![]() ![]() That historical anxiety, directed both at the past and the future, is acutely felt by Lockwood’s protagonist, who, like Lockwood herself, is a married woman in her late thirties who has found real-world eminence by being very online. Lockwood is sending a bulletin from the future, when, horrifyingly, such things will be said of her generation, and be true. Pictures of roast chickens-maybe because that’s what women used to doĪ digital ailment demands a digital cure: this is funny, sad, and right, as is the telling grammatical slip at the end of the paragraph, which implies that women used to Google chickens rather than cook them. Locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing thatĪlways broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown The words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath, and layĪ hand on the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeating Thomas De Quincey, plugged full of poppy, reported sitting at a window “from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move,” and something similar happens to Lockwood’s unnamed protagonist when she sits in front of her computer screen: We know this from science, some of us from experience, but Lockwood is out to describe that sensation of dependency, the feeling of possessing a screen-suckled brain-or of being possessed by it. What opium did to the minds of the nineteenth century is no different than what the Internet-“the portal,” as Lockwood calls it-is doing to the minds of the twenty-first. Why are we still On Here? Twitter users often ask with the desperation of the damned, and the answer that Lockwood’s book immediately gives is that we are addicts. To translate for the offline: this is what someone says in a clutch of outrage upon discovering a topic or bit of news-one which, it is safe to assume, many people are already talking about. What began as one of the biggest literary experiments since the birth of the world, everyone invited to shoot out words from their fingers at any time, has calcified into a genre clogged with clichés, one of which Lockwood has taken as the title of her first novel, “ No One Is Talking About This” (Riverhead). It’s also a stoning square, a rave on bad acid, an eternal Wednesday in a high-school cafeteria, an upside-down Tower of Babel pointing straight to human hell. ![]() ![]() Twitter is still a comedy club and a speakers’ corner, the cozy back booth at an all-night diner. Meanwhile, much of the medium’s fun has gone sour and sharp. Democracy in America has barely survived it. Twitter did not usher in a definitive dawn of democracy abroad. “Tweeting is an art form,” Lockwood tells her skeptical mother, in “Priestdaddy.” “Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” She made it seem like it was.Ī decade has passed since those happy days. ![]() (It helped that she was a poet, a fondler and compressor of language.) Her best tweets were tonally filthy but textually clean, like a clothed flasher, their voice so intrinsic to the new medium, so obviously online, that if you tried to explain to a parent or an offline friend what you were laughing at you ended up sounding like a fool. All you needed was style, and Lockwood had it. Fewer saw that the form could be a kind of fiction, an exercise in pure persona sprung from the manacles of story, or even sense. Tuna-fish sandwiches versus the Arab Spring: that was the crux of the debate. Back in those days, people tended either to dismiss Twitter as one of the stupider things to have happened in human history-the whole world should care what you had for lunch?-or to celebrate it as a revolution that would usher in a golden age of democracy and peace. Quiddity’s thing,” ’ ” she writes, in her memoir “ Priestdaddy” (2017). “Free in the knowledge that no one was listening, I mostly used it to tweet absurdities like ‘ “Touch it,” Mr. Patricia Lockwood created a Twitter account in 2011. ![]()
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