Twitter was a very different place in the early 2010s. Not the freespeech fascist-friendly hellscape of X. Not the progressive-oneupsmanship stress-ass deathmatch the hellscape sought to correct. It was Something Else. A weird ass wild west. Strange to say now because people in 2010 were already reminiscing about the lost eden of the old internet—newsgroups and livejournal and geocities, places that felt DIY, places people went on purpose and almost never for money. all long since steamrolled by facebook. the old twitter, the twitter of ~2010, had more than a spark of it—the old internet. and it’s the only place horse_ebooks could have happened.
people thought it was just zany spam. a slightly miscalibrated bot, charming in its eccentricity.
at worst, it was banal.
regardless of the text, the links took you to a janky ebook website.
increasingly, the bot forgot to include the link to what it was supposed to be selling.
it was our Bartleby, this saleshorse who would not sell.
it had every appearance of someone’s forgotten project, a neglected toy. wanting “to be loved not for that but for itself,” like ashbery’s tissuepaper clouds.
one found oneself rooting for the horse.
people began to look to the horse. what would it say next? it took on the aura of a shabby oracle.
it had the poetry of concision with the magnetism of accident.
one began to feel understood by the horse.
the pathos of doomed ambition; it was here, too.
the horse became an unlikely altar. we gathered and we waited for the horse to explain.
the horse gave without expectation. it gave more than it asked. it gave to us without appearing to notice we were there.
the horse was all of these things and i still contend that it does not matter that in the end behind the horse there was a man.
the man has been forgotten even as the horse abides. because it does abide.
people were disappointed. they felt they’d been fooled. doesn’t that make it an even greater achievement? to give us poetry without bothering us with poems?
for the lucky few, the art remains long after the artist is ashes. shakespeare’s work has survived long enough that his own existence is no longer, by all, believed in. i have my familiar tirades about it. why won’t people let themselves admire? of course, in this, i become my own denunciation, seeking enemies where perhaps there could have been friends. people have such a complex relationship with the mirror. exhausting, exhilarating, not new at all. who has seen this but the horse? who will see it even now?
Who knew from this horse? I read this over several times and then the meaning emerged! Brilliant!
I still remember when you showed me the horse, when you