Digital culture is great, I get that. But there is a real world and it has real stuff in it. Stuff that doesn't just look but also feels and smells and tastes. Stuff that has substance. I mean like physical substance. I'd like to celebrate that stuff. So yes, I decided to do it... in a blog. Ironic much?
The name of the blog is a bit of old-school whimsy, a little gesture acknowledging the irony of a digital archive celebrating material culture, but you shouldn't take that to mean that we don't take ourselves seriously. We are all people who have interests and expertise that take place in and touch on the real world and encompass a lot of that physical real-world stuff I'm talking about. Books. Printed ones. Made of cloth and paper and leather and ink. Music. Made with real instruments that involve things being plucked and banged and scraped and, y'know, blown. Art. Made with paint and wood and cloth and paper and ink and clay and light and salt and oatmeal and just, well, everything. Theater. Made in front of a living audience, with living actors breathing and spitting and sweating and bleeding all over that living audience. Things that, in short, have been made. Out of real, living, breathing people-stuff.
That sounds kinda gross. Let's move on.
If any of this sounds even a little interesting to you then hang about because I have no idea where it's going to go. The next several posts are going to start introducing the cast and crew of this little production. I may be the director and curator here, the virtual Master of the Revels, but in the end I'm only the name at the top of the blog, or possibly the Man Behind the Curtain. You'll be hearing from me a lot, but you'll be hearing from a lot of other people as well. Book people and art people and music people and theater people and, well, mostly just people who have not forgotten that culture is a living thing. And it has feelings.
Tangibly Yours,
Professor Malvolio
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