordsworth & Coleridge:
DeQuincey: ok, so step two is also drugs
Here’s a fun one, in which Toby reports the observation of a grad school professor:
I had a great professor describe Jane Austen plots as kung fu movies with constant fights to the death performed as social etiquette
One of Toby’s most successful tweets, garnering 29,000 likes, almost 3000 retweets, and 41 replies, was the following:
oh, you like Jane Austen? Name one time a minuscule social cue gave you a deep understanding of the ways your identity is inextricably imprisoned by your gender and social status.
Toby has a great Austen interchange about Mansfield Park with tweeter “Dubious Seda of the Brown Aja” (@DubiousCA). Dubious began with,
My real honest take is that modern readers just don’t understand how infinitely bawdy and horny 18th century vibes actually were, so they imagine Austen in the imagined prudery of the Victorian era (which was also super horny but in a more sadomasochistic way)
Austen LITERALLY makes a joke about anal sex, in what often gets labelled as her ‘most boring’ book
Toby, replied,
Omg plz say this is related to the horniest character name, Franny Price
To which Dubious replied,
Close! Mary Crawford talks about having lived amongst men of the Navy and “of Rears and Vices I saw enough” then is all ‘teeheee that’s not a pun i swear, nudge nudge wink wink’
Toby got a good laugh out of that one (two laugh emoji), as did I.
Here’s a tweet to make you feel better about yourself:
If you ever feel like you’ve missed your chance at being great, just remember that Victor Frankenstein created a monster that killed everyone close to him as an undergrad. So, if you haven’t done that, you’re at least doing ok.
In one tweet, Toby alludes to T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” which argues that the world ends with a whimper:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a—Hold on. Oh. Ok, sorry, I just heard it’s definitely going to be a bang.
At one point, Toby asked who was the most depressing author. Leading contenders were Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Harland Ellison, with Ambrose Bierce as a special mention. Toby observed,
Hardy is lapping the field right now! Sorry, Conrad, that heart wasn’t dark enough!
And later in the thread, when someone mentioned Jude the Obscure:
One of the few books in which you can actually FEEL the author reach through the page and slap you
Having four young children, Toby finds himself periodically analyzing children’s books, including one that I used to read to him. Here’s his thread on Curious George:
Watching Curious George and 100% of these problems could be resolved by not capturing and keeping a wild monkey in the city.
Somehow as a kid I internalized thinking all the trouble was George’s “fault”, but this is entirely not on him. Real Frankenstein vibes.
Did I request thee, [Yellow Hat], from my clay / To mould me man?
Toby is a huge Dickens fan, and Toby regularly imagines him in conversations. Here he is talking with poet Leigh Hunt, upon whom the parasitical Skimpole in Bleak House is based:
Dickens: hey, there, Skimpole
Leigh Hunt: that’s not my name, wait, holy shit, you’re not putting me in your stories, are you???
Dickens: certainly not, Skimmy!
Hunt: I swear to God
And here are two other conversations, one with H.G. Wells, one with science fiction authors Robert Heinlein and Octavia Butler:
Dickens: and so he travels to the past and future!
HG Wells: and comes to understand the fourth dimension!!!
Dickens: no, well, I was thinking maybe he would just buy a big Christmas turkey?
Wells:…
And:
Dickens: so he travels and sees his past self
Heinlein: and then he has sex with himself to give birth to himself, right?!
Dickens: I-
And:
Dickens: the spirit takes him to see the whole present world–
Octavia Butler: so he then understands that his wealth is the result of a grotesque dehumanizing network of torment and extraction?!
Dickens: 😬
One fellow tweeter (Dr. Andrea Kaston Tanger @aktange) suggested a seminar called “Best Book I Ever Read” in which
every student picks one book for the class to read, and we meet once a week to talk about a new book and eat muffins. Could this fly?
To which Toby made a counter proposal:
A seminar called “Book I am Most Miserable to have Read” where we meet once a week to commiserate over a book that hurt us and drink bitter wine.
Week 1: Books where beloved animals die.
I conclude with two final Toby tweets:
For Father’s Day this year, get your dad what he’s always wanted (!!!), the identity of the man who killed his predecessor and made him king of Thebes!
And one final one on Toby’s favorite novel:
For anybody wrestling with the absurdity of life during a pandemic when simple medical solutions are eternally deferred by seemingly unrelated political gamesmanship and broken underlying economic realities, the book you want is Middlemarch.
