Blogs into blooks - The new wave?
Interview with Julie Powell
 Photo Credit: Kelly Campbell |
NEW YORK, May 20 (IPS) - This week marked the second annual Lulu Blooker Prize, which recognises the emerging genre of books based on weblogs. With 110 entries from 15 countries, the winners included the account of a U.S. machine-gunner in Iraq, a whimsical fiction book about the doorbells of Florence, and a memoir recounting a mother's struggle with lung cancer. IPS spoke with Julie Powell, now a member of the five-judge panel and also last year's winner.
IPS: How do you judge a blook differently from a book?
JULIE POWELL: I have to do a couple of passes on each blook in terms of my thinking. Different judges do it different ways for sure. But for me, it had to read as a good book first. To me, the origins of it are secondary to the quality of it as a book. I was also very ambivalent about excess "blookiness" or "blogginess". If the strings showed too much, it put me off. You're reading some novel about a 3,500-year-old immortal woman and she talks about how she kept a blog once. Oh god. For me, the fewer mentions of blogs, the better. There was disagreement among the judges on that. A lot of people want to see some sort of creative use of blogging and that translated as really bringing the blog in some obvious way into the narrative, which was not my feeling at all. There was one judge in particular who we disagreed on everything. One of the books was a zombie novel, and I thought it was great, and this guy thought it was terrible. But one of the things I said is that I was just so relieved that the zombie doesn't keep a blog.
On the other hand, the purpose of the Blooker [Prizes] is to advance this idea -- which is a questionable idea in my mind -- that there is a real genre, that this medium has a great potential to bring books from blogs. So it should come from a blog in a meaningful way.
IPS: It seems that one interesting aspect of blooks is they offer an opportunity for writers with no previous experience. Is this helping to democratise the publishing business?
JP: Absolutely. Again, I am not someone who believes in this revolutionary, "we are changing the world" aspect of blogging. For me, it's another tool. And it does have the wonderful effect of taking out the middle man and introducing myself directly as a writer to people, and I absolutely think that is something that deserves as much popularisation as possible. The idea there are millions of fantastic writers out there is probably false. Looking at your average blog will prove that definitively. But I do think that it is a wonderful opportunity for people who have something to say and they can put it out there.
IPS: Tell us a little about your own blog.
JP: I began my blog, the Julie/Julia project, back at the end of 2002. I sort of backed into the whole blogging thing. I didn't really understand what blogging was about. It was just a way for me to keep up with this project that I had decided in a panic that I was going to do, which was cooking my way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year while I was working as a secretary. And there was no really rational way for me to do this, it was just sort of exercising my excessive qualities. And the blog was a way to track that. My undergraduate degree was in writing but I'd never really made anything of it. It was a way to keep myself honest, keep a schedule and maybe entertain some friends. At the end of that year, I was given a book deal and as luck would have it, the same year that I published, it was the first annual Blooker Prize, so I entered and was lucky enough to win.
IPS: Most of the entries I saw originated in North America and Europe. Would you like to see the prizes become more international?
JP: Of course. One of the great things about blogging is that it brings people from such incredibly diverse experiences and geographic locations so easily together. I would hope that eventually it becomes almost inevitable that it will be more of an international competition. The 10,000 dollars in prize money this year certainly will inspire some people to enter. If they keep doing a good job of promoting it, getting the press out there and getting the sort of chatter going on line, it will hopefully spread far and wide. I definitely believe that will improve the quality of work that gets submitted. You still get a lot of blogger geeks, computer-oriented folks and people who are really kind of savvy on the whole thing. It was something that I thought was interesting and a little frustrating about the entries this year -- not all of them of course, there were some really nice books. But the characters in many of these books are computer programmers, gamers, web designers, etc. And I f eel like that's fine, good for you, but it's a little boring. I'd like to see people of wider experience in terms of where they live, what they do, what their life situation is. A lot of the people who find publishers are people who have an insider view. It seems to me that it will be a real waste of the genre and this emerging medium if we couldn't get beyond that.
IPS: Which are your favourite blogs, and do you find it hard to keep up? As of this month, the search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs.
JP: It's amazing. And I'm not actually very good at keeping up with blogs at all. I'm actually not much of a blogger. When I did my blog, it was such a smaller world. My blogging heyday was 2002-2003, and just in that short period of time [since], things have changed exponentially. So I actually don't spend lot of time visiting that many blogs. And the blogs that I do visit are shamefully boring.
The Gypsy Chronicles
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Book review by Cate Montana
Every once in a while a book comes along that seduces you away from reading about brain chemistry and chaos theory. Plus it’s spring, and the whole world is in love with itself. Just the time to pick up a delightful bit of fiction that will enchant the spirit and warm your heart.
The Gypsy Chronicles is first and foremost a love story about love. It follows the reminiscences of Gitana, a gypsy woman and natural born matchmaker who falls in love with Tzigany de Torres, the local maker of Matrimonial Beds. Even if Tzigany did not place a potent charm for a lifetime of passionate love making (not sex mind you, but love making) on each one of his beds, his and Gitana’s marriage would have been an excellent match. But Tsigany would hardly miss the opportunity to charm his own bed. And so his life and love for Gitana is enchanted from the moment they meet.
As might be intuited from the title, the book chronicles not only Gitana’s life and love with Tzigany, but the matches of love that she makes among the local village folk. The wine maker, the flamenco dancer, the … well, I don’t want to spoil the story. As Gitana would be the first to point out, there must remain some mystery to the tale! For what is love but a mysterious prize, to be awarded to the hearts who seek it most?
A great deal of love and thought has been poured into this little book. From the words carefully chosen to weave their spell, to the illustrations and the lively photographs of the Romani people. This is the consummate bedside book. Each chapter is a tasty morsel that can be consumed with gusto, and yet leave you craving more. Who knows? Perhaps if you desire it enough, Tzigany and Gitana will reach out beyond their pages and touch your life – and bed – with the magic of true love.
