Link: blackoystercatcher: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material.
I'll begin with my manifesto On the Virtues of Preexisting Material, which goes like this:
1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don't presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What's gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement
No one loves manifestos more than their writers, which means that they often require interpretation and maybe even translation into real-world language. So what I'm going to do is take my 14 points and expand them into ideas. Some of these might sound trendy, but I think they're actually traditional — they've been in and around the culture for a long time....
