There is an interview with me at the WordPress news blog today. I talked to WordPress editor Ben Huberman via email; he asked me all kinds of great questions that made me reflect on what I’m doing with Biblioklept, as well as blogging and writing in general.
From the interview:
I don’t think I’d ever call myself a curator — I’m an amateur, and I hold deep respect for what traditional curators do, for their training, and for their discipline and experience. David Foster Wallace suggests that “The curator’s job [is] to recall, choose, arrange: to impose order and so communicate meaning.”
I choose and arrange, but I’m not sure how much order I impose, beyond tagging and titling, and I’m certainly not interested in making meaning for the reader, at least not with the material that I share but do not originate — I’d prefer the audience to do that work.
Our conversation was edited for length, including my response to a question Ben asked me about some of my favorite WordPress blogs; as a bonus, here’s that answer:
I’m a big fan of Time’s Flow Stemmed, a blog that started a year or two after Biblioklept. Anthony, who writes it/runs it is a really smart guy and our interests overlap—but more interestingly they diverge—so I learn a lot from what he shares. I’ve been reading his blog pretty much since it started, so watching it develop and change has been meaningful to me, both as a reader and a blogger.
I also really like Darran Anderson’s blog, Literary Flotsam & Jetsam by an Attempted Human. It’s very wry and funny and comes from this very specific place that intrigues me. He wrote an essay a few months ago called “Albert Camus and the Ventriloquists” that anyone inclined to share images and quotes of authors on the internet should read.
“The Obliterated Man” by H.G. Wells
I was—you shall hear immediately why I am not now—Egbert Craddock Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic to the Fiery Cross. What I shall be in a little while I do not know. I write in great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can to make myself clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You must bear with me a little. When a man is rapidly losing his own identity, he naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I will make it perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the story. Let me see—where am I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead self! Egbert Craddock Cummins!
In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of “I” as this story must be. It is full of “I’s” before and behind, like the beast in Revelation—the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But my tastes have changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied the masters—G.A.S., G.B.S., G.R.S., and the others. Everything has changed since then. At least the story is about myself—so that there is some excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because, as I say, since those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration.
That past!… I was—in those days—rather a nice fellow, rather shy— taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face “interesting,” slight stutter which I had caught in my early life from a schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new, she was— cigarettes—liked me because I was human and original. Considered I was like Lamb—on the strength of the stutter, I believe. Father, an eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great deal in the British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary people, that British Museum—you should read George Egerton and Justin Huntly M’Carthy and Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved in our intellectual way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All gone now.) And her father liked me because I seemed honestly eager to hear about stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest prospects a young man could have. I never went to theatres in those days. My Aunt Charlotte before she died had told me not to.
Then Barnaby, the editor of the Fiery Cross, made me—in spite of my spasmodic efforts to escape—Dramatic Critic. He is a fine, healthy man, Barnaby, with an enormous head of frizzy black hair and a convincing manner, and he caught me on the staircase going to see Wembly. He had been dining, and was more than usually buoyant. “Hullo, Cummins!” he said. “The very man I want!” He caught me by the shoulder or the collar or something, ran me up the little passage, and flung me over the waste-paper basket into the arm-chair in his office. “Pray be seated,” he said, as he did so. Then he ran across the room and came back with some pink and yellow tickets and pushed them into my hand. “Opera Comique,” he said, “Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the Frivolity. That’s all, I think.” Continue reading ““The Obliterated Man” — H.G. Wells”
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