Short attention span is the new avant-garde. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. David Markson feels particularly relevant now. Twitter is the revenge of modernism.

What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.

For me, Twitter is a public persona. I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion, but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me. Art used to make me see the world differently, think about things in a new way - it rarely does that for me anymore, but technology does that for me on a daily basis.

And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

I don't think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins.