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”
“The Huldrefish” by Jonas Lie; Translated from Norwegian by Nisbet Bain (Illustration by Laurence Housman)
It was such an odd trout that Nona hauled in at the end of his fishing-line. Large and fat, red spotted and shiny, it sprawled and squirmed, with its dirty yellow belly above the water, to wriggle off the hook. And when he got it into the boat, and took it off the hook, he saw that it had only two small slits where the eyes should have been.
It must be a huldrefish, thought one of the boatmen, for rumour had it that that lake was one of those which had a double bottom.
But Nona didn’t trouble his head very much about what sort of a fish it was, so long as it was a big one. He was ravenously hungry, and bawled to them to row as rapidly as possible ashore so as to get it cooked.
He had been sitting the whole afternoon with empty lines out in the mountain lake there; but as for the trout, it was only an hour ago since it had been steering its way through the water with its rudder of a tail, and allowed itself to be fooled by a hook, and already it lay cooked red there on the dish.
But now Nona recollected about the strange eyes, and felt for them, and pricked away at its head with his fork. There was nothing but slits outside, and yet there was a sort of hard eyeball inside. The head was strangely shaped, and looked very peculiar in many respects.
He was vexed that he had not examined it more closely before it was cooked; it was not so easy now to make out what it really was. It had tasted first-rate, however, and that was something.
But at night there was, as it were, a gleam of bright water before his eyes, and he lay half asleep, thinking of the odd fish he had pulled up.
He was in his boat again, he thought, and it seemed to him as if his hands felt the fish wriggling and sprawling for its life, and shooting its snout backwards and forwards to get off the hook.
All at once it grew so heavy and strong that it drew the boat after it by the line.
It went along at a frightful speed, while the lake gradually diminished, as it were, and dried up.
There was an irresistible sucking of the water in the direction the fish went, which was towards a hole at the bottom of the lake like a funnel, and right into this hole went the boat.
It glided for a long time in a sort of twilight along a subterranean river, which dashed and splashed about him. The air that met him was, at first, chilly and cellar-like; gradually, however, it grew milder and milder, and warmer and warmer.
The stream now flowed along calmly and quietly, and broadened out continually till it fell into a large lake.
Beyond the borders of this lake, but only half visible in the gloom, stretched swamps and morasses, where he heard sounds as of huge beasts wading and trampling. Serpent like they rose and writhed with a crashing and splashing and snorting amidst the tepid mud and mire.
By the phosphorescent gleams he saw various fishes close to his boat, but all of them lacked eyes.
And he caught glimpses of the outlines of gigantic sea-serpents stretching far away into the darkness. He now understood that it was from down here that they pop up their heads off the coast in the dog days when the sea is warm.
The lindworm, with its flat head and duck’s beak, darted after fish, and crept up to the surface of the earth through the slimy ways of mire and marsh.
Through the warm and choking gloom there came, from time to time, a cooling chilling blast from the cold curves and winds of the slimy and slippery greenish lichworm, which bores its way through the earth and eats away the coffins that are rotting in the churchyards.
Horrible shapeless monsters, with streaming manes, such as are said to sometimes appear in mountain tarns, writhed and wallowed and seized their prey in the fens and marshes.
And he caught glimpses of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds.
And, besides, that there was a soft whizzing and an endless hovering and swarming of beings, whose shapes were nevertheless invisible to the eye of man.
Then the boat glided into miry pulpy water, where her course tended downwards, and where the earth-vault above darkened as it sank lower and lower.
All at once a blinding strip of light shot down from a bright blue slit high, high, above him.
A stuffy vapour stood round about him. The water was as yellow and turbid as that which comes out of steam boilers.
And he called to mind the peculiar tepid undrinkable water which bubbles up by the side of artesian wells. It was quite hot. Up there they were boring down to a world of warm watercourses and liquid strata beneath the earth’s crust.
Heat as from an oven rose up from the huge abysses and dizzying clefts, whilst mighty steaming waterfalls roared and shook the ground.
All at once he felt as if his body were breaking loose, freeing itself, and rising in the air. He had a feeling of infinite lightness, of a wondrous capability for floating in higher atmospheres and recovering equilibrium.
And, before he knew how it was, he found himself up on the earth again.
Biblioklept 