Recently, thundara posted an article by Timothy Krieder titled The Quiet Ones that ran in the New York Times. It spurred some good discussion and I wrote Mr. Krieder to invite him to take part in the discussion. Below is his response back to me:
Thanks so much and absolutely not. I am a twentieth-century guy and believe that the author's job is over once something's been published. That piece got cut way down from its original length and so there are, of course, all sorts of things I wish I could add to it--little insights and tangents and qualifications and the one anecdote that made me sound like a heroic defender of decency--but I don't get to so too bad for me. It's the readers' turn to have their say now, uninterrupted by my defensive explanation. So although I am gratified that the piece has provoked so much discussion on your site, I think I will abide by Quiet Car rules and say nothing.
Tim Kreider
I enjoyed the response and thought it brought up some interesting questions. Now that every online magazine and aggregator has a comment section, we see an interaction between author and consumer that was never present in the past. Is this a good thing? Is there value in just leaving it all on the page?
Incidentally, Mr. Krieder and I corresponded once again and he was very kind and intends to stop by Hubski and perhaps partake in discussions that don't revolve around his own work and he granted me permission to post this correspondence. Nice guy.
Shout-out to those that took part in the discussion on the original post: kleinbl00, cgod, b_b, lil, mk, sounds_sound, steve, JTHipster, cloud_ctrl