Twitterggans Wake

We know, we know, the above heading takes a website with a punning name, “Twinnegans Wake,” and makes another, lesser pun of it. Lame. However, it couldn’t be resisted, and sometimes, when things can’t be resisted, we must freely choose them!

Case in point: a poetic project employing text-message-based auto-correcting functions. Seriously—the idea of typing things into auto-correct and presenting the resultant material as poetry is simply too obvious to actually do, right? It’s like a conceptual writing prompt for an undergrad creative writing class. However! Someone figured out how to make it work, and all it took was a little Joyce.

Surprisingly, “Twinnegans Wake,” a twitter page which auto-corrects the text of Finnegans Wake, is pretty cool. The creator, Kevin Spenst, was smart to use as a source a text already ridden with non-words - the result is not so much a translation into nonsense, but a different kind of echo-chamber - the kind that comes from simply mishearing, and not from the allusive intertextuality of the library.

Here are a few samples:

robert run, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commode vice of recirculation back to Howth Castle & en

Yalu, Yalu Yalu! Quails! Where the baddest particulars are still out to marble Malice Migraines and the Verdins catapulting the Cambridgers

by archly and rory end to the region was to be seen rings on the squad. The fall (nab)of a once walleye oldie is retail Earl in bed & later