Metablog the fourth

(In which our hero attempts to obscure the lack of interestingness in his life by posting a two-month-old note from his Moleskine.)

I was on a Vaporetto crossing the Giudecca Canal on the last day of my holiday, when I heard a jet flying overhead on its way to the airport (a rarity: Venice airport is fairly busy by small-town standards, but planes seldom fly over the city). The situation reminded me of Noorster's recent series of photos of her arrival in Venice. I looked up at the plane, and thought to myself "Wouldn't it be funny if Noorster were on that flight?"

By the way, don't call the stalker police just yet. This is not about Noorster, she simply happens to have triggered it. I could have written this about any blogger whom I regularly read, or for that matter about myself.

Who is Noorster? The question is not as trivial as it may seem. I've never met her, probably never will, and I'm sure that the great majority of (my and her) readers are in the same boat. We know quite a bit about her from reading on and between the lines: she is "an atheist secular Jew", travels a lot (and some of us know why), smokes, reads in at least three languages - and is learning Hebrew, loves dogs, has a wry and dry sense of humour, and is very intelligent: I was astonished to discover (after reading her blog for nearly a year) that English isn't her native language.

Sounds like a nice, interesting person, somebody you'd like to get to know. The problem is that "Noorster" does not exist, she is a work of fiction more or less true to life - just as "Udge" is. Udge is very similar to me (my sister recognized it as my voice) but he is by no means all of me: my fears and weaknesses, my bad habits and petty incompetences are grossly underrepresented here. A blog identity is a literary construction, like the hero(ine) of a novel: saying "Noorster is a nice woman" is similar to saying "Inspector Brunetti is an honourable man".

On the other hand, I believe that a successful long-term blog has to be based closely around the personality and life of the blogger, because of the enormous difficulty of maintaining this voice if it were purely fiction. How many thousands of words have Mindy, Philip, Lioness, et al written? The length of some blogs exceeds that of many novels, and the speed of publication precludes the amount of planning and coördination that I feel would be necessary to sustain an invented character; add in the rapid-fire communication that arises in comments and blogging-about-blogs, and the task seems to me pretty well impossible. Blogging in that persona would be a tiresome and tiring full-time occupation, and who would bother to expend that amount of time and energy on a blog when they could as more easily write a novel?

Which brings us back to my starting point, with myself on a Vaporetto looking up at an airplane and thinking about Noorster. I wondered what would happen if she and I should chance to sit at adjacent tables at the Café Florian in the Piazza San Marco that evening. If we started a conversation, would we recognize each other?

Other Metablogs: first second third