Lengthy stay Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter account: the one pure area left on this hell website

At the centre of most issues is a skeleton. So it’s for the net infamy of Joyce Carol Oates. In 2021, the award-winning novelist delivered her most important contribution to literature: a diabolical tweet ruminating on the existentialism of Halloween.

For the uninitiated, the 86-year-old, five-time Pulitzer finalist used her platform on X (previously Twitter) to share a photograph of a powerful, American-style Halloween ornament, which featured dozens of plastic skeletons clambering up the facade of a home. “You’ll be able to at all times recognise a spot during which nobody is experiencing a lot or any grief for a misplaced liked one,” she wrote. “Everybody you like decomposing to bones is only a joke.”

This distinctive tackle Halloween traditions was met with a form of confused on-line glee. In an more and more polarised political world, it’s uncommon to come across such a rogue and bafflingly robust opinion like this out of nowhere. No tradition wars, no common discourse, only a thought sprung into being like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. Or a spooky ghost leaping out at you in a haunted home – though we shouldn’t joke about that.

However that is greater than only a one-off phenomenon. The truth is, it’s only a single instance of a bewildering array of traditional Joyce Carol Oates tweets – a decade-long oeuvre which makes a compelling case for one more addition to her trophy shelf: Twitter’s best poster. The poet laureate of social media. I’m not being snarky right here; I genuinely love her tweets, and they’re one of many solely issues that carry me pleasure in a quickly Nazi-infested platform. As Twitter consumer Kaitlin Ruiz places it: “She doesn’t must reply to any specialization; an oracle just isn’t beholden to coherence.”

Oates is a prolific author in each side of her life. She has revealed 58 novels – however extra importantly, she has written 170k tweets. Her targets are broad and plentiful. There are political takes: dozens of tweets a day about Harris v Trump, and Israel’s warfare on Gaza. She’ll be outspoken on trans rights at some point, and writing about JD Vance’s tiny eyes on one other – however she additionally isn’t afraid to enterprise into worlds of caprice, resembling her cat pondering the trolley downside.

The purpose is that she posts often, with out the agenda to promote one thing, and seemingly with unabashed sincerity. In interviews, she’s dismissed the medium as “ephemeral and rapidly forgotten”. However her relationship to the platform feels pure. It’s the way in which Twitter must be used.

Each thought comes straight from her large artistic mind on to the web, the net farm-to-table. “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous?” she questioned again in 2015. “Are there cases of girls changing into obsessive about historic occasions?” she mused in 2023. Then there’s the time she posted a really confronting image of her contaminated foot on-line.

Twitter’s proprietor, Elon Musk, consistently refers to Twitter as a “city sq.”, however following Joyce Carol Oates is extra like being in a endless feast with the creator, the place she is sitting a few seats down from you. Occasionally, when you’re consuming your scrumptious fish meal and chatting to your neighbour, you’ll hear a snippet from Joyce Carol Oates waft up the desk. You’ll normally miss the context about why she is presently waxing lyrical on this topic, or its relevance to anybody else, and even any higher nuance to the dialogue – however that shouldn’t matter. We must always all be grateful that we get to be completely at a cocktail party with Joyce Carol Oates.