skippy the bush kangaroo: life imitates art, and art imitates blogs

Friday, February 19, 2010

life imitates art, and art imitates blogs

readers of this space will know that we are fans of the mystery/thriller genre of popular literature (our email correspondence w/sara paretsky, author of the v.i. washawski novels, is one of the high-lites of our blogging career). so it was nothing untoward for us to pick up a book by a previously-unread author, which promised to be "an exciting, believable and well-writtern thriller" (sez ridley pearson, author of killer view).

fault line, by barry eisler, showed good, pulpy spy-vs.-spy promise in the early pages: a lawyer who specialized in computer software patents has a client, who is murdered on the first page (hell, in the first sentence! always a good sign when a book starts out fast and violent). the lawyer is subsequently attacked himself, so he contacts his estranged brother, who is a black ops/military spy, for help.

so far, so good. but why we mention it to you, our dear readers, is that we began to notice some not-so-subtle hints that the author, barry eisler, must be a big fan of blogtopia, and yes, we coined that phrase. so much so, that he actually used names of bloggers as character names in his tome.

the afore-mentioned first sentence should have been a dead (pun intended) give away:

the last thing richard hilzoy thought before the bullet entered his brain was, things are really looking up.

now, we admit, no alarms went off @ the mention of the name hilzoy. after all, it's not that impossible that someone else besides the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Bok could be called that. and the first name 'richard' also disguised its use. we would have been more on alert had the sentence talked about 'richard fafnir' or 'richard t. bogg,' but no.

however, a bit later in the early chapters, one of the characters muses about blogs:

the one thing that really interested her was politics. she read everything, across the political spectrum - newspapers, magazines, books. blogs especially. there were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both.

this statement about the media sounds like it could have come from any number of writers in blogtopia (y!wctp!), so we simply assumed that mr. eisler, the author, was a fan of blogs.

we weren't even totally convinced that these mentions were something more than coincidence when we came across this familiar name on the very next page:

that kernel of resentment led to her first real act of rebellion - an american-as-apple-pie boyfriend named josh marshall...to whom she lost her virginity.

wow! josh marshall? and he's a playah? (that dog!!) who knew??

still, we said, the names "josh" and "marshall" aren't all that uncommon...and mr. eisler didn't call that minor character josh michah marshall, after all.

but then, the girl who lost her virginity to josh, dumped him on the very next page, and you'll never guess the name of her next boyfriend:

she'd been at the law school less than a month when she got involved with a second-year, another anglo-american, this one named john cole.

john cole??? not the ex-goper, now sane proprietor of balloon juice! couldn't be! hilzoy, josh marshall, john cole, mainstream corporate media rants...this all just has to be coincidence!

or so we told ourselves, until a few pages later, when the mystery led to the death of a manager in the us patent office who was working on paperwork for hilzoy's invention. when the lawyer called the patent office to find out about his friend, his call was re-directed:

a moment later, another woman's voice came on, throatier than the first, and more business-like. "hello, this is director jane hamsher, computer architecture, software and information security. may i ask to whom i'm speaking?"

jane hamsher??!?! that's it, this guy is stealing bloggers' names for his minor characters!

but, we soon decided that it was a benign reference to all the good which blogtopia (y!wctp!) has done, because yet a few more pages later, the lawyer and the ex-virgin insist on spilling the beans about the whole mystery. and do they want to go to the mainstream press? no, of course not. she lurvs the blogs! and by name, as well:

"if we had the source code," she said, "we could have published it."

"of course," alex said. "sourceforge, or slashdot - "

"not just the tech sites," sarah said." "we could written to every political blog out there - talking points memo, unclaimed territory, no comment, balloon juice, hullabaloo, the daily dish, firedoglake. we could have documented the people who were killed, the break-in at your house - "

however, the black ops brother decides almost immediately that the blogs would be ineffectual.

strangely enough, he's probably right.

now, we don't know if every single one of these bloggers have secretly signed away the rights to their names to mr. eisler for his book. we tend to think not, but, as we said above, this is probably more a tip of the hat to the work the bloggers have done, rather than under-handed identity theft.

we haven't finished the book yet. it is a rather good yarn, w/intense emotional rivalry between the two brothers (they lost a sister early in their lives, and all the familial floatsam and jetsam you could imagine appears therewith), and the spy/procedural, set in san francisco, is pretty exciting. we'd recommend mr. eisler's work to any fan of the genre.

however, if we find later in the book a police detective called sgt. skippy the bush kangaroo, eisler will be hearing from our lawyers!

addendum: our good friend batocchio sends us word that mr. eisler is indeed a big fan of blogtopia and yes, we coined that phrase:

scott horton's interview with barry eisler, author of fault line (3/31/09):

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004625

4. question: the names in your novel read like a roll-call of the civil-liberties blogosphere—you have hilzoy (hilary bok), andrew sullivan, glenn greenwald, and josh marshall worked in. and the man running the black ops killing program is named scott horton. ahem. but i was also taken by the fact that characters in fault line turn continually to the blogs—not to newspapers, radio or television—for their information, and in the end of the book, for solutions to their dilemma. would it be fair to call this a blogosphere thriller?

answer: more than fair. it was a pleasure for me to name so many characters after bloggers i admire, and to make blogs key to the characters’ hopes for defeating the conspiracy plotting to kill them. in making bloggers and blogs central, and, by implication, making the mainstream media moribund and irrelevant, i think fault line reflects reality–while, i hope, nudging reality along.

discussions of the rise of the blogosphere and the decline of the “mainstream media” tend to center on the logistics of shipping paper or the expense of broadcast and other such costs of traditional media. and while these are all relevant factors, how often does the msm consider whether part of their business woes might be a reflection of the quality of the underlying product? is it possible the blogosphere’s growth is attributable at least in part to a growing sense among the public that by and large, the msm acts either as a government press organ or as a gossip rag?

posted by skippy at 5:39 PM |