[John Whitworth]

Apas, Lucy didn't want rhyme. Presumably the sort of person who tweets (e.g. Sally Bercow) doesn't do that. Humph. Congratulations to our practised wits.,Chris O'Carroll, Bill Greenwell, Bazz and Brian. Do any of them tweet in real life as it were? And if so then to what end?

Lucy Vickery 8 June 2013
In Competition 2800 you were invited to reconstitute a well-known work of literature as a tweet, i.e., text of up to 140 characters, including spaces.

A few years ago Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, two students from the University of Chicago, embarked on a mission to make the great works of literature more palatable to a 21st-century audience afflicted by an ever-dwindling attention span by recasting them in the vernacular of our time: the voice of Twitter.

Their endeavour prompted John Crace to have a go in the Guardian. Somewhat impressively, while Aciman and Emmett’s boiled-down classics were rendered in a series of tweets (up to 20), Crace managed it in one. Here is his take on Madame Bovary:

Bof I despise my mari’s provincialism. Give me glitter et amour. ‘Tu es too high maintenance,’ said Leon et Rodolphe. Alors I kill moi-meme.

Competitor Charles Curran goes one better, not limiting himself to just one work but reducing Henry James’s entire oeuvre to a single, withering tweet:

Various vaguely unhappy upper crust characters discuss their minor problems and social pretensions at length. Nothing much happens.

You embraced tweetspeak, and the furniture of Twitter, to varying degrees, but all excelled in the art of distillation. The winners, printed below, earn £7 per tweet.

Some poets are like ‘Eyes = sun! Cheeks = roses! Breasts = snow! Voice = music! Floats like a goddess!’ No way. My woman’s beauty = real.

I’m bald, not Hamlet type, stiff collar, can’t eat peach, can’t score w @talkingofMichelangelo nor w @singingmermaids. #etherisedupona-table

@balconygirl & @partycrasher r teens in luv, but their fams totes h8 each other. Spoiler at start of play sez it ends badly. #starcrossed

Mum @daughtersgalore is antsy 4 husbands. Assorted losers & winners come wooing. Best girls get luv plus £. #truthuniversallyacknowledged

Murdered king’s son @anticdisposition communes w Dad’s ghost, can’t get revenge act 2gether. Girlfriend insane, Prince maybe. #endsindeath

Rich, bitter, stingy old bugger @bahhumbug h8s Xmas. Ghosts & crippled boy adjust his attitude, he gets w Xmas spirit. #blessusevery1!
Chris O’Carroll

embront: h1&c1+h2#grim, c1&h2+e#grim, h2&i#revenge. c1/h1/i&e die. c2 & lh#grim. BUT h3 (h1 son) to wed c2! h2 dies, ghosts w/c1. lol@wuther

STC: Oldbore seadog FFS holds up wedding. OMG he shot albatross & crew go #superstition & die. He survived WTV. Can we go now? #late

Halpint: Outsider in, feet tableunder #menace Insider out, new outsider twits inside outsider, outturfs him> Sidcup?? #territory @longpauses

GeoChaucy: There’s a whole in my Becket: all human life #pranksters #backstabbers #sermons No time to finish but tales frisky @aleveltrad
Bill Greenwell

Time’s beginning is time’s end and time’s end is time’s beginning: a mystical opus in verse that begins where it ends or vice versa.

Fiend offends God, falls from Grace into garden, tempts coy couple with forbidden fruit, gets them evicted and fouls up everyone’s future.

Man weds woman, woos her daughter, woman dies, man dupes daughter, loses daughter, murders madman, goes to jail—Lust’s Labours Lost!

Honeymoon hell in hotel where inhibited couple build up to sex. He comes too soon, she goes too soon and their dreams end in angst.

Scrooge screws Bob and his tiny tot, Tim. Dead partner screws Scrooge with scary ghosts. All ends well. Tim thrives. Happy Christmas!
Alan Millard

Bygmester Finnegan cobblesqueak actually totalcrap of over six hundred pages has conned readers since the thirties. Best not to read it. Brian Murdoch

Cosmic ego trip round WW’s gonzo head, 3 cheers 4 America, democracy & homoerotic visions, mostly writ10 in verse so free it lives in wild
Basil Ransome-Davies

st8ly plump $ mulligan has breakfast so does stephen daedalus so does leopold bloom molly remembers his proposal yS I said yS I will yS
Brian Allgar

Bloody kids, not following orders. Who’d have daughters! Rough sleeping no joke, even with Fool. Enough to send you mad.
D.A. Prince

Didi & Gogo w8 4 godot. 0 2 b done, just w8. Pozzo & Lucky come & go. Boy comes & goes. Didi & Gogo w8 4 godot. 0 2 b done, just w8.
G.M. Davis

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Do any of them tweet in real life as it were? And if so then to what end?

Not I, John. Never have, never will, no clue what it's for. That's probably why I only managed one. But I suspect that Chris and Bill may have inside information on the subject.

Anyway, congratulations to all, especially Chris and Bill who, if I am not mistaken, have clocked up ten between them - a gr8 & mIT 1der!

[Jayne Osborn]

Congratulations to Chris, Bill, Bazza and Brian.

(But this has served to remind me why I don't have anything to do with #@>$-ing Twitter!)

Jayne

[Brian Allgar]

But you seem to have mastered quite a lot of the Twitter symbols, Jayne. Or was that something else?...

[Ann Drysdale]

It's easy, Jayne; all you need is

140 characters
viz
Snow White and seven dwarves,
the European nations,
a couplet’s lines, plus a hayfork’s tines
and a hundred and one dalmatians

[Jayne Osborn]

Actually, I don't 'get' Twitter - so I must confess that my apparent mastery of the symbols, Brian, was in fact, something else: what I meant was (in my more usual style of writing) ****ing Twitter!

Annie,
Ah! - I think I can see now how "easy" it is!

Heehee.

Jayne

[Chris O'Carroll]

Since I don't have a Twitter account, I got some expert advice from my son. I sent him a bunch of 140-character summaries of various works of literature, and got back a patient-with-the-clueless-older-generation reply that said, essentially, "Some of these are funny, Dad, but they don't read like tweets." He gave me some tips on use of the @ and # symbols and I started afresh, hoping I wouldn't sound like some dork trying to speak faux-Elizabethan without knowing the difference between "thee" and "thou."

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

what I meant was (in my more usual style of writing) ****ing Twitter!

That's exactly what I suspected, Jayne - hence my shocked face.