People whose blogs we would like to read.

[shewhomust]

Every day, the Quotation of the Day mailing list sends me a quotation. Not every one is a gem, but a decent proportion are - and most are at least worth reading. Sometimes, of course, I want to argue, or submit counter-quotations.

Last month, they sent me this:

"Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they're parasitic on thing other people have written. It's a democratized writing, a democratized literacy."

Raph Koster, video-game designer.

So what's new? Montaigne said the same thing in 1580-something:

"Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations, qu'à interpreter les choses : et plus de livres sur les livres, que sur autre subject : Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser.
"Tout fourmille de commentaires : d'autheurs, il en est grand cherté.*"

Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 13

Which set me thinking about Montaigne: we used to be taught that he invented the form which he called "essais" (experiments) and which we take for granted as essays. Now I think that he invented the blog - or as near as he could get to it without a computer. He wrote a diary, not about what he was doing but about what he was thinking. His early attempts were sparked off by quotations from the classics, full of snippets of Greek and Latin cut-and-pasted into his text. As time passed, the proportion of original thought grew, and he started to talk more about his own experiences, the minutiae of his life, his preferences. He loved polemic, he argued all the time with his source material. And he carried on annotating his essays even after they had been published, adding afterthoughts in the margins of the printed books.

I'd love to see what he could do with the internet.

This post - which has been in my mind for some time - finally realised under the inspiration of sartorias's Montaigne icon.

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*My translation:

There's more activity interpreting interpretations than interpreting facts: and more books about books than on any other subject: all we do is footnote one another.

Everything is teeming with commentaries: there's a great shortage of authors.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I had thought "essais" was closer in meaning to "attempts," but perhaps my command of early modern French-- or any other French-- isn't very good.

The thing about newness is the ancient proverb, "There is no new thing under the sun." Not precisely true, but in some sense. What tend to be new are new combinations of old things. It gives rise to the question, how new do the components of a thing have to be for the thing itself to be considered new?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

No, your French is fine, either is a possible reading - and perhaps "experiments" is anachronistic, chosen to fit my argument rather than Montaigne's thought. But then again, if I's said "attempts" - attempts to do what, precisely?

Absolutely with you on your second paragraph: new combinations and new contexts.