Sunday, September 11, 2005
Having been tagged by Tim Samoff, I am inviting Chronicles readers in general and five of you in particular (see below) to participate in this latest meme:
Because the unregulated, unedited Internet is in short supply of people who actually know how to write, my nominee is The Marvelous A, already a mainstay of the Chronicles masthead.The explosion of the blog world in the last year has led to countless high-quality blogs being started, but sometimes it is hard to find them among all the other blog muck. Because there are so many quality blogs out there, I thought I would try to start a meme to send some eyeballs toward those unknown bloggers. So, share a blog you think more people should read, and then tag five others (who hopefully read your blog!) to do the same.
By way of preface, there’s a terrific writer named Colson Whitehead, whose brilliant 2000 debut novel, The Intuitionist, features an elevator inspector as its protagonist. In addition to being an intriguing work of detective fiction, the novel is a fascinating procedural about elevators and the technicians who inspect them. For all I know, Whitehead could have made up most of it, but his remarkable attention to detail animates the world of a presumably dull, mundane profession and makes it absolutely enthralling for the reader.
The Marvelous A is proof that great stories and storytelling can be discovered in unlikely places — a complex and interesting 26-year-old girl in southwestern Wyoming who writes engagingly about her family, friends and life in small-town America. (Adriane actually discovered me first, although through what channels I do not know, and which I learned only because I’m vain and I Google myself every so often to see if my circulation numbers are climbing.) Though I know little about her education or formal training, A proved to be a very talented writer and, in addition to other artistic pursuits, had mentioned the possibility of writing a blog-based novel, so I began checking in with her periodically.
A while back, A had fallen off my radar for a month or so, during which time, it turns out, she was in the process of leaving an administrative position at City Hall and concurrently training for a job at the water treatment facility in her community. The first post I read upon returning mesmerized me so much that I believed it was fiction; it immediately reminded me of The Intuitionist, and I was convinced I was reading an episode from her proposed blog novel. Caught up in the language and technical jargon, I read passages out loud to co-workers. It was only after I read two or three entries that I realized that she was, in fact, working at a water treatment facility.
Go. Read. Now. There aren’t enough writers out here in the blogosphere who can make words like “polymer” and “coagulant” sexy. (“Flocculation,” of course, was sexy to begin with.) Aside from which, I have always imagined Adriane as someone we’d all be lucky to know.
Meanwhile, I’m passing the baton to the blushing bride Mrs. Sanka, Shem, Wheat, Taughnee and, if I haven’t embarrassed her too badly, The Marvelous A herself. Tag, you’re it.
