Tweets on Ice
In which Lightsey Darst and MC Hyland discuss contributions to The Shantyquarian, a tweet-sourced letterpress paper that Hyland and friends are running at the Art Shanties.
mnicebike: Shanty Haiku I.
Biked here on Christmas.
Westerly headwinds blew
hard. Surveyed the lake ice.
LD: This one comes from your very first issue. My take: you’re just getting going here. People aren’t sure what to write, so they write haikus—because haikus are what, old/new (like a tweet-sourced letterpress paper)? “poetry”? short, like tweets? seasonal? Anyway, I love how your forced “line breaks” (preserved) add to this one.
JPageCorrigan: Screw
Vintage! Print is the Future.
0.918″ is the nouveau 1.0″.
Bjorn Means Bear, 2007
MCH: Things I like about this tweet (or “tweet,” as it was submitted via our website, not through Twitter): 1) it appeals to all the letterpress geeks out there (0.918″= the height of a piece of type, in the US), 2) I have no idea what to make of the last line. It looks like Bjorn Means Bear is a Twin Cities band, with a debut album coming out soon (as of whenever their website was updated). Do they have a song about the height of type? Bjorn Means Bear, if you do, please contact me: I will pay you all I have to come over to my apartment and sing me to sleep daily.
Ice-Weasels: At night,
we come.
LD: Who are the Ice Weasels?! MC, tell me you were there when they wreaked havoc!
MCH: The ice weasels are everywhere! They’re mostly pranksters, but their teeth are sharp. We’d like to train them to come into the shanty by night and put away all our type, but so far, no luck.
Come learn to spin wool at
sashay shanty all day
today
LD: Is it just me or is this when The Shantyquarian really starts cooking? Incidentally, when do you print this—in time for people to go spin wool at the sashay shanty?
MCH: That’s probably the most “breaking news” we’ve published—except for the one issue that informed people about a potluck that started at approximately the time the print copy came out. We usually set type from 9:45 or 10 until sometime between 12 and 1, then spend up to an hour proofreading, changing out non-printing or incorrect letters, and getting all the lines of type nice and tight in the bed of the press so they don’t wobble while printing. If breaking news comes in after noon or so, it waits until the next day’s paper. This means that sometimes urgent news stories come out a day late: this weekend, Sunday’s paper contained this update: “FIRE! FIRE! The One Room Schoolhouse is on fire”—though the fire was put out around 1pm Saturday.
LD: The One Room Schoolhouse was on fire? They didn’t tell us that in the article they wrote! I may have to rethink my commitment to their educational model.
Sarah Harper E>: I could
not be wearing any more
pairs of socks
LD: I remember this. God it’s cold on a frozen lake, even when it’s a mild winter. Also, loving the haikuishness of this one. Reminds me of a new term I just heard: litwitter.
KellyEverding: I love november
crows. A bunch of them are
hunching around the yard
like little Columbos.
LD: Okay, I love this one not only for the spot-on image, but because of the suggestion that this tweet took a long time to arrive. What’s the story? Was this tweet hand-delivered from Providence?
MCH: I also love how this tweet seems to have traveled through a wormhole from November to January. I think it’s a latter-day retweet, though it might also be a transcription of an old journal entry? We had a serious proofreading failure in the first edition of this one: we probably gave out 200 copies of the paper that read something like: “A bunch of them are hunching around the around the around yard…”
LD: But you know that edition is collectible now! Incidentally, I like how the modern phenomenon of the retweet takes a serious detour here, becoming more like a message in a bottle. Speaking of which. . .
Message in a
Bottle
Sedna: Help I’m trapped the
bottom of the lake
LD: Tell me about this: where’s the bottle? More importantly, what was in it before it became a message receptacle?
MCH: The bottle is an actual bottle—a few of them! One of the highlights of this project has been building a relationship with people from the other shanties. The Shanty of Wonder, built by Kermit Boyum and Matthew Nupen, is a big black box full of gears and crankshafts and other mechanical things that raise and lower stuff through the ice. One of their contraptions allows people to send a message in a bottle down below the frozen surface of the Medicine Lake. At the end of the day, they bring their message-filled bottles over to us, and we pick a few to print. Probably 50% of the messages are something like “Hello, fish!”
capitolhill1: Dream no. 00170
I dreamed my teeth fell out &
they formed a democracy that
could not be influenced by
lobbyists.
MCH: Another great contribution from a fellow shanty: this is from Capitol Hill’s Department of Dreams. For the first week (? two weeks?) of the Art Shanty Projects, you could go to the Capitol Hill shanty to file one of your dreams in the Department—but then, of course, the bureaucrats lost track of things, and the dreams were scattered throughout Shantytown. First, though, they tweeted us this gem.
DANCE SHANTY. NOBODY
LIKES A HOTDOG PARTY.
XO SASHAY XO
MCH: We’ve been watching some feuds develop between shanties, especially between Dance Shanty and Sashay Shantay, who’ve been using The Shantyquarian to trade insults. The Dance Shanty, in fact, has only two rules: no hot dogs and no disco balls.
LD: Just what I’ve been waiting for: a dance smack-down on ice.
Letter to the
Editor
katemlucas: Mind blown by
the camera obscure at
Medicine Lake.
Excuse me, do you have
a permit for that?
—Dpt. of Everything Else
LD: I don’t know if these are connected, but I love them together this way. When I went to the camera obscura, it was obscure (cloudy day), so then I went and saw something else (a dance on the lake? a polished spot in the ice in a dark shanty? this was years ago), which was mildly mind-blowing. Very Art Shanties: a little failure, a little fun, a little cosmos.
roddeadtech: Review of paw
owned by Pancake the cat.
Cool leathery and slightly
dewy on my face this morn-
ing. A strong showing.
MCH: This is one of my favorites. Jeff Peterson has been doing a great job of sending out prompts for very, very short writings of all sorts (space operas, beer reviews, horror stories, haikus, etc.) on the @Shantyquarian twitter feed—this is a response to a call for reviews of “something you’ve never seen reviewed.”
LD: Ooh—now I want to write one.
You have one more weekend to tweet your best for The Shantyquarian (until February 5), using the hashtag #shantyQ.
All images come from the Shantyquarian Blog.
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