"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose," said Franzen, according to author Jami Attenberg, who was at the talk. "It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."
This sure sounds like yakking about oneself to me. And I suspect Basho could have done a lot with 140 characters.
I once had a look at Spinoza's Ethics to see how many of his definitions and propositions could fit in 140 characters. In Latin, quite a few can--see http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/spinoza.ethica1.html. I don't have a copy of Heraclitus around the house, but it is my impression that quite a few of the fragments that survive have 140 characters or fewer.
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