I have abandoned Twitter for a second time

Above: use of the term on the cover of The Observer magazine. Coolness is combined with the word chic (defines appearance) and untouchable (defines accessibility).


Twitter has defeated me again. After a relaunch I was using it as an informal notebook as I researched the cultural meaning of the word "cool". I was beginning to make progress, collecting examples, jotting down ideas, organising thoughts.


As an uncool person myself, bemused for years as to what exactly (exactly) "cool" means, I felt I was close to the philosopher's stone of defining (and thus controlling) the acclamation cool.

But I began to notice my “tweets” (that word still makes me feel uncomfortable – yet another reason why I will never be thought cool) were disappearing. One tranche of tweets vanished and I managed to restore them from notes and partial memory. Then another, much larger sequence dropped off my site.


It seems that Twitter is unstable, and this is happening to hundreds of people. Thoroughly disillusioned, I have abandoned Twitter for a second time, and will continue my pursuit of “cool” via occasional posts on this site.





Above: journalist Hadley Freeman also uses the word cool in association with the idea of certain people being untouchable or unapproachable.





Above: Sky magazine. Hang 10 is a surfer expression that means "When a man whose penis is over 10 inches walks around naked" (I havn't made this up). Unlikely I will actually watch the series.


I can't help thinking Cavafy summed all this up years ago:


In his tomb - ornately designed,
The whole of syenite stone,

Covered by so many violets, so many lilies

Lies handsome Evrion,

An Alexandrian, twenty-five years old.

On his father's side, he was of old Macedonian stock,

On his mother's side, descended from a line of magistrates.

He studied philosophy with Aristokleitos,

Rhetoric with Paros, and at Thebes

The sacred scriptures. He wrote a history

Of the province of Arsinoites. That at least will survive.

But we've lost what was really precious: his form

Like a vision of Apollo.