internet vs. "real life"

Last night, Mike was telling me that some e-observers have been wondering aloud whether the blog is "the death of the novel." A topic about which I have some thoughts.

--It seems the novel is fated to die many deaths, like God. I am of course only pretending not to understand the above statement, because Proust, by ushering in the era of the autobiographical memoir-novel, may have confused the lines between the two in a way not helped by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, etc. While I can fully imagine Henry Miller having a blog, can you imagine the Proust blog (madeleine.blogspot.net)? Of course not, except to imagine the hilarious (for me) absurdity of it. Because novels thankfully are NOT just streams of observations about Stephin Merritt [sic] and WMDs-- do you think a blog would have gotten in the way of Finnegan's Wake or The Fall? No, because that's not how things work. Sure, people will continue to confuse the parade of anecdotes of their own life as some parade of insights, and to misunderstand the novel as a catalog of such, but really, I wouldn't be worried, on two accounts. 1) People with the ambition of a grand construction will still write novels. 2) Wouldn't Tropic of Cancer be *just* as good if it were a blog?

--When I was working at Book People, which is this giant indy bookstore in Austin, there were book signings nearly every night. And, except for Jane Fonda, John McCain, and other Baby Boomer idols, the authors had a universally poor draw. Two authors who were supposed to be a big deal had had the following ideas: "I'll write a novel about blogging," and "I'll write a novel about myspace." Now, the girl who wrote the novel about blogging is really cute, but bless her heart, writing about political-blog romances in Washington, DC (let's dub this genre the "punditroman") is at best an exercise in post-Trollopean ignorance, and at worst a cutesy mishap which suggests that blogs will be the birth of many a shitty novel. The book about myspace also involved blogging, and was misguided in its belief that people would want to read about "other people's lives" on the internet VIA this crappy novel. Like, dude, that's what the internet is FOR.