The Pulitzer is like the Caldecott--if you know what it is, it can influence your consuming. If I am looking at a nonfiction book and see it has won the Pulitzer, I am more inclined to give it a go than another book on the same subject.

The Pulitzer is a big BIG deal in the theatre--plays that win usually get produced at regional theaters all over the country and they use the prize as a selling point.

The Pulitzer is a big BIG deal in the theatre

Did you notice that there wasn't one this year?

This is all about mediation. Who gives a rusty frimp if the Pulitzer people were watching a play this season?

People who are selling the play. That's who. If the Pulitzer Committee had said that such-and-such a blogger always has her ducks in a stack about theatre and she digs such-and-such show the most, said blogger could make the play.

That is how it really happens, now. Print reviews are entirely after the fact. Ditto breaking-news in print/broadcast. When you release a movie, you pound the refresh key on "Ain't It Cool". What The Times said a week ago machs nix.

Pulitzer in newspaper would be v. different from a blog, if only becuase even these days when most newspapers have most of their stuff online, if I see "oh, the Portland Gazette got a Pulitzer for their series on meth!" I'm unlikely to go read it. If I see "Congratulations to bobsblog.com, for the Pulitzer post on underwear (read it here!)", I'd go read it, and then if I liked it, possibly become a regular reader.

If meara's link didn't go to a 404, her argument would be utterly compelling.

Other than this, I agree with meara.

If it weren't 3AM, I might not have made up a fake link.

Or I might've anyway. I make no promises.

I know a theatre that needs a kick in the capital campaign. Wanna blog about it?

I would. Not that the Pulitizer Commitee would notice. If it was the P-Award-Winning GusBlog, though, you might have to offer sexual favors.

Not that that is a bad idea.

I'm reading Dean Kontz's "False Memory".

I will never read another haiku ever ever ever.

I knew DK was fucked up, but damn.

It's like he and Anne Rice and Stephen King sit around comparing fucked up-ness like those guys in Jaws comparing scars.

"I can totally beat that! In MY book, blah blah blah SO FUCKED UP blah ablah blah supernatural blah."

I knew DK was fucked up, but damn.

Heh, and heh to the Jaws scar-showing imagery.

Though DK is still a distant second in my mind to Clive Barker. I've read one single Clive Barker book ever, a very very long and twisted thing I can barely remember anymore except for a vague impression of something like a cross between Gaiman's Neverwhere and the first King/Straub Huck Finn pastiche collaboration, only approximately 90 billion times more fucked up. It's the only book I've ever read that I finished and thought, "Whoever wrote that has got to have some major neurochemical disorder; there's just no way a normal human brain would not only think that up, but go there and stay there for upwards of 500 pages."

It did, however, serve the salutary purpose of making every Koontz and King book I've read since then seem kind of playful and kittenish by comparison.