mania in Fuller & Dockray 2011
s, and
then we use the classes to also figure out what texts we are going to be
reading in the future, to make new issues and new classes. So it becomes an
organising group, reading and working its way through subject matter and
material, then revisiting that library and seeing what needs to be there.
**MF:** I want to follow that kind of strand of habits of accumulation,
sorting, deferring and so on. I wonder, what is a kind of characteristic or
unusual reading behavior? For instance are there people who download the
entire list? Or do you see people being relatively selective? How does the
mania of the net, with this constant churning of data, map over to forms of
bibliomania?
**SD:** Well, in Aaaaarg it's again very specific. Anecdotally again, I have
heard from people how much they download and sometimes they're very selective,
they just see something that's interesting and download it, other times they
download everything and occasionally I hear about this mania of mirroring the
whole site. What I mean about being specific to Aaaaarg is that a lot of the
mania isn't driven by just the need to have everything; it's driven by the
acknowledgement that the source is going to disappear at some point. That
sense of impending disappearance is always there, so I think that drives a lot
of people to download everything because, you know, it's happened a couple
times where it's just gone down or moved or something like that.
**MF:** It's true, it feels like something that is there even for a few weeks
or a few months. By a sheer fluke it could last another year, who knows.
**SD:** It's a different kind of mania, and usually we get lost in this
thinking that people need to possess everything but there is this weird
preservation instinct that people have, which is slightly different. The
dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and
subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to
preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have
lots of high quality metadata - it doesn't have the publication date, it
doesn't have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system
is pretty dismal in that way, but I don't min
mania in Constant 2009
the “general character and weight of any object
touching it (. . . )” Or take for example the book Beautés et merveilles
de la nature et des arts by Eliçagaray from the 18 th century which
lists both technological and animal wonders, for example bees and
ants, electricity and architectural constructions as marvels of artifice
and nature.
Similar accounts abound since the mid 19 th century. Insects sense,
move, build, communicate and even create art in various ways that
raised wonder and awe for example in U.S. popular culture. Apt
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example of the 19 th century insect mania is the New York Times
story (May 29, 1880) about the ‘cricket mania' of a certain young
lady who collected and trained crickets as musical instruments:
200 crickets in a wirework-house, filled with ferns and shells,
which she called a ‘fernery'. The constant rubbing of the wings
of these insects, producing the sounds so familiar to thousands
everywhere seemed to be the finest music to her ears. She
admitted at once that she had a mania for capturing crickets.
Besides entertainment, and in a much earlier framework, the classic
of modern entomology, the aforementioned An Introduction to Entomology by Kirby and Spence already implicitly presented throughout
its four volume best seller the idea of a primitive technics of nature –
insect technics that were immanent to their surroundings.
Kirby and Spence's take probably attracted the attention it did
because of the catchy language but also what could be called its
ethological touch. Insects were approached as living and interacting
entities that are intimately coupled with thei
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