I’ll admit that I only read a few paragraphs down this article; then skimmed at least as many before my eyes glazed over; and finally, found myself scrolling absentmindedly until I didn’t remember why I was on that page. That’s the general state of my reading comprehension after almost two decades consuming and composing a maximum of 500 characters per tweet (or toot, or post).

As a consequence, I feel more comfortable replying to the title of the text than its entirety, much less its content. I know I’m not alone in this; most people only respond in this most superficial way, particularly in online, short form discourse. We call this a “hot take”, because it is as brief and ill-advised as testing with your fingertips whether a hotplate is still on. Reading a text before replying would require others reading your decidedly colder take to do the same, and that’s just presumptuous.

To the point of the title, then — I do think we should consider the literary qualities of the tweet toot nondenominational microblog post as more of a potential than a given. A potential that the quoted short form post by Patricia Lockwood demonstrates very well, but to the exclusion of all the dreadfully nonliterary tweets posted at the same time; as well as all that came before and after.

Not to say that Lockwood composed the single, glowing point of artistry in a void of dire hackery — there are certainly many more in her league, across several platforms not all bought by neofascist techbros and surrendered to the alt-right and Russian troll factories as open soapboxes. But I digress.

I would not want to imply that this is even the only example in the linked article that might qualify as literature, either; I refer again to my initial paragraph. What I do propose here is that we consider instead these updates parts of a textual spectrum that partially, as one modal component, contain a literary ecosystem. In this ecosystem several strata of literary professionals, dabblers, audiences and pundits would coexist.

I refer here to the consummate professionals; struggling part-time writers (subbing, perhaps, as a barrista or preschool teacher); award winners, the bitterly shortlisted, and the also-rans; copywriters with pretentions of literature; aspiring celebrities and the otherwise self consumed; the well received and the not at all noticed; formalist experimenters (also a part of the entirely unnoticed); genre writers (noticed only by the illiterate); autobiographers; essayists; literary historians and critics, who are largely particularly disillusioned versions of all of the above; opinion letter aficionados; toilet graffiti scrawlers; involuntary compulsive cursers; readers; fans; hangers-on; people who commit to read any number of books during a year but lie about achieving their goal; people who collect books for their material qualities but don’t really care for the writing; those in one-sided parasocial relationships with writers; the writers’ closest relatives; writers’ agents; writers’ bank managers; writers’ nemeses (also part of an armed militia); writers of notes; writers of holiday postcards; writers of shopping lists; writers of financial statements; writers of incriminating evidence; abductors (collagists); some tattooists; some fine artists; all the bloggers that survived web 2.0; readers of the surviving blogs but not books; readers of the surviving blogs and also the books; book burners; note burners; shopping list burners; incriminating evidence burners; probably some CD burners; microblog post burners, somehow, if at all possible; and those who don’t know they’re responding to a writer, the post just showed up in my timeline and their name looked like somebody I was introduced to at the pub, anyway it was just meant as a larf, no offense meant your honour, certainly no perjury.

In summary, people who may or may not safely and/or knowingly engage with literary forms, if at all. Within this varied biome, the examples that most closely approach writerly qualities, such as the one by Patricia Lockwood presently cited, are similarly most apt for our consideration as truly literary expressions of this short form, nondenominational microblog post.

If someone wrote a long read about that phenomenon, I’d definitely read it. Well, I might lose my thread after the first couple of paragraphs. Too many years posting oneliners at max. 500 characters, you know. Your attention span goes before you know it.

Where was I?

Where am I?