Somehow, after just three weeks of reviewing books, I’m somehow writing about a second whole book based on a Twitter account. The first was The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon by Dana Schwartz. It was a solid book of literary trivia written by someone making fun of the arrogant white hipsters that take graduate level literature courses. The book is very funny, but more importantly, it serves as an example of someone taking the persona they created on Twitter and trying to convert it into something that tracked in the wider literary world. The persona the writer used in her book was directly created and honed on Twitter in 140 character bursts over the course of several years. It’s always uplifting to see someone’s hobby get them something cool like a book deal. Sadly, the account appears to be retired with the release date of the book late last year. @GuyInYourMFA is still up, but no new content seems to be forthcoming. That’s not a bad thing, better to go out while the joke is still fresh. RIP and congrats on the book.
Today’s Twitter-based book is a greatest hits collection from an account that will never, ever log off, and fuck you for even suggesting it. It’s easy for a celebrity or professional writer to use Twitter to self-promote. To them, Twitter is just an extension of LinkedIn. Other posters in less mainstream Twitter circles don’t have the name recognition or career prospects of those with blue checkmarks, they Tweet for the love of the game. The funniest of these Twitter subcultures came to be known as ‘Weird Twitter.’ Before, birthing minor celebrities like the hosts of Chapo Traphouse, Weird Twitter was a place where posters made art out of unconventional humor. Done with a deliberately amateurish élan, Weird Twitter posters craft absurdist humor and non-sequiturs using Twitter’s intentionally limiting format. Coherence and logic are for the ‘normies’ with their ‘careers’ and ‘medication.’ The cutting-edge humor on a cutting-edge communication platform belongs to those wild and weird enough to craft something truly unique. It takes vision, it takes imagination, it takes an utter lack of interest in the opinions of anyone but what the voices in your head tell you kicks ass. This is the world of Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection.
The Story:
There is absolutely no story to this book. Quite simply, it is a collection of roughly 1,500 hundred tweets from the Twitter handle @dril. This account has been active since 2008 and has amassed an archive of well over 100,00 tweets. Recognizable for its blurry avatar picture of a smiling Jack Nicholson wearing sunglasses, the Dril account tweets in the persona of the strangest man to ever walk our little blue marble. The specifics of who this man is don’t really matter. He’s usually portrayed as fat, with many large sons that bully him and more often than not wearing a very full diaper. This man tweets about any and every topic imaginable, spelling mistakes and all. That’s in fact the form this book takes, arranged into chapter containing tweets based around topics such as “nostalgia,” “girls,” and “9/11.” The tweets themselves contain a distillation of the madness that seems to fill the modern world. Dril tweets with no rules, other than to be as absurd as possible in 140 characters or less. It’s the sort of humor meant for a world of limited attention spans and constant horror. It can be digested quickly, and is so goddamn strange that it almost makes sense in a world that seems to be rapidly unraveling at the seams. Within all the seemingly random statements shouted into the Twitter void, there is some sort of comment to be made about what spending too much time online does to the brain. The obsessions it breeds, the way it affects how we think, but that comes second to this book’s main purpose of being absolutely hilarious. Dril gathers all the buzzwords and slang of the internet era, sews it all together and spits it back at us like the loogies of Frankenstein’s monster. Nonsensical though it can sometimes be, they reflect the preoccupations and worries that cloud our thoughts in the internet world. Is it something you can get into? Read the quotes below as a sort of litmus test.
Quote(s) of the Story:
“the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: ”there’s no difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron” –Dril
“police man kicks me in the diaper while running out of radio shack, causing my shit 2 fountain up and ruin several RC spongebobs #rodneyking” –Dril
“Ilove “Driving Um Wild” with my trade mark wrong opinions” –Dril
“I proudly skim the amount of $17.76 off of all my employees paychecks, because they do deserve pain” –Dril
Keep or Donate?:
Did of the above quotes make you laugh? If so, buy this book. There’s a big chance you’ll wind up loving it. I spent the better part of this week cackling like a degenerate and reading Dril quotes to my finance because my brain wouldn’t allow me to keep the madness locked up in my head. My fiancé is a perfectly reasonable, beautiful and intelligent woman, so the fact that she laughed at some of these shows that the book will appear to at least some people that aren’t sweaty, twitter addicted dolts. I loved this book and I’m keeping it. It’s the perfect book to read in small doses while on the toilet, just the way Dril would have #wanted. Legends say he even posts to this very day:
https://twitter.com/dril?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
BOOKS! 