Taking Bullets and Twitterature...

So I'm not in my undergrad anymore...although this is not my first realization of it.  For example, tonight our professor had all of our thesis statements printed out for us on sheets of paper which he then proceeded to pass out to each student in the class.  He then brutally played "devil's advocate" in order to "thicken our skins" and help us weed out all of the stacked claims and illogicalities.  Needless to say, it was like taking bullets; not to mention everyone was sweating bullets.  You could almost feel the perspiration gathering in the room.  We all survived though and I hope we are all better for it.  


On a lighter, less daunting, note while sitting in Barnes and Noble today, I found myself next to the humor section in the cafe.  Skimming the shelves after reading several pages of my assigned reading for class, I found a book called Twitterature: Humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first century, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer.  Like a good English major I went over to investigate and found it quite interesting.  If you visit the link above you will be redirected to the website where you can read examples from Hamlet, Harry Potter, and unfortunately, The Da Vinci Code (would we really categorize that as a literary classic?).  I'm not quite sure how exactly I feel about the fact that the first "classic" listed is The Catcher in the Rye, or that the twenty-first century needs "digestible portions" of the classics.  But it did get me quite excited about the prospect of bringing Twitterature into my future high school English classroom (if Twitter is even popular then...either way I think they will like the simple, humorous "reworkings" of the classics).  What I found most interesting about this book is that it was written in a dorm room by two guys from the University of Chicago; they are presently nineteen years old!


Twitterature story on NPR