Its late and getting later.
The furor over Isabella V. and her blog (A Flight Risk, http://www.aflightrisk.blogspot.com ) has been growing. And, with its inclusion into the daily listing of Wired News, it has officially blown open to the netsurfing public at large. The comments section of the blog are full of cynical trolls, Lit Club debaters, and the sort of weepy soul that you can imagine waving madly at a departing railcar. Billboards openly discuss Isabellas background, her links with Sean-Paul of the Agonist, parallels between famed Internet hoaxes of years past, flat condemnations of the supposed fat, sweaty Unix administrator behind it all, open admiration for the story she is telling. And the less Isabella posts, the more the story shifts to the mechanations of her ever-squabbling fanclub.
And Im right there in it.
As a reader, Im captivated by the multiple threads running throughout the blog, the possibilities of who or what may happen next in this persons (possibly fictional) life, and the whole issue of who she is (my best guess is an heiress from the Dassault family of Paris). Im amazed at how well the edges of fiction and reality have blurred no one knows the truth about this story, and if anyone does, they aint telling. And there is also how the issuing of each post causes a commotion in me, and all over the community of her readers, much like what it would have been like awaiting the arrival of the latest chapter of a Dickens novel. As an, er, aspiring writer (a term that I despise I dont aspire to write, I write. I simply aspire to be a skillful writer) Im amazed at the detail thats in her story, and how easily her story can flow in the best posts. And I am hopeful that the story is pure fiction, the first work of an Important New Artist, who, in my yuppie-esque snobbery, I must know about earlier than everyone else, so I can brag about it later. And as an unrepentant romantic I pray that Isabella is real. I construct daydreams about the young heiress, a very real princess in need of saving from her grasping, controlling family, from her uncaring fianc, from the mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) detectives on her trail, from her own stupidity and self-centeredness. I can be the hero. I can insert myself into this story. Its unfinished, still (mostly) unknown and ready. And of course my need to analyze the whole situation, if for no other reason than to claim some sort of sane distance from a story that I have no distance from at all. Im living and dying with each word.
And then theres the car-crash fascination with watching everyone else react to her and her story. The patient deconstruction of her prose down to the tiniest syllable, like were all forensic scientists analyzing clues that will lead us to the door of the killer instead of the stumbling net addicts we actually are. The two-faced denials of her existence from people who simply cannot walk away from this story, they must yell about the obvious fakery and warn everyone about how much itll hurt when their favorite heiress is revealed to be a dupe and a fraud you can almost sense the blurry-U.F.O. I Want To Believe poster thats on their walls and in their hearts and because of that they just cant let go. And, even more incredible, Isabella posts on the same bulletin boards, challenging her doubters, alternately screaming and crying, utterly believable in every aspect of her character. Ive seen the catfights on Slashdot, the pundits holding forth on Usenet and, for raw emotion, for raw humanity, this spectacle is putting them, all of them, to shame.
And, at the very end of it, theres the unquiet understanding that if this person is real, if shes telling the truth my god. Look at how we, her supposed fanbase, has hurt her with our snooping and our backstabbing and our petty bullshit.
You know, nothing on the other side of this monitor is supposed to be real. Its all just stop-stutter bits shuffling over dead wires. But we (or at least I) seek out the real online. And sometimes we find it, and its beautiful. And sometimes we seek out the gloriously fake or maybe pretend that everything on the 'net is all a big joke anyway. Whatever we need to get away with protecting our silly little hearts. And we can live with this dichotomy, keeping what we suppose to be real and what we suppose to be phony fully seperate and indulging in each as we need.
But to me it looks like when were faced with such an intense mix of the real and the unreal as Isabella is presenting us with, the Hollywood story mixed with the writing of a self-obsessed but brilliant girl and finished off with our own yearnings for the real, for the fake, for something we can prove the intensity of those posting, the intensity of my own feelings over this, its like Im watching this story just crack people open and letting the all of their flawed humanity spill out, all of mine.
Its amazing. Im captivated. By every aspect of it.
Ill catch you at A Flight Risk, eagerly awaiting the next post.
The furor over Isabella V. and her blog (A Flight Risk, http://www.aflightrisk.blogspot.com ) has been growing. And, with its inclusion into the daily listing of Wired News, it has officially blown open to the netsurfing public at large. The comments section of the blog are full of cynical trolls, Lit Club debaters, and the sort of weepy soul that you can imagine waving madly at a departing railcar. Billboards openly discuss Isabellas background, her links with Sean-Paul of the Agonist, parallels between famed Internet hoaxes of years past, flat condemnations of the supposed fat, sweaty Unix administrator behind it all, open admiration for the story she is telling. And the less Isabella posts, the more the story shifts to the mechanations of her ever-squabbling fanclub.
And Im right there in it.
As a reader, Im captivated by the multiple threads running throughout the blog, the possibilities of who or what may happen next in this persons (possibly fictional) life, and the whole issue of who she is (my best guess is an heiress from the Dassault family of Paris). Im amazed at how well the edges of fiction and reality have blurred no one knows the truth about this story, and if anyone does, they aint telling. And there is also how the issuing of each post causes a commotion in me, and all over the community of her readers, much like what it would have been like awaiting the arrival of the latest chapter of a Dickens novel. As an, er, aspiring writer (a term that I despise I dont aspire to write, I write. I simply aspire to be a skillful writer) Im amazed at the detail thats in her story, and how easily her story can flow in the best posts. And I am hopeful that the story is pure fiction, the first work of an Important New Artist, who, in my yuppie-esque snobbery, I must know about earlier than everyone else, so I can brag about it later. And as an unrepentant romantic I pray that Isabella is real. I construct daydreams about the young heiress, a very real princess in need of saving from her grasping, controlling family, from her uncaring fianc, from the mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) detectives on her trail, from her own stupidity and self-centeredness. I can be the hero. I can insert myself into this story. Its unfinished, still (mostly) unknown and ready. And of course my need to analyze the whole situation, if for no other reason than to claim some sort of sane distance from a story that I have no distance from at all. Im living and dying with each word.
And then theres the car-crash fascination with watching everyone else react to her and her story. The patient deconstruction of her prose down to the tiniest syllable, like were all forensic scientists analyzing clues that will lead us to the door of the killer instead of the stumbling net addicts we actually are. The two-faced denials of her existence from people who simply cannot walk away from this story, they must yell about the obvious fakery and warn everyone about how much itll hurt when their favorite heiress is revealed to be a dupe and a fraud you can almost sense the blurry-U.F.O. I Want To Believe poster thats on their walls and in their hearts and because of that they just cant let go. And, even more incredible, Isabella posts on the same bulletin boards, challenging her doubters, alternately screaming and crying, utterly believable in every aspect of her character. Ive seen the catfights on Slashdot, the pundits holding forth on Usenet and, for raw emotion, for raw humanity, this spectacle is putting them, all of them, to shame.
And, at the very end of it, theres the unquiet understanding that if this person is real, if shes telling the truth my god. Look at how we, her supposed fanbase, has hurt her with our snooping and our backstabbing and our petty bullshit.
You know, nothing on the other side of this monitor is supposed to be real. Its all just stop-stutter bits shuffling over dead wires. But we (or at least I) seek out the real online. And sometimes we find it, and its beautiful. And sometimes we seek out the gloriously fake or maybe pretend that everything on the 'net is all a big joke anyway. Whatever we need to get away with protecting our silly little hearts. And we can live with this dichotomy, keeping what we suppose to be real and what we suppose to be phony fully seperate and indulging in each as we need.
But to me it looks like when were faced with such an intense mix of the real and the unreal as Isabella is presenting us with, the Hollywood story mixed with the writing of a self-obsessed but brilliant girl and finished off with our own yearnings for the real, for the fake, for something we can prove the intensity of those posting, the intensity of my own feelings over this, its like Im watching this story just crack people open and letting the all of their flawed humanity spill out, all of mine.
Its amazing. Im captivated. By every aspect of it.
Ill catch you at A Flight Risk, eagerly awaiting the next post.