Friday, August 07, 2009

Pushy Literary Theorist

I was honored and quite starstruck to do this interview with Mimi Smartypants recently. If you don't know who Mimi Smartypants is, leave this site and go to hers: www.mimismartypants.com. I'll see you back here in a week or so.

Back? Good. So you see why I like her so much. I was really curious to interview her because I have a lot of Questions and Ideas about what it means to be a writer in the Age of the Internet... As a writer of a Book, I'm constantly being told that books are not long for this world and that I am basically a throwback to a bygone era and may as well be churning butter by hand or setting cold type. So I was curious to talk about all this with a woman who is, to my mind, one of the very best writers working primarily on the internets.

But I failed to consider, in the course of preparing for and conducting this interview, that no artist (and I don't think it's a stretch to call Mimi Smartypants an artist) is really capable of analyzing her own work and her own place in the history of her genre. Of course, right? I mean, any artist who even likes trying to talk about such things is probably so wanky that you would never want to read their work. As Mimi puts it: "I do not have a lot of patience for people who have a grand manifesto about their creative activity." That.

Anyway, I hope I didn't permanently alienate myself from her good graces by pushing her on, for example, what sort of paper an undergraduate might be forced to write about her work in 2509.

I did, however, confirm that no-delete Thursday is real. It's real! Which blows my gourd. You don't want to see my no-delete anything, believe me.

1 comment:

Eileen said...

margaret! it is really weird to see you and mimi smartypants in the same context, since I've known both of you (her indirectly) for ages, but the two paths have never intersected. however, my main point: have you seen this? http://gizmodo.com/5372241/this-insane-photo-destroyed-a-camera-lens

REFRACTION!