Hot on the heels of the Litblog Co-Op’s disbandment, litbloggers decided to combine their collective malaise and stop blogging.
Bookbanger.com’s Gary Hesmith was the man who came up with the idea after experiencing peer pressure shortly after reading Remainder, which other litbloggers had gone crazy over. “I just wanted to type ‘Tom McCarthy is cool’ into Typepad, and even that sentence seemed too much time for me to commit to.”
Many litbloggers who stopped blogging had long wondered when the money would start showing up. They had remembered the magical dot com days, when cashes of money would often saunter into offices unannounced and someone would have the professional courtesy to deposit some of this into random bank accounts. These litbloggers figured that by sitting on their asses doing nothing, the dinero would arrive just in time for dinner.
But 1999 was a long time ago. And the dollar was in poor health against other currencies. So Hesmith decided that the only thing anybody could agree upon was that blogging was almost as hard as assembling a piece of IKEA furniture.
The moratorium on litblogging will remain in effect until someone gives these litbloggers money. Many of them moved into basements in Terre Haute.
“They laughed at me when I first said that,” said writer Richard Ford, who had made litbloggers very angry with remarks delivered to Motoko Rich. “But I was right the entire time.” Before I could ask Ford additional questions, he then cut the interview short, because he needed to find another talented African-American writer to spit on.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (