Sepia Mutiny compiles some excerpts, and by god, they have just about convinced How the World Works to get on board the Twitter-train. While American politicians (I’m looking at you, Charles Grassley) comport themselves on Twitter in a fashion that would embarrass most self-respecting teenagers in either India or the United States, the minister manages to be funny, informative and, most of the time, typographically coherent.

To wit:

Have given 13 interviews in 3 languages and 2 more TV shows pending. A little overwhelmed by the media scum.
3:31 PM May 19th from TwitterBerry

Scrum. I meant, scrum.
3:32 PM May 19th from TwitterBerry

<p>@renuka book will be published in 2010. A collection of my tweets. Tentative title: “Meet, Eat and Tweet: Using Twitter to Keep the Public Tharoorly Uninformed.”
9:35 PM Jun 5th from TwitterBerry

But losing Twitter has gotta hurt. Just last week, Michael Anti, a former New York Times research and well-known blogger, noted in an interview with Danwei that “Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one, for a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language.”

But “the joy of Chinese Twitterland is fragile,” he warned prophetically.

Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is. So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of YouTube descends on it one day.

But who knows? Maybe Twitter censorship will be the straw that finally breaks the Chinese Communist Party’s back. Maybe China’s hundreds of millions of Internet users will finally declare that enough is enough, and will take to the streets en masse on Thursday, in honor of their fallen brethren 20 years ago, demanding, once and for all, the freedom to tweet.

Until recently, standard protocol for handling a humiliating personal betrayal in public was to tough it out. This rule applied mainly to public figures who had no choice but to handle such challenges with all eyes on them, like political wives, who were required to stand by their men in purse-lipped silence, hands folded, eyes cast hellward, or celebrities, who were obliged to pretend to work through their painful feelings in public while carefully drawing the line at revealing anything that might jeopardize future career prospects. In both cases, the same general rule held true: The more painful the humiliation, the greater the need to maintain dignity by refusing to stoop to the humiliator’s level.

But those days are over. Thanks to the increasingly public nature of our lives, the ranks of people who might find themselves having to deal with private humiliations in public have now expanded to include basically everybody. And a surprising number of people recently have trumpeted their private grievances against the bastards who done them wrong, using whatever means are readily available to them. Ailing wife of the former presidential candidate Elizabeth Edwards, most prominently, used “Oprah,” the “Today” show and “The Daily Show” to get back at the tramp who seduced her husband. In January, Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend broke up with him on Facebook. Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Facebook-divorced her husband after a fight. A couple of weeks ago, former New Yorker staffer Dan Baum breached the Kremlinesque secrecy of his erstwhile employer when, in the name of transparency, he tweeted the details of his firing while painting a less-than-flattering portrait. And Veronica Lario, the long-suffering wife of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, let her priapic husband have it (predictably with a lot more panache than Edwards) when she publicly accused him of consorting with an 18-year-old and supporting the political ambitions of models and starlets. “The impudence and shamelessness of power offends the credibility of all (women), damages women in general and especially those who have always struggled to defend their rights,” Lario said to the Italian news agency ANSA. Sisterhood is powerful, but revenge is pretty sweet, too.

 While it’s hard not to side with Lario, whose lashing out, no matter how self-serving, practically constitutes a public service, Baum, Edwards et al. come across as having murky motives. It’s not just that they have books to sell. What’s interesting (and similar) about these stories is that it’s easy to imagine how the behavior started out as fervent revenge fantasies, the kind that have crossed the minds of everyone who has ever been cheated on or fired. As recently as last year, marshaling the power of the Web to get back at one’s ex was considered pretty pathological behavior. When the YouTube divorcee Tricia Walsh-Smith went viral after posting a video disclosing the juiciest details of her collapsed marriage to a Broadway mogul, her story launched a thousand expert opinions about the legal ramifications and psychological effects of living our lives in public. Similarly, when the gossip blog Valleywag publicized the relationship between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and former Fox News commentator Rachel Marsden by publishing their IM chats, and Wales responded by announcing on Wikipedia that they weren’t together anymore, nobody thought Marsden a hero, or even a person in her right mind, when she retaliated against Wales on eBay and Knol. But that was last year. This year, according to a British poll, nearly half of all people under the age of 21 and 18 percent of 22- to 30-year-olds have publicly dumped someone by announcing it on Facebook, Twitter or something similar in the past 12 months.

“Self-righteousness makes people feel superior,” says Pauline Wallin, a psychologist in Camp Hill, Pa., and the author of the book “Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide to Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior.” “People always find a logical reason for what they want to do — like, that company fired me, the world needs to know what they’re really like. We decide emotionally and justify rationally. We decide first, justify later.” In other words, there’s nothing like getting screwed over to bring out the smugness and moral superiority in everybody. And, these days, who isn’t getting screwed over? The fact that we’re all just an angry e-mail, late-night status update, drunken text message or hormonal tweet away from more disclosure (self- and otherwise) only adds to the already considerable anxieties of the age. Technology doesn’t cause lack of impulse control, it just creates a nice, dark, moist and warm environment in which it can thrive.

It’s possible, if improbable, that there could be something healthy in the impulse to take ownership of one’s own humiliation and cash it in for attention and money, if not sympathy. Maybe it’s a sign of idealism, in an endearing belief in the goodness in people and the brotherhood of man that makes people trot out their lowest moments like circus ponies. Or maybe it’s just the result of a long, slow process of indoctrination. As long as there have been formulaic Hollywood movies, there have been scenes in which the bad guy gets his very public comeuppance. At the end of “Dangerous Liaisons,” for instance, Glenn Close’s character, the evil Marquise de Merteuil, gets booed at the opera after the virtuous young Chevalier Danceny reveals her evil schemes to the world by publishing her letters to Valmont. It seemed like a powerful, satisfying scene to me when I first saw it in college, but it drove my French film professor crazy. “No French person would do that,” he said. He didn’t mean the shunning. He meant the unified public expression of it. He meant everyone coming together for an unembarrassed, cringingly sincere public display of moral opprobrium. In the movies, casual onlookers can always be called upon to join in a chorus of disapproval against the villain, thereby validating the victim’s victimhood and eradicating all grievances against him in one fell round of applause. In real life, and especially in reality TV, we treat such displays with malicious, rubbernecking glee. The more technology allows us to prop ourselves up by putting everyone else down, the more we’ll level our blunderbusses at every passing ant. 

I’m the first and only American author who’s written for Japanese cellphones (and with literary intentions at that). A happy lesson in old-fashioned technique, it was a sobering one about our brave new cyber-world’s eternal essential: interactivity. Most of the auteurs of keitai shosetsu are Japan’s vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee.

Astronomically popular (chiefly among millions of Japanese teen girls), “thumb novels” are much decried as trash for yahori (slow learners, i.e., half-literates). And over recent years this subculture has stormed Japanese commercial book publishing. In 2007 — keitai shosetsu’s annus mirabilis –half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper “Love Sky,” by the self-styled “Mika,” has sold 2. 9 million copies in tandem with its sequel, which ranked third.

Last fall a literary grandee joined in. Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as “Purple,” author of a keitai shosetsu, “Tomorrow’s Rainbow,” about a teen’s search for love after her parents’ traumatizing divorce. Delightfully, Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of “The Tales of Genji,” Japan’s racy ur-novel classic.

But before the great Setouchi stooped to keitai, I beat her to it. In late 2002 I was in Tokyo my first time. Unlike Bill Murray in the Sofia Coppola movie, I’d found myself in translation. Three of my books of brief quirky tales had been very happily serialized and published in Japan. It’s still where I sell most. One morning I watched a Tokyo teen Web-browsing on his cellphone. I was amazed. I’d never yet heard of i-mode, the vanguard keitai Internet service launched in 1999 by Japan’s telecom giant NTT DoCoMo. I’d never even owned a cellphone. But I’d been on MTV with my surreal mini-fables; I’d adapted them into a very episodic indie film that still lives a happy second life online. My work, I always felt, fit the short-attention-span age to a T.

Here at last, it seemed, the culture was catching up with my literary brevity. Despite the impact of Raymond Carver (god of MFA writing programs, and of me too), the short story in general got short shrift in fiction’s limelight. And ultra-shorts were practically offstage. But now technology was about to fix the script.

My translator, professor Motoyuki Shibata of Tokyo University, Japan’s foremost translator of contemporary American writing, enthusiastically agreed. (He didn’t own a cellphone either.) So back in New York I hatched a format: no story over 350 words, for minimal thumb-scrolling; 12 words tops for opening sentences, to fit whole on a single screen.

“Make it shorter,” says Woody Allen, citing all-purpose comedy-writing advice. I got into shortness originally to fight an awful tendency to bloviate. And over the years, I’ve sometimes gotten identified with genres like “sudden fiction” and “flash fiction.” But I call what I write simply “stories.” Compression, I find, intensifies everything. The reader’s imagination will hungrily conjure from the bits you shrewdly serve. Or withhold.

I began my keitai shosetsu in late 2003 (shosetsu means “fiction,” in fact, not “novel”). I knew nothing of “Deep Love,” the seminal Japanese cellphone novel about a sex-for-money girl teen, which had just become the first of its kind to be brought out by a book publisher. (Written by “Yoshi,” actually a 30-something guy, it’s sold almost 3,000,000 copies.) I wrote, as usual, in longhand, reworking on laptop. Here purists might squawk. Even ancient Jakucho Setouchi began “Tomorrow’s Rainbow” on her cellphone — but soon gave up and switched to her customary fountain pen, writing vertically on paper.

Prostitution, AIDS, rape, incest, abortion, drugs, suicide, desperate eternal love: These are the stock in trade of keitai shosetsu’s world. I was clueless. I did figure on youngish readers (of both genders), and the need to Japanify. Shame, I did know, was big in Japanese culture. It was big with me too. So I riffed away, repeatedly, opening with a three-fer about a young office worker, mortified to have accidentally swallowed his cellphone.

Of course I invoked manga, karaoke, baseball (a headless batter) and J-pop. Then I went searching for gold online, at sites like Trends in Japan. My translator marveled at my cultural savvy as I sent up young depressed male shut-ins (hikikomori), needy geeks (otaku), the Burberry fashion craze and the monstrous hegemony of Cute (kawaii). To be plain saucy, I recycled an old item of mine about a horny guy and a cynical sheep.

My pioneering literary keitai shosetsu finally launched with three mini-tales a week, downloadable for a low fee from the “cellphone paperback” i-mode site of my book publisher Shinchosha — 78 stories all told. When they later came out as a slim regular hardback called “I-Mode Stories,” 100,000 readers had accessed them online, which seemed like a pretty fine number. Until I later learned of the 3.25 million racked up by literary nun Setouchi. Revisiting Tokyo in 2007 I’d be recognized on the street; but “I-Mode Stories” sold very modestly, no match even for my other, conventional books.

I know now what probably cost me most: lack of interactivity. I wrote my Kafkaesque whimsies the old, author-as-impervious-god way. I treated the cellphone screen as an innovatively accessed, but inert, mini-page. Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools, where writers and readers can dynamically engage with each other. And that’s key. Yoshi shaped “Deep Sky” based on ongoing hits and e-mails. (He even handed out fliers.) Keitai readers notoriously aren’t big book buyers — but they will buy books as mementos of their communal involvement.

Despite warming U.S. press coverage, so far the keitai shosetsu phenomenon hasn’t crossed over here. Yes, a couple of new Web sites, including one from a Japanese company, DeNA, now offer “cellphone novel” templates. But cellphones play a crucially different role in Japan. They, not computers, are the principal portal to the Internet. “The majority of my students (19-22-year-olds) don’t have a P.C. e-mail address,” notes Yuki Watanabe, a Ph.D. candidate in American lit in Tokyo. “Many don’t have a P.C. at home.” They’re of the keypad, not keyboard, generation. The lingo of texting is normal language to them, and they’re tuned to its subtleties.

Just as influentially, says my friend Roland Kelts, cultural critic and author of “JapanAmerica,” Japanese daily commutes often last two hours each way. “Holding a cellphone screen inches from your face on a packed commuter train and reading a confessional, melodramatic narrative” provides the perfect intimate package of content, technology and portability. Keitai shosetsu’s mainstream success, though, is taming its edgy subculture content, according to one Japanese observer. And professional writers are now being hired to supply “amateur” cellphone narratives.

For the U.S. and U.K., the venue where words and cellular/cyber technology seem to be feeling for new forms is Twitter. Unlike in Japan, Twitter is not chiefly for teenagers. Social interactivity is again a key; doubtless many (most?) users are drawn merely by the possible thrill of Tweeting with undisguised celebs. But beyond this there’s emerging energy in the creative potential of Twitter’s 140-character micro-format. (Quillpill, one of the new U.S. “cellphone novel” Web sites, also uses a 140-character per post limit.)

 To me, most interesting aren’t the micro-tales and poems but instead the attempts at an ongoing narrative in short bursts. Two I like are both hard-boiled crime thrillers, not surprising since the genre is conventionally lean, staccato and headlong. “Fuel Dump” by TV writer Tom Scharpling (@scharpling) wields a stripped genre-orthodox style for its wiggy premise:

Morton snapped open the briefcase and his wish was granted — four million dollars laid out in neat rows before him.

Dennis Wilson unrolled the map in the poster tube, focusing on the small red circle over a town called Jalpan.

“Fuck the Beach Boys and that bald asshole Mike Love; when this thing pans out, I’m gonna be richer than Brian,” he thought to himself.

But with “Twiller” (as in Twitter thriller), New York Times reporter, and crime writer, Matt Richtel (@mrichtel), aims more ambitiously. “Think ‘Memento’ on a mobile phone,” says Richtel, and his hectic saga of amnesia and peril unspools using texting lingo and real-time posting context with writerly jazz. It’s a juicy little read, by and large:

forgive my french: jesus #*^%& christ. I’m just outta the hospital myself, AS PATIENT. i’m walking home with JD’s chip, and some asshole..

Tackles me near an alley, punches my face, rips my earring, rifles in my purse, screams: where is chip?! (in broken english). I reach for

my penlight in my pocket and stab his eye; i run. left purse, kept chip, which was..fuck u;not saying where. someone’s reading i can’t trust

Some media critics find “Twiller” too confused and mechanical. But for me, the writer’s funky voice is payoff enough.

So far book publishers haven’t been lured by Twitter fiction. What has lured them is amateur clever bits (the forthcoming “Twitter Wit”) and, very splashily, business advice from wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk, whose now 300,000-plus Twitter following got him a million-dollar deal. But the Twitter-to-book route is still in infancy.

Will route become highway? For fiction, I doubt it. Twitter narrative strikes me as a curio amid the insider updates and celeb-following. It lacks the urgency of generational cultural release that has driven keitai shosetsu in Japan. And Twitter may prove something of a curio itself: 60 percent of its swarms of users fail to return the next month, a grim augury. As far as Tweeting goes, that number includes me.

As for my keitai shosetsu experience, I took away another lesson beside interactivity’s impact — a writerly lesson. I reeducated myself in the weight of individual words, and the power of cutting, and cutting yet more. Writing on a computer tends to encourage flow, pacy verbal sprawl. For Japan I actually found myself ransacking old notebooks from the days when I first tried short (when I even embraced the fumy term “prose poem,” quickly abandoned as unwise for an aspiring comic author). The irony, and exercise, of salvaging faded pithy poetical scraps for new life on cutting-edge cellphones was a mighty rich one.

“The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity,” observed the New York Times in a recent piece about fiction and the zeitgeist. “And the short story may provide a timely antidote to the cultural bloat of the past decade, when it often seemed that every novel needed to be 500 pages long …”

How about tales 500 words long?

Here, previously unpublished in English, are 3 keitai shosetsu from “I-Mode Stories”:

Meant for Each Other

You make a date through the Internet. You meet the girl for the first time at a sake bar. She gulps down a whole bottle of sake by herself. “Okay,” you think. “I guess we know what sort of problem she has. But man, is she cute.”

After two more bottles, the girl falls asleep on her bar stool. “That’s our sweetheart,” grins the bartender, shaking his head at the girl’s snores.

“You mean you know her?” you inquire, uneasily.

“Sure, she’s here every night, with a different guy,” says the bartender. “Whoopee, whoopee.” He winks.

“Really,” you reply. You eye the unconscious girl slumped headfirst on the bar counter. And you decide no matter how cute she is, this first date will also be the last, thank you very much.

And this is how you two meet, you and the love of your life. Four months later you get married and move into a lovely apartment together, where you start to raise a large and happy family.

How you get from point A to point B is a long, complicated, heart-warming, and in many ways wonderfully unbelievable story. But alas it requires someone with far greater narrative powers than mine to properly relate.

Edgar Allan Poe Rice Ball (Medieval Landscape)

Disease strikes a distant town. The victims develop loathsome sores all over their bodies; at the same time they’re maddened by extreme lascivious impulses. Down street after street door after door is splashed with a crude red cross: inside, the lunatic disfigured coupling rages on nonstop — men, women, even children — until exhausted dawn, until death.

In the hills beyond town, a monk makes his way along a darkening road. He chews a stale rice ball for his supper as he goes, so as not to interrupt his march. His sandaled feet move one in front of the other inexorably. His staff leaves a trail of dots behind him in the dusty distances. At last he comes around the side of a hill and he stops. The prospect of the dim town spreads before him. A look of disturbance moves over his face, as he slowly chews the last of his rice ball. Even here the uneasy wind carries the grisly minglings of lamentation and carnal grunting. The monk becomes watchful; he looks uneasily around him and grips his staff in both hands. Two figures are moving feverishly in the darkness ahead. They seem to prance toward him, half-naked, hideous, moaning hoarse endearments. The monk calls to his god as he raises his staff and prepares to meet them.

Woolly

A man goes for a swim in a creek. When he gets out of the water, he sees a sheep standing on the bank, watching him. The man looks at the sheep. The sheep looks at the man. Slyly, the man smiles. He checks up and down the creek. There’s no one in sight. The man steps toward the white, woolly mammal. “Here sheepy, here woolly,” he says softly. The sheep backs up slowly into the bushes, looking confused by the state the man’s in. But the sheep is only faking.

Later, the man dresses by the creek. The sheep lolls next to him, watching him, warm-eyed. The man combs his hair and says, looking down the creek in the direction of his off-road vehicle, “So that was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll be back up this way sometime. I’ll get in touch.” He puts his comb back in his pocket and gives the sheep a quick pat. He gets to his feet. “Okay?” he says, dusting off his pants.

The sheep lies perfectly still and watches the man picking his way awkwardly down the creek into the distance. “Yeah sure, bud, I believe you,” it thinks.

If you’re wondering — and I know you are — the question that led to my moment of triumph was, “This fmr. Pres. met Pres. Kennedy in the WH Rose Garden in 1962. The mtg led him to enter life of public service. He was our XXnd Pres.” And, of course, the correct answer was Bill Clinton, the 42nd president.

Now, as Rove himself pointed out afterwards, this question was way too easy, and certainly not up to his usual standards. But for my sake, let’s just all agree to pretend that it was very difficult, OK? And if we could also agree that it’s not somewhat sad that I was still on my laptop at 10 p.m. ET last night, I’d appreciate that as well.

While we’re on the subject, this is probably a good time for some additional shameless self-promotion: You can follow me — and every other damn political reporter in the country — on Twitter. My profile is here.