I just finished reading a book called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon which turned out to be a very bloggy book: not in it’s style but in it’s references. Towards the end there is a pretty neat description of blogs:
A blog is the movie of your life, with subtitles, only it’s the subtitles that do all of the moving in your movie and not the image above. Also, you’re the producer, director, DOP, editor and, most importantly, subtitler.
Without giving too much away Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, casts his shadow over much of the book and then turns up as a character towards the end. One character is obsessed with the Baghdad Blogger and has his/her own blog that they never get round to writing in. The URL for it is given (www.pov.blogspot.com) and it does actually exist.
According to the author this blog was not set up especially for the book or even set up by the author, but is one of the many thousands of blogs set up and never used. I’m taking that with a pinch of salt because it is just too perfect for the part it plays in the book.
There is also a blog for the book itself (lacunacabal.blogspot.com) which is where it all gets a bit post-modern and inter-textual.
Funny that you think it’s perfect. Since I published, the POV blogger cleaned up his page and added a name: Ajith, thus exposing me, I figured, as a thief of blogs.
Exposed? But its mentioned in the notes that its not yours – or was that note only added after the original Canadian publication but before the UK edition?
Actually I did see the name but thought Ajith was just the sort of weirdnom de blog that Aline would use.
All very interactive though… will book groups become an endangered species if anyone can write about a book on their own blog and have the book come back to add comments?
Strange Brew // Sep 7, 2008 at 6:50 pm
[…] wrote recently about the book The Last Days Of The Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon, but only touched on the […]
Using the term ‘exposed’ playfully. I have no idea if the blogger has any idea that I’ve made use of his site. I think he must have fixed it up when Blogger revamped their html. But yes, that note is also in the original Canadian edition. I wanted to give credit where it was due. And I’ve always been amazed at how many mostly empty blogs there are on the Internet.
His blog used to have a fire image that overlapped with the text. But that’s all been cleaned up. And then, when ‘Ajith’ appeared, I did hope the average reader would consider it a nom de plume for Aline. But I also wondered whether he would suddenly start blogging.
In retrospect picking one of the net’s many moribund blogs was a bit of a risk wasn’t it? The book will forever contain links to a site over which you have absolutely no control; what if the owner turns out to have a sense of humour and a literary bent?
Could be great fun – or the basis for a story all in itself. If he changed his name to Aline and posted controversial stuff you would keep getting the blame for it.
Got to love the 21st Century!