Friday
From time to time, I share literary tweets composed by my son Tobias Wilson-Bates (@PhDhurtBrain), who is in the Georgia Gwinnett College English Department. I sometimes joke that I rebelled against my father by specializing in British rather than French literature while Toby rebelled against me by specializing in 19th century British literature whereas I specialized in 18th century British literature. In any event, Toby has far surpassed his father in his mastery of the twitter format, composing hundreds of insightful and often very funny tweets. My favorites, of course, are those that deal with literature, and I share some of my recent favorites today. (You can read previous posts on Toby’s tweets here and here.)
Samuel Johnson, an inveterate procrastinator, once said that procrastination can take the form of intense busyness. Here’s Toby’s tweet on the subject:
Sherlock Holmes (*entering my house): a very clean home
Me: thanks!
Holmes: avoiding work deadlines I presume?
Me: YOU BASTARD!
On creative writing, in two tweets:
Dickens skewers Chancery Court in Bleak House, but if you think about it, as a young court reporter Dickens probably drew an enormous amount of insight into plot and character watching hundreds of hours of depositions.
What I’m saying is that MFA programs should offer a class that’s just sitting in on local court cases for a semester.
Dickens gets a lot of play in Toby’s tweets. Here are some more instances:
Every single other Dickens title makes more sense than Our Mutual Friend.
From now on just assigning the first two serial fragments of novels and then telling students they need to register for my classes next semester to get the rest.
Dickens writing from female perspective: she’s so mysterious! her manners are a carefully orchestrated symphony of etiquette.
Bronte writing from a male perspective: this asshole is so insufferably full of shit you would not believe it.
Here he summarizes T.S. Eliot:
The Work of TS Eliot: or, how to be unhappy but in a useless way
Toby started a twitter thread on literary figures and characters who complain a lot:
the popularity of complaining about how other people are complaining makes me think we’re still in the fin de siècle somehow
Matthew Arnold was the all-time king of “my complaining is better than your complaining”
Pater was just telling everyone to complain harder
Picture of Dorian Gray is 90% just people complaining and then some quick murders to finish upto be fair, Hamlet is also mostly just one guy complaining about things
I was touched that Toby in one series of tweets mentioned my inspiration for his name. It’s about Tristram Shandy’s gentle Uncle Toby refusing to hurt even a fly:
Tristram Shandy has arguably the best line in English literature: “Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
Really every scene with Uncle Toby is solid gold.
And, yes, I was named after this specific character, so what?
Uncle Toby, having sustained a wound to his groin in the Battle of Namur, becomes obsessed with recreating the fortifications where it happened. I like Toby’s comparison:
building a full scale model of the singular moment of your trauma is basically what writing an academic monograph is
And then there’s the widow who has her eyes on innocent Uncle Toby but who first wants to find out—without asking directly, of course—whether his war wound has incapacitated him:
I will never stop laughing at the “I can show you just the spot where I was wounded!” widow scene. The most perfect punchline in literature.
Toby gets some good laughs out of the anti-technology Luddites (who hated what factories were doing to working men and women) and Lord Byron, who from his elite position claimed to be a rebel:
Luddites: we need a few clear political mandates to convince parliament our cause is just!
Byron: good! and then we’ll seduce their wives and beautiful half sisters!!
Luddites: ok, ok, who let Byron into the meeting???
The following two tweets were composed in the final week of the semester when Toby was madly grading student essays:
Testing out a new hypothesis that the work will eventually give up and complete itself. More later.
*David Attenborough voice: the Work continues to rest lazily in its natural habitat, but don’t let its relaxed demeanor lull you, it is capable of doubling or tripling at a moment’s notice.
Since Toby handles twitter so beautifully, he of course has been interested in Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again attempt to acquire the company:
For all you Bleak House lovers, if the Twitter sale goes sideways the whole thing is ending up in Chancery, well known for handling complicated cases quickly 😉😉😉
Toby’s dissertation was on how notions of time changed over the course of the 19th century, influencing literature in the process. As a result, meditations on time often show up in his tweets, as here:
Rime of the Ancient Mariner is actually a poem about what it feels like to go to one of those Time Share pitches.
Also, aren’t we all already Sharing Time??? Deeply troubling to consider the alternative 🤔
And here:
My proudest teaching moment is probably still teaching Alice in Wonderland in a class on temporality, where I sent the whole class off on a journey across campus and when they came back we sat there for a second and then a student said, “that was a waste of Time, wasn’t it?”
I almost fell out of my seat cheering. Credit hours are already a nonsense structure.
On James Joyce:
Editor: (*laughing) no, but for real, if we publish this the way it is right now, you’re gonna sound like a real pervert
James Joyce: *looks directly into the camera
On Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is like 4 entirely different books in one, but the surrealist horror of a single human footprint is the best one.
For those Thomas Gray fans:
WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT THOMAS GRAY WAS BURIED IN A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD?!
Thomas Gray: I AM the mute inglorious Milton I want to see in the world.
For John Steinbeck fans:
Grapes of Wrath was the original Squid Games.
Steinbeck and [George] Eliot both feel like they do this thing where the plotting, in almost the gentlest way, leads you to the cruelest outcome
A note to his almost 4500 twitter followers:
Greetings, new Followers! Just know that by Following me, you implicitly endorse Middlemarch as better than Moby Dick and that the 19th century extends from 1780-1914. I don’t make the rules (except for this rule that I just made up)
A response to a tweet by one Jack Corbett:
Jack Corbett: Enough content creators, now time for content destroyers.
Toby: Alexander Pope’s entire career in a tweet
On William Morris:
Last time I taught News from Nowhere, I feel like I didn’t do it justice, but this time the students are so into it that the artisanal revolution might happen after class gets out.
On selling one’s soul:
Mephistopheles: I will offer you anythi-
Me: a sabbatical.
Mephistopheles: I mean, you could have infinit-
*sound of door slamming, tires squeal into the distance
On teaching literature:
just reiterating that it’s a crime against me that I can’t assign 16 novels for one semester in an undergraduate English class. incredibly difficult choosing only a couple to teach!
Response to a game invented by (I think) one Dustin Friedman:
Ok. I’ll play.
Victorian authors edition
Favorite of all time: George Eliot
Dislike: Carlyle. The answer is Carlyle.
Grew on me: Wilkie Collins (brought sexy back)
Most overrated: this feels like a trick
Most underrated: Richard Marsh
The G.O.A.T.: Wilde & Eliot tie
And finally, a twitter thread about combining 19th century novels:
all film adaptations should retroactively produce extended universe structures. fairly clear that Lucy Snow [from Villette] tracks down Wickham in order to resolve that situation for Elizabeth Bennet, and then tells Darcy not to say a word.
Jane Eyre’s rich uncle mysteriously dying at a convenient time is the work of Van Helsing.
Thornton [in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South] goes bankrupt because the wildly profitable speculation in America is investing in Magwitch’s sheep fortune.
Basil leaves Miss Havisham at the altar, so it’s kind of not too bad when Dorian kills him.
Heathcliff turns out to be the love child of the Monster and Elizabeth Lavenza [Dr. Frankenstein’s wife]this also makes the scene where he tries to dig up Catherine’s grave make a new kind of sense
After Frankenstein dies, Walton goes on to become the Ancient Mariner.
All I’m saying is that comic nerds have had their decade in the sun. RELEASE THE LITERATURE NERDS!