tisiwoota

Google romance? Eh, it was cute. Aliens on Google Earth Area 51? Better. Every other web company getting taken over by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft? Pretty much happening anyway. (And btw, what would be so hard about actually making a virtual pet dragon?)

But then there’s Virgil and Socar. Unlike those wannabes who think they’re being sooo clever by posting on March 30 rather than April 1, these pros get their pranks rolling a full month in advance. And boy are they elaborate. And just like last year, its pure brilliance– they invented a blogger, 58-year old Howard Glassman, who is dedicated to eating the “compleat works” of Neil Gaiman.

By “compleat works,” I mean “everything the man has ever published, be it comics, essays, poetry, or prose.” By “digest,” I mean “pass through my alimentary canal.”

This choice of theme actual reminds me of an author I’ve read– not Neil Gaiman (because I’ve ah, never read him), but Geoff Nicholson. Nicholson’s characters are typified by bizarre obsessions (such as a quest to walk down each and every street in London), which often have some literary element to them or are being charted by a failed writer. These obsessions are employed as devices to make philosophical commentary about literature and the act of writing. In particular I’m reminded of Bedlam Burning, which begins with a pompous bout of book burning by academic types at Oxford, and centers on the travails of a man who finds himself employed as a writer-in-residence at an insane asylum, where he is expected to guide the inmates in producing their own work. Howard Glassman would fit right into the mix– as inmate or observer.

Ah, and here we go: the Nicholesque meta-commentary.

DAY SIXTEEN
…Here’s how I view it. Books are no longer the precious commodity they once were. Gone are the days of short runs and hand-tooled leather bindings. Nobody toils over the printing block, slotting hundreds of individual letters into a wooden frame so we can read a single page. Books were once objects to be revered, it’s true: if not works of art, certainly marvels of craftsmanship. What I’m eating, however, is nothing like that. These are mass-market paperbacks, run off by the tens of thousands. They ship with blobs of glue still clinging to their spines. Their pages come loose on the first read through. You can pick one up anywhere in America for less than ten dollars, or have one shipped anywhere in the world at the touch of a button. There’s nothing precious about the object, only the ideas inside.

It’s also interesting how writing about obsession is at heart an exploration of the way that people categorize the world around them. An obsession about something soon becomes less about that particular something than about how the person decides to parse their own rules and delineate the boundaries of their subject:

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
Are you planning on printing out and digesting his web-posts?

I hadn’t thought about that. It would be a big commitment, and one that would likely last for the rest of my life. Neil Gaiman is a young man. He is also a prolific Internet poster, if his website is anything to go by. It would take me years just to plow through his journal archives. For now, I think I will stick with his conventionally published material, with the understanding that if he ever launches forth on the ebook market, those will be printed out and digested.

I haven’t decided yet about books on tape. On the one hand, they could be classified as alternate editions. I feel it’s important to eat all the words, but not every instance of the words. On the other hand, the reader’s voice brings something new to the story. It brings an interpretation, of sorts. At the moment, I’m leaning towards ignoring books on tape: I’m not sure the reader’s interpretation is enough to constitute a whole new experience.

…

UPDATE: Ah. I just came to an unmistakable sign of Virgil.
A smattering of rhyming couplets:

Posted on the fridge this afternoon:

Thanks to you, who stole my lunch,
I had to eat a Crispy Crunch.
Thanks for nothing, thanks a bunch.

…I know who did it, I got a hunch.
I got something for him, it’s a punch.

Of course. Well then, that will make next year easy– assuming one small advance in technology. Seeing as Ask.com (that crass Jeeves layer-offer of a search engine) unveiled a “Rhyme Search” feature today, it is only a matter of time before Google adapts its blog search to enable searching for recent blog entries that contain rhyming couplets. Presto! (Or better yet, I’ll use my internal Google contacts to have such a capacity personally developed for me. And then I shall WIN. Win what, you ask? Um… eternal smugness for having found out a Virgil/Socar prank?)