This often ridiculous site and its associated twitter feed turn 10 years-old this Thursday (October, 21). In typically self-indulgent style, I will run a post on the history of the site then, but I wanted to start with a kind of gift/curse to the world: the SA Tweetbook.
What in all that is sacred is a Tweetbook? It is a collection of tweets! Is it a real book? No, just a somewhat edited, collection of some of @sentantiq’s most common tweets from 2011-2020. This document is a cleaned up version of my tweet rotation document (cleverly titled “tweetmaster”).
I have made the Tweetbook available as a public google drive document (both .doc and .pdf) and on academia.edu as a .pdf. I have provided the .doc version in case people want to create documents—even books–of their own. (And, let’s be honest, it’s me: there are likely mistakes and typos.)
It starts like this:
Homer, Iliad 22.304-5
“May I not die without a fight and without glory but after doing something big for people to come to hear about”
ὴ μὰν ἀσπουδί γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην, ἀλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι.
It ends like this:
Sophocles, Antigone 737
“The state which belongs to one man is no state at all.”
πόλις γὰρ οὐκ ἔσθ᾽ ἥτις ἀνδρός ἐσθ᾽ ἑνός.
And there are 450 pages in between.
Most of the passages appear in some form or another on this website. The translations in this collection will not perfectly match those that have been shared over time. Our views about using non-binary and gender-neutral language have evolved over the past decade. Where, due to our rather conventional classical training, we were pedantically strict concerning the number and gender represented in Greek and Latin, we have seen the value in offering more inclusive translations. (And the internet has presented us with countless instances to illustrate the closemindedness of pedantry.) We have retained clear gender where the context or meaning seems to demand it in some way.
Ok, but what is a tweetbook? This document’s pages contain over 2000 passages drawn from over 2000 years of Greek and Latin. The quotations below are not exhaustive, broadly representative, or ordered in any systematic or pleasing fashion. Instead, the order is more or less chronological in terms of first appearance on the website or the twitter feed. Thanks to the editorial assistance of Julia Greig, the tweets have been presented with their citations in a more-or-less correct and consistent fashion. (If there are inconsistencies, their fault lies not with Julia, whose work was exemplary, but with my incessant meddling.)
But Why a tweetbook? Over the years, several people have asked for a document with our favorite lines. I have considered assembling a kind of coffee-table quote book at times, but my interest in doing this is on the other side of tepid. So, as a compromise I have used the occasion of our website’s tenth anniversary to share this strange fruit of our labors with the world. I don’t know what the next ten years may bring, but this is a version of a document I keep called “tweets master” from which I schedule daily tweets.
This ‘book’, then, gives you, dear reader, the power to become your own ancient tweetbot. Someday, there may be no twitter. Perhaps this document will be the source of a quote-feed in some future communal space. Perhaps it will just me something you search (through reading or ctrl+f) for words to match to your feeling or time. Perhaps you want to take these lines into new worlds, to boldly conquer instagram or some other social media we have not heard of. Or, maybe you just want to start up your own twitter feed. Whatever the case, I let this rather unpolished collection into the world and give it and you my best wishes. Re-use at will. But reuse for good, where possible.
Whoa! What a piece of work! This looks even better than I had imagined it would.