At least two things are happening this week. One is close to home: on Tuesday, The New Yorker relaunched its books blog, which is now titled Page-Turner. The second is also an online event, happening now: Facebook’s I.P.O. In light of these events, we’d like to propose a question that combines technology, literature, and social networking, and ask you to write a Facebook-style status update for any fictional character in literary history. It takes a bit of imagination, but before that, it takes a clear definition of the terms.
A status update, in case you’ve been living in Unabomber-style isolation for the past decade, is a short statement that describes your current existence, either concretely or abstractly: “Ben Greenman is writing this week’s Questioningly rules”; “Ben Greenman is waiting for a phone call”; “Ben Greenman is hungry.”
A fictional character is a figure from any book who does not possess what we commonly think of as human or animal existence: Don Quixote, Mrs. Dalloway, Augie March.
So combine the two. Have fun. Let your status-update skills run wild. As always, submit your answer via tweet, and don’t forget to add the hashtag #tnyquestion. Questioningly runs Fridays until Monday morning, when we’ll retweet the winning entry along with some runners-up. This week’s prize is a hundred billion dollars.
