While an MP3 of "Azi ai voie" by the Romanian band Voltaj [in its turn a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction"] played in the background, I wondered if anybody had thought of throwing a fantasy blog block party. Using something like GeoURL or the London Bloggers Tube Map. It's strange mapping points in cyberspace to meatspace. Connecting blogs by interconnectivity (à la Technorati's link cosmos) is, of course, easier and somehow makes more sense, but what about categorizing blogs by IP address or by the amount of money in a blogger's coin purse at entry creation? I don't know, maybe it'd make more sense to just sit down and read a book. Here's Sartre's La Nausée (actually the New Directions paperback translation by Lloyd Alexander) and there's Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. Which one? Will do. Antoine Roquentin or Geoffrey Braithwaite? Go ahead, you decide, make a choice. Stuck in Bouville, a veritable utopia, researching a fictional Marquis de Rollebon, or visiting a slightly less fictional city called Rouen, tracking down an author named Flaubert, or a parrot of his acquaintance thereto. Hmm.
Jean-Paul writes: "The statue seemed to me unpleasant and stupid and I felt terribly, deeply bored." And, Julian types: "Let me start with the statue: the one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying cupreous tears, the floppy-tied, square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, straggle-moustached, wary, aloof bequeathed image of the man." Of course, the second statue (that is the statue in the second, more modern quotation) isn't the real one, but another casting made years after the Germans had carted off the first one in a war scrap drive, and the first statue (that is Roquentin's little Khmer statuette "on a green carpet, next to a telephone") is something else entirely.
Shucks, just brought on by the Invisible Library, or perhaps just a bout of spring fever.
Posted by jim at June 16, 2003 06:12 PM