Author and culture critic Mark Dery has launched a blog called The Gilded Hack.
Mark says he’ll “be writing occasional, desultory screeds about unpopular culture, unnatural history, weird sex, fringe science, media pathologies, Xtreme theory, bottom-feeder subcultures, and whatever else catches my fancy.” Mark’s writings have always engaged me, frequently informed me, sometimes confused me, never bored me, and almost always made my head spin with delight. Full disclosure: In his opening post, Mark paid Boing Boing what I consider to be the ultimate compliment. He likened our site (and others) to a postmodern cabinet of curiosities, my own personal meta-obsession.
Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger’s innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind’s eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer—an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that “reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the ‘discovery’ of the networked world.” Some of the most consistently enlightening and entertaining blogs are the inscrutable products of borderline obsessive-compulsives. Like the baroque “wonder closets” invoked by Dibbell, blogs such as bOING bOING, The Obscure Store, Kottke.org, and Die, Puny Humans are omnium gatherums, overstuffed with anything that catches the fancy of their eccentric curators.