Keeping It Real

For those in the blogosphere who believe the NYTBR prefers nonfiction to fiction, yesterday's story about blogging authors may suggest that the alleged bias is spreading to the daily Arts section as well. Although the piece does acknowledge the existence of novelists online, namely Aaron Hamburger and Poppy Z. Brite, all the interviews are with nonfiction writers...and is it a coincidence that all but one of them are or have been regular contributors to Wired?

Speaking of Wired, the latest issue showed up just before the holiday weekend--Mrs. Beatrice got stuck with it as an "incentive" to renew her subscription to Salon--so I had a good laugh at its attempts to cover "the rise of cut and paste culture." Never mind that the "Quentin Tarantino swipes from other directors" story is a decade's worth of old hat; Mrs. B practically threw the magazine across the living room (okay, she dropped it on the floor, is all) and asked, "How is that Neal Pollack manages to write two entire pages about fan fiction without using the word 'slash'?" (Or, for that matter, hinting at its existence.) Really, apart from Neil Gaiman returning to his music journalism roots to interview the brains behind the Gorillaz, you might as well move along, because there's nothing to see here. It's almost enough to make a man nostalgic for lost issues of Mondo 2000 and the original Boing Boing.

(And speaking of fiction writers who blog, I've just added new names to my own homepage list, including Paul A. Toth and Jacqui Lofthouse.)