I Am Abraham & Mileage On Twitter With Old Photographs
Friday, March 21, 2014
One of my favourite writers in Newyorican Jerome Charyn. Recently he published I Am Abraham a novel on Abraham Lincoln. Like his previous novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, I Am Abraham is a first person autobiographical novel. Charyn’s novel puts us into the head and mouth of Lincoln.
Thanks to the internet and that I have a
daily blog (over 3000 of them since I began in January 2006) I am able to write
about anything I want (I rarely rant) and I illustrate it to my taste. Luckily
some years ago I traveled to New York
to interview and photograph Jerome Charyn. This means that I can illustrate my
I Am Abraham “reviews” with my portraits of him.
After I write a blog I then put a link into
facebook (note that this must be in lower case) and in Twitter. It just so
happens that Charyn has three Twitter handles, one as Charyn, one for his Lincoln novel and the
other for the Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. His friend/agent Leonore Riegel
also has a Twitter handle. And some of these Charyn/Riegel connections are in
facebook.
All that means is that I can re-tweet and
re-facebook to my heart’s content.
Then I had another idea. I used the
wonderful American Civil War photographs available in the Library of Congress
and other official sites to illustrate (not the blog) but the Twitter and
facebook re-postings.
A few days ago I received a notification
from Twitter about my two most popular tweets of the week.
It would seem that the attraction consisted
in the old photographs I used. My friend John Lekich has explained. “They are
old photographs but those people look alive.”
That Silver Sword of Appomattox
That Dark Lady from Belorusse
And Zero at the Bone
Currer Bell
Glock- Verb-Transitive
Blue Eyes, the butterfly and a picot
That Vampire of Paris