Selected Tweets

by Tao Lin, Mira González

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Fiction. Poetry. SELECTED TWEETS by Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin, dating from 2008 to 2014, as well as extras such as illustrations of each other's tweets, short stories, essays, and a long poem.

SHEILA How do you imagine people read Twitter?

TAO On their phones I think mostly. I think I've read the most Twitter while laying in bed or on my back, or just laying in places, like in parks or in airports. Maybe not the most, but a lot. I've dropped my phone on my face many times. I think other people must too, but I rarely hear about this.

SHEILA What do you think about before you tweet? You once told me that you tweet what makes you feel uncomfortable. So which tweets do you reject, which do you accept?

MIRA I wouldn't necessarily say that I tweet what makes me feel uncomfortable, I think it's more that I feel comfortable tweeting things that I would never feel comfortable saying in a real life conversation, or even in other places on the internet. For reasons that I don't fully understand, Twitter is a place where I don't feel ashamed to say my most shameful thoughts...

(From "What Would Twitter Do," Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez interviewed by Sheila Heti)

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, American

424 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2015

About the author

Tao Lin posts on Substack and lives in Hawaii.

Reviews

[Alejandro Saint-Barthélemy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A necessary (somebody had to be the first one in publishing a collection of tweets, why not Tao Lin? Especially Tao Lin) contemporary art artifact. Unlike most reviewers, I prefer Tao Lin's tweets.

Don't get me wrong, Mira González's Twitter account (see her profile picture, her cover photo, the shrimp emojis after her gmail account, etc., all creating a smoothie of foolishness) is a contemporary art masterpiece, better than Tao's, but it smells way too much and my drug-free brain suffers from the exposure to such torture (most contemporary art is a vomit of silliness).


P.S.
I've allowed myself to come across a little bit harsh because most reviewers are on Mira's side here (so just balancing), and, all in all, I'd rather read her tweets from this book any day of the week than the old-fashioned doorstopper, ~500 page-long, Pulitzer Prize, bestseller story about nazis (Hitler sells better than any other dictator) with a heroic orphan (of course), an old man with a young soul (OFC) and a blind (OFC), jew (OFC), girl (OFC), who experiences the nazi horrors (OFC) and escapes (OFC) to the coast (OFC) with a big (OFC) secret (OFC) that my wife has on her night table, recommended (of fucking course) by some talentless literature professor.

[tao_lin3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book. I can read this book in any mood and enjoy it, I think. This book is sarcastic, self-conscious, afraid and smart.
The words all have meaning that my brain can process. After I read the words I feel emotions. Each tweet makes me feel emotion.

[stephanie]

it's nice to have a recap of everything i missed from the "alt lit" era while i was off being a teenager. do i feel a little nostalgic for a time when social media was used to make dumb posts, instead of the consumption farming site it is now? yeah, i do. we as a society have maybe moved past tweeting like this, but it's nice to look back at the history books from time to time.

[Ariadna Martos]

están LOCOS

[Kai White · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a great book! funny, insightful, strange, playful, enlightening. i remember when this came out a lot of the discourse focused on whether it was pretentious or not (boring!) to publish a collection of tweets. tbh, i think those sorts of conversations are what’s pretentious. as the book description says, this is literary nonfiction, art, poetry, TWEETS!

Mira Gonzalez is the uncontested star of this constellation of >140 character insights. her tweets are consistently hilarious and thought-provoking. i could physically feel emotions reading this collection. the late 2000s early 2010s nostalgia is a vibe.

sometimes Mira tweets matter of factly, “I’m cold and poor and upset” and “I want Rick Ross to sit on my face”

sometimes Mira offers glimpses of the surreal, “My vagina needs to start wearing tiny versions of all the clothes i wear on my body” and “Novel where the protagonist is a baby on LSD”

sometimes Mira reaches across the cold digital void for advice from terminally-online parasocial strangers, “If I chop off my ass tonight, will things be better tomorrow?” and “Does 40mg of adderall have more calories than 20mg of adderall?”

it didn’t matter whether she made me laugh or made me sad, Mira held my attention with her effortless charm.

Tao Lin’s tweets were ok. some of them were quite funny, some were a little too dry and unfocused — and i say this as a person who enjoys writing that can be called “dry.” many of Tao’s deadpan insights resonate more lucidly and feel at home in his poetry collections you are a little bit happier than I am and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. i recommend them!

that being said, Tao does have an uncanny talent for capturing the novelty in the subtlest moments of strangeness we overlook every day.

these were some of my favorite tweets from Tao:


“feel like i can’t stress it enough that i strongly feel that if i’m put in a room with 10+ extraterrestrials i’ll easily dominate them all”


“Hallucinated a tiny bird floating up briefly into view outside my 4th floor window to monitor my activities for the CIA”


“Imagining oneself meditating as a method for meditating”


“feel like i don’t remember 2011” (same!)


“Found a poem titled ‘i want to email myself to an unknown email address’ in my Gmail account from 2005”


“Novel titled Self Publish Next Novel and Don’t Do Interviews/Press”


“imagined ‘national geographic’-style narration ‘this human is trying to remember what website he was going to look at’ while trying to do that”


“All my hundreds(?) of premonitions of the end of the world, or at least the end of the world for myself, have been wrong so far”


this is a collection that is best experienced a page or two at a time. there’s some doodles, some fiction and miscellaneous extras, but the tweets are where it’s at. each one a meditation, a tangent, an absurd little moment or memory or lapse in reason. i enjoyed this collection thoroughly!

the presentation is top notch.

the pocket size and vinyl cover is super cute.

[Peter Schutz]

i wanna download twitter on a three terabyte harddrive
and print it out and read it like a novel
like all those pretty girls on the train
they look like models

[Jesse Larkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started on Tuesday May 16th 2023 and finished on Wednesday May 24th 2023
As the title suggests it’s an omnibus of tweets from Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez
Each author is given around 200 pages
It’s in chronological order so you do follow a timeline of events of some sorts as they shed and gain new twitter handles
It’s like the same as evolving and being in different phases of their lives
Some of the twitter handles were made simultaneously so when the new one starts sometimes you are set back at the beginning so to speak or to a prior moment
Self aware irony to the design on the outside being like a bible
Some comment on internet being the new religion or offering some sort of similar transcendent communal connection to man and the divine
Loved the contrast between Castro’s the novelist where he talks about feeling dumb for ever considering his tweets as art and here one of his best friends Tao Lin (who appears in the novelist) demonstrates that your tweets in a way are artistic expression and can be representative of a piece
When condensed onto the page it gives it a dreamy biographical poetry quality like a heightened autofiction
With Tao we get a lot of disconnected random thoughts whether they be imagined scenarios for books or movies or funny images in his head.
He is very present with his thoughts and although the tweets are curated and curated to a timeline we see he has posted some very private strange thoughts like the non sequitors that pop in our heads while we do random things or when we speak in different voices to amuse ourselves
Every now and then he’ll get focused on a topic and post about that for a while and it feels like we are getting some sort of narrative from it despite being anti narrative
He spends a lot of time feeling alienated isolated depressed in his room which is a comfort zone
Drug dependency and downward spirals
It feels like the accounts get progressively darker with Tao’s
Being depressed and held up in his room for long stretches of time not liking people not wanting to go out
Status updates on novels he’s writing
Fake titles for things hell never do but are given their artistic representation through being said and put out there
The psychedelic references to mckenna and Charlie Kaufman movies keep it floaty
The stream of consciousness essay was provocative and funny and gave me a lot to think about
Pg 145 tao Lin mentions remains of the day and I picked it up in a little free library an hour prior to reading the section
I think I liked Mira’s section more than Tao’s
Her random one off tweets were funnier and punchier
Her drug addiction and constant cycles of depression and shame kept it so intriguing to read
Her essay at the end about going to see movies with Tao and then seeing blue is the warmest color was thematically a great wrap up that embodied everything we had been reading from her into a structured context
The nonfiction essay about her and Peter almost getting arrested was great too

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been following Tao Lin’s oeuvre for awhile now, even after the collapse of the “alt-lit” scene a few years ago after allegations of sexual harassment deservedly brought it all down. I never really followed the movement aside from Lin but there is still something about his detached, surreal yet banal style that fascinates me. I’ve mentioned in a previous review that I feel like Lin’s work, terse and yet literary, filled with a numbness and self-conscious irony, might be the new literature of the internet age. I even compared his writing to tweeting itself. So, seeing Lin publish a book devoted to tweets as an important part of his literary output, along with those of poet Mira Gonzalez, was interestingly fitting.

I used to be on Twitter, for professional reasons, but never really got into it and as the Twitter platform seemed more and more to be a negative force in the world, I jumped ship. That is not to say that I don’t think that tweeting is a worthy literary activity, and in fact, it seems to be a driving force in much of today’s creative writing. It makes sense for social media to be the natural home of many millennial age writers, and Lin and Gonzalez really make the most of the platform to push their styles, condensed into its famous 140 characters, the poetic voice of the internet age.

Tweeting is, like any social media, an autobiographical medium, and Lin and Gonzalez each use this, both to publish their work and elicit a response from readers. At the same time, it is interesting to think about the effect the medium has on the message. It is an instant way to share what one is thinking or feeling with the world, for better or for worse. Reading their work, I was struck by how much they chose to share, how much of their lives they bare to the world, and, like all of us, how lost they seem in their own lives, as well as taking a somewhat self destructive stance. There may be, in some ways, an exhibitionist element present, but for the reader, there is an equally strong voyeuristic feeling in perusing this work or following anyone on Twitter.

People may have perhaps always felt these impulses, but the internet makes it more efficient than ever. It is interesting, then, to see these ephemeral, fleeting thoughts published in the traditional media of a book. The little book itself is an interesting artifact, compact and bound not unlike a religious text with shiny gilt titles. The book is also organized to be with Tao’s and Mira’s tweets reversible on each side of the book, allowing the reader to flip it upside down to read the work of each. Arranged on each side from the earliest tweets circa 2010 and continuing until 2014, we watch them cycle through a variety of Twitter accounts, created to capture different voices or moods. For the most part, I was fascinated by the rather uncomfortable view into their thought processes, as each begins to delve into deeply personal subjects in their own ways. They can also be very funny, and I laughed quite a few times while going through the book, and it was also a struggle to not share too many of them with my wife.

Both write in a similar confessional, earnest, minimalist style, with drug use being a major theme for each, though they seem to be responding to the ennui of contemporary existence in slightly different ways. Lin’s, for instance, comes across as detached, surreal- he masks his emotions through strange thoughts and whimsy. His voice is neutral, bland, even as he speaks of absurd or comedic situations or personal fears. His work seems colder, more quirky, as he returns to familiar themes, whales, or fast food, or awkwardness, multiple times. In an interview on Hobart, Lin writes that he tweets what he would never feel comfortable saying in real life. I think that is a common feeling for many users, and it makes me wonder if there isn’t something cathartic about having such an outlet for such inexpressible feelings. This is especially evident when reading the other half of the collection, the tweets of Mira Gonzalez.

Gonzalez’s, in contrast to Lin’s cool, dispassionate style, feels much more raw, her emotions deeply expressed, hiding nothing. While also evoking comedy, phrasing a lot of pop culture references and puns, she writes her life in generally bleak terms, struggling with relationships, body image, and drug use and makes the reader even more disconcerted than Lin’s. She depicts a life in a free fall, self-excoriating and blunt. To be frank, it is almost a bit too visceral to read comfortably, particularly towards the end.

I did like how each of them used footnotes to annotate various dated references to pop culture, or other places where some explanatory notes may be necessary, as if they are already anticipating the use of these texts by historians looking for primary documents of 21st century life. Even if the Library of Congress has, since December 2017, ceased preserving the bulk of the worlds’ tweets, a few of the most unique words will persist here.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is super hard to rate -- some tweets I loved & wanted to read out loud to whoever I was with, some made me laugh out loud, a lot made me cringe or roll my eyes and/or be extremely worried about both of them. And some were just ~extremely 2012, and I feel like maybe it's unfair to use my 2017 expectations to view some of it (plus like, the edginess is obviously the point, but does that excuse the rampant fat-shaming, use of the r-word, etc.?), so idk what to do with that.

I def preferred Mira's section, for what it's worth. Tao's was fun/cool/interesting at first but got *so* repetitive I could barely finish it and skimmed large portions.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating is based almost entirely on the Mira Gonzalez portion of this book. Her tweets were frequently hilarious and felt like they came from an honest/"real" perspective. There was a sense of learning about her through fragments of her life as they accumulated. Tao Lin's tweets often felt like they were delivered in large conceptual blocks. His tweet "discerned what i'm doing right now as 'livetweeting my nothing'" sums up a significant portion. There were moments of clarity and the way in which he wrote about how he processed moments rather than the moments themselves was fairly interesting but it was less pleasurable than Mira's contribution.

[Romany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Some were laugh-out-loud funny, and some just a sad indictment of contemporary culture. But it’s a gem of a book. And the format! People asked if I was carrying a bible! Sure was.

P.S. I purchased this on behalf of my academic library, as I’m sure it will be the focus for research in future.

[Jeff Hoiland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I follwed tao and mira on twitter a few years ago and I'm glad that this book exists to revisit incredibly funny and interesting tweets.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I may not be confident or ambitious but at least I'm not confident and ambitious" (Gonzalez 93).

[rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

joder macho qué fomo de twitter 2012

[Andrew Worthington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interview I did with the author (Mira Gonzalez): http://fivequestions.club/post/150577...

[Jack Daniel Christie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Real Old Man Hours: I Don't Like the Tweet Book That Much

like most of you, I have Tao Lin as a friend on GoodReads (hi Tao, hope you're doing well).

Mira Gonzales is not on GoodReads.

i've never understood twitter. i'm bad at it. maybe that extends to me not getting this book.

publishing your own tweets is an inherently narcissistic project, like publishing your own journals when you aren't even dead yet -- it's just bad form. not to say that publishing itself isn't a narcissistic project, just that there's tiers.

Getting published
^
Self-publishing
^
Publishing your tweets

it feels a bit like a stunt.

does Twitter as a literary form democratize literature? i hate that question, and hate all conversations about the "democratization" of literature.

but if i must comment i must say nein, mein freund, publishing tweets is just the first step in the UNdemocratization of Twitter as a literary form.

not a rebellion against literary legitimacy but a plea for it.

perhaps our children will be taught in school to feel stupid for not picking up the subtle overtones of a dril tweet.

who knows. who cares?

[Jodie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, the concept is what drew me in. I had never read a collection of Tweets before though this was a good starting point. I have a few friends who are into Tao Lin who suggested I pick this up and I feel guilty in a way to say that I enjoyed Mira's work better. Though both authors had a sort of repetitiveness to their writing, it was a lot more pronounced in Lin's. I definitely plan to delve further into Tao Lin's writing in the future. If anybody could give me a good recommendation as to where to start with his solo work it would be greatly appreciated!

[Brian Alan Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Here, Gonzalez is my main b while Lin is my side b—charming, funny, totally self-indulgent, totally non-academic, and weird as fuck. It’s like Jack Handy for a younger generation of insane, misanthropic curmudgeons who take/have taken too many drugs. Looks like a bible because it kind of is."

Excerpt from yesclash.com

[Jillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just really liked it. I had never even seen a Twitter account, but created one halfway through reading this book. I'll probably delete the Twitter account but boy do I love Tao. And while Mira's accounts were more disturbing and redundant than his, her last essays were disarmingly good.

[Danielle Doerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

the end of tao's section felt vaguely optimistic
the end of mira's section felt bleak
as their twitter accounts got more obscure
their twitter accounts got sadder
I probably should've read mira's section first

[Lorenzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

a worthwhile and successful literary experiment. gonzalez' section felt like it had a stronger narrative thrust, but tao's very disorganized thoughts featured some funny tweets. his final section in the 'extras' when he attempts stream of consciousness writing was very funny.

[Adam]

"Someone blows their nose, and you want to keep it?" -Peter Venkman

[Corporate Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely readable and addictive. An interesting and hilarious exploration of anxiety and melancholy.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mira Gonzalez was more interesting that Tao Lin.

[Alec · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short book that proves, without pretension, that the tweet can be a literary form.

[Jonathan Lee B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selected Tweets is finding loose Runts in a jacket and eating them.

[Charlotte Hayden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought it for Mira's tweets and wasn't disappointed.

[F(r)iction F(r)iction]

Read Samuel Dymerski's book review of Selected Tweets: http://tetheredbyletters.com/book-rev...

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly an avant-garde masterpiece

[Richard Chiem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mira's section especially.