GC Gets Proppian

I wasn’t joking yesterday when I said articles about book culture repeated the same (five, six, seven — the number doesn’t matter) plotlines. During my worst days, the repetition makes reading claustrophobic — like I’m living in a Groundhog day constructed from newsprint, and nothing changes except the nouns in the papers’ mad lib blanks.

I know this is isn’t the best attitude for a blogger to have or, worse, express; I should make reading the news feel like infectious fun, everyday a wild ride into our culture’s eccentricities. But, I’m proposing an experiment: instead of relaying the more familiar articles about dead writers’ shacks/houses/villas, teenage girls with sexy memoirs, and self-mythologizing retrospectives in UK papers about becoming writers, I’ll begin relaying these articles solely for classification purposes.

For example: here’s an article about the Burns National Heritage Park being in crisis. The larger, archetypal plotline: Dead Writers’ Property, In Need of Rescue. (And maybe once I’ve compared more examples of this plotline, the Burns National Heritage Park will also exemplify a sub-type … I’m thinking this new classification project should be as precise as it is shrug-inducingly pointless — at least, for non-semiotics majors.)

I’ve a long queue of articles, found over the past 24 hours, to be categorized and then reported. But I’d also love contributions — ideas about what categories are absolutely necessary (“the debut writer’s horror story”? “the complicated literary friendship”?), or links to articles you’ve already rolled your eyes at.

Update: Here, however, is a story I’m not sure I’ve read before.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.