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We have a winner!

Pamela Ribon's reading from Why Girls are Weird exceeded my expectations -- she started with memories of a little girl's strange rituals with Barbies and then got funnier from there. Her stage background added to her live persona, too.

At the Q&A I asked about whether she was the long-awaited messiah of the blog novel and the answer seems to be yes. Praise and hallelujah! (Although she prefers to think of it as "online journaling" -- that's okay, messiahs are funny about terminology, Jesus was a Jew not a Christian, etc.) What's more, she's now in LA pitching scripts so I think it's only a matter of time before there will be a blog movie. At which point blogs will have finally entered the mainstream consciousness and effected a culture-wide paradigm shift on the order of, say, You've Got Mail.

I wanted to get her to sign my copy of Essential Blogging but it was at home so I bought her book instead. More later when I've actually read it.

As if sitting through You've Got Mail wasn't tedious enough. I hope you will all join me in praying very, very hard that there is never a You've Got Blog.

So what will we call the blog novel...a blovel?

i picture something like "the blogger," a suspense thriller a la "the net," starring sandra bullock.

Wasn't the "She's a flight risk" weblog I linked to a couple of months ago an obvious [and rather readable] bid at book-contract-by-blog-stealth?

Purportedly by a little rich heiress from some Latin country fleeing an arranged marriage, narrating [quite convincingly] her spoilt childhood intercut with adventures with staying in old friends' safe houses for a few nights at a time in various cities.

Classic damsel in distress stuff - I sent the link to a NY literary agent I was chatting to at the time. He got quite excited.

Was that blown as a hoax yet?

There have been quite a few examples of online fiction serializations which had more or less resemblance to the blog or online journal format. There have also been some interesting examples of web projects spinning off into books (my favorite recent example is the Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About website and book).

But what I really mean is a book that does with the weblog/online journal form what an epistolary novel does with letters or Nicholson Baker's Vox did with phone sex.

What, makes it completely laughable? I thought Vox was a major stretch that ...didn't... ...quite... ...make... ...it...

All I know is, after reading Why Girls are Weird, I just want to go rent Tapeheads and pretend John Cusack is my own Ivan/Lloyd, serenading me with Peter Gabriel and Swanky Modes tunes while I communicate with him only by blog.

Too bad I don't have a TV.

Ah, I like Nicholson Baker, even if he is a baby-with-the-bath luddite when it comes to bringing libraries into the 20th (forget 21st) century. You may have heard of his crusade to keep libraries from disposing of hopelessly unmanageable and inefficient card catalogs in favor of online catalogs, in which he bluntly accuses librarians of being barbarians intent on destorying western civilzation.

My favorite moment in the Baker wars was when the founder/CEO of an online catalog vendor came to talk at the UT library school and replied to Baker's attacks by calling him a "pornographer". In jest, but ouch!

Did you try reading The Fermata? I'll hazard a guess based on our previous conversation about Klimt and Schiele that it would not be to your liking. Nevertheless, any honest male raised on The Twilight Zone must admit that a similar idea occurred to him at some point in his adolescence. I like Baker's way of taking the Proustian project (I've never read Proust but this is what I imagine him to be like) of obsessively detailed stream of consciousness to new lows in subject matter.

Destorying? I meant destroying, but destorying works too. :-)

Just because it makes me uncomfortable doesn't mean I don't like it. To some that sounds contradictory, but I can like a depressing movie, too. (I did say in my can you forgive artists rant that "in both cases [schiele & klimt], though, the art still fascinates me."

Anyway, I got three Baker books out of the library last weekend. I slogged through Vox and my judgement remains the same. Yugh. Way too draggy, and also, it just seems so fake. I mean, frans? Come on!

Maybe The Fermata will be better. I hope so, anyway.