The Accommodation is an interesting book. To grossly oversimplify, it’s about race relations in Dallas and how a number of Black folks went along with White folks to keep the city from ever truly getting onboard with the civil rights movement. It was written by Jim Schutze and published in 1987. If you want a copy, it’ll set you back about $1,000. That’s because it’s out of print and County Commissioner John Wiley Price, of all people, owns the rights. Read more about that odd turn of events here.
I bring all this up because I learned this morning that someone operating with the Twitter handle “The Accommodation every hour” is publishing the entire damn book on Twitter, 240 characters at a time, a new post going up every hour. The tweeter started June 4. Right now, he or she is on Chapter 6.
What a brilliantly bonkers undertaking. I assume this is an automated process. So that means you first have to get your hands on an electronic copy of the manuscript. Or scan the entire book and use optical character recognition to get it in a usable format. Then you have to cast a magic spell to make Twitter grab chunks of the text and automatically post it every hour.
To whoever you are: kudos.
