nobel?

Doris Lessing will never be confused with the Internet’s exhibitionist personality Tila Tequila, but winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in October helped Ms. Lessing’s status on MySpace. What once was 125 friends before the announcement from the Nobel committee has now topped 350 friends.
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Ms. Lessing, who is 88, has been described as blithely unfamiliar with the Internet, relying on the efforts of a fan, Jan Hanford, to keep her MySpace page and Web site up and running.

But, as was made clear from her Nobel lecture this month with the misdirected title, “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” Ms. Lessing isn’t “blithely” anything about the state of the world.

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers,” she said in her speech. “We never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.?”

Ms. Hanford, the woman who has been Ms. Lessing’s bridge to the Internet, declined to comment on Ms. Lessing’s speech.

But some literary-minded bloggers seemed a little piqued.

One admiring blogger, at Lee’sRiver, would only admit to “a slight annoyance and smile at her old fuddy-duddy crossness with ‘blogging or blugging’ as she puts it.”

Another, Carolyn Kellogg, an M.F.A. student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, writing at Pinky’s Paperhaus, gave her post the headline, “Blog and Put a Dagger in Doris Lessing’s Heart.” “Although I am sure Doris Lessing isn’t reading this blug,” she wrote, “I hope that someone points her to One Laptop Per Child.”

Tila Tequila has 1.7 million Myspace friends.

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