On November 1st, I pulled the above sentence (“Even if you got there, you’d probably find it burned down.”) from poet Vanessa Place’s Twitter feed. I’d followed her account for a while, but something jumped out to me on that day. Maybe the sentence felt prescient. Or, I had the sudden realization that few full sentences appear in her daily stream of tweets. I may have thought that there was some personal meaning in finding just one.
Place’s feed appears to recount the story of Gone With The Wind. Each day, she posts a a piece of the adventure, sentences trailing from one tweet to the next. Though I read her posts for months, I woke up to the possibilities of close investigation of the story somewhere around the burning of Atlanta.
I’m fascinated by the creation of rule-based, word-related scouring rituals; the time-sensitive nature of the Twitter platform plays naturally into that interest. (With immense respect for the ancient artform) I consider the I Ching reference a working title; more importantly, it’s an experiment in the personal, daily, ritualistic reading of a single text.
I don’t know yet what I’ll make with the sentences I collect. I’ve posted them as MTs (Modified Tweets, in Twitterspeak) within my locked account. I now start to collect them publicly, in a very simple form. The ongoing list may be accessed here.
