Say what you will about blogs... Colm Toibin's reading mine.

Hi Colm. Hi Anne. Hi Dermot.

I learned something strange and a bit unnerving last night: a few of the Irish writers at this year's festival are actually reading this blog. Last night in the Hospitality Suite (oooh, I promised my superiors at Harbourfront I'd never start a sentence with "last night in the Hospitality Suite." I can almost feel the hairs going up on the back of Geoffrey Taylor's neck. You see, the Hospitality Suite is the Vegas of IFOA. It's strictly off-the-record - no media, no hassles. Just writers "relaxing" and "being themselves" in a well-appointed suite at the Westin Harbour Castle. To blog about the goings-on in there could be the single fastest way to "destroy" a young man's writing "career." Or so I've been told.)

Anyway, last night in the Hospitality Suite, Colm Toibin quoted from this blog, Dermot Bolger accused me (in a very friendly manner) of stealing his "best stuff," and Anne Enright introduced me not as an author but as the official blogger (it's OK, Anne... I know I'm already terribly overexposed in this capacity and sadly underexposed as a writer).

This led to the classic conversation about blogs themselves, and how many of us feel they are simply useless, or self-congratulatory, or both (Colm came up with a very good euphemism for blogs versus books, actually, but I'll not share it here for reasons of propriety already discussed above).

But this makes me wonder: what would make this blog better? What would pull it up and out of the mongrel blogosphere? And I think I know the answer. A pure-bred, world-famous, prize-winning, Irish-accented Guest Blogger!

So come on, Colm. Have at you, Dermot. Let's see it, Anne. Which one of you will rise to the occasion and offer to write IFOA's first guest-blog?