OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at writing comedy. I do better with titles. "The Blog Quebecois" will have no resonance beyond Canada's borders; but at least within, it'll get a few phlegmy chuckles from old Scotsmen in Westmount, who are, as far as I can tell, my main audience at this moment.
For the others who might not appreciate the incredible pun that I've cooked up, the Bloc Quebecois is the Quebec-based separatist party. The Blog Quebecois is, like, an exceptionally clever take on that.
Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you, too.
Besides, I googled it, and nobody else seems to have come up with the idea.
I actually had planned to run a blog with that name, but this project and some others have sidetracked me at the moment, so I decided to recycle it into here.
Any writer worth his salt knows the value of the "hook," the initial paragraph -- ideally, the first sentence -- that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go until you lose him on the second sentence.
Or ideally, the second paragraph.
I think it's a combination of two things. One would be the overload of the Information Age. I don't read a hundredth of the things I'd like to read on the Internet any day. It's like being stuck forever in an infinitely-wending Borges landscape.
I love it.
The other, related issue is our attenuated attention span. click I'm at the New York Times click I'm researching Russian military equipment in 1941 click I'm, uh, let's not go there.
The title is the "come hither" glance across the room that screws up your courage to approach a beautiful woman.
That hook is in that smoky dark velvety rasp of a voice that bubbles over into girlish laughter and soon enough tunes to a note of hysteria beyond human hearing before morphing into the braying of a jackass underlain with the hideous cackle of the hyena.
OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at love, or at least writing about it.
But that's a new column.