1103 Commonplace Book

Fall 2015. Sober reflections, gut reactions, and unexpected connections. An experiment in critical creativity and creative criticality.

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You Can Have Millions Of Subscribers On YouTube—And Still Be Flat Broke

The disconnect between internet fame and financial security is hard to comprehend for both creators and fans.

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97% (Short film) 

A film in line with our conversations during Unit 1.

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This comprehensive arrogance is captured in one of Thoreau’s most famous lines: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is a mystery to me how a claim so simultaneously insufferable and absurd ever entered the canon of popular quotations. Had Thoreau broadened it to include himself, it would be less obnoxious; had he broadened it to include everyone (à la Sartre), it would be more defensible. As it stands, however, Thoreau’s declaration is at once off-putting and empirically dubious. By what method, one wonders, could a man so disinclined to get to know other people substantiate an allegation about the majority of humanity?

Kathryn Schulz, “Why Do We Love Henry David Thoreau?” 

Read this very recent critique of HDT and consider how this impacts your impression of the man and his message. Is Walden a valuable reminder to live simply and in balance with nature? Should the “hypocrisy” of its author, as Schulz calls it, deter us from taking this book seriously? 

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Check out this podcast on the ways we access and sift information in the digital age. This episode is particularly relevant to our conversations about new media and journalism.

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Are these modalities wholly separate? Where do they converge? Is the left brain/right brain split a reality or are things much more blurry upon closer consideration?

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Brain Pickings

An inventory of the meaningful life.

Check out this interesting ongoing blog project about writing, art, creativity, and meaning. Is there anything on this site that strikes you as useful and/or interesting for your own tumblr project?

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But seriously, Dr. W, what are we doing?!

1. We’re making connections.

2. Brainstorming ways we might blur the line between the critical and the creative.

3. ???

While I will not put a limit on your use the tumblr project, I can offer a few suggestions for what you might include as the semester progresses:

* Post and unpack and/or raise questions about quotations from course texts and outside materials that relate to our (past, current, and upcoming) discussions)

* Post and unpack and/or raise questions about images and/or videos that relate to our course material and conversations

* Link to or reblog content from relevant articles/sites/blogs/etc.

* Translate: Transform some portion of your writing, be it a discussion board post, in-class writing activity, or section from a major essay, into a work of multimodal composition. Use images, video, links to outside content - anything you can think of - to rhetorical reposition your writing for a digital context.

* Return: As WA states, a commonplace book is not just a record of your reading but also “a record of your thinking about the reading” (53; my italics). Now and again, consider returning back - perhaps right now to unit 1 - and consider how your initially responded to a work and/or passage from said work and how that has changed over time.

* Post your own art-work, photo, video, and creative fiction/non-fiction responses to course content. All of us are makers, in one way or another. Are you feeling creatively inspired by the things we discuss and write about for this course? Share it on your CPB!

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Abbey penned this “Author’s Introduction” in 1967. What does it mean when he calls his book “an elegy” and a “tombstone”? What does this say about his relationship to Arches? Why do we need to bleed to know what it was like back in the days Desert Solitaire memorializes?

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Astra Taylor at Harvard University in April of this year. 

How does this video add to our reading of Taylor in class? 

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danah boyd on a book tour for her latest book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. 

How does boyd’s talk compare to her essay, “Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle”?

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O.K., Glass - The New Yorker

Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer.

Gary Shteyngart, author of the novel, Super Sad True Love Story (2010), mentioned in Helena Fitzgerald’s essay, “Kissing Is Not The Answer,” dons a pair of Google Glasses for this piece for The New Yorker. 

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Context shift

How does a commonplace book change in an online context?

How should we approach the shift between the classic commonplace book, which was a largely private affair, and the online tumblr blog, which ostensibly anyone can witness?

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Writing Analytically & The CPB

Our textbook, Writing Analytically, describes the commonplace book as “a collection of ideas, a storehouse for thinking that a writer might later draw on to stimulate his or her own writing” (53). That is, the commonplace book is a space to maintain a running account of our thoughts as we engage with, in this case, a sequence of course materials and assignments. 

WA also offers advice about how to make the most use of your CPB. It states: “Try to write a sentence or two after most of your quotes, noting what you find interest there, perhaps paraphrasing key terms” (53).

And so, as you are building your own tumblr CPB:

* Post quotations and offer a few lines of analysis.

* Post images and/or video clips and offer a few lines of analysis.

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What kinds of implications can we draw from the OED definition of the commonplace book? How can we, today, in our (analytical) reading and writing “gather” for ourselves “good furniture both of words and ... phrases ... to make to [our] use”? 

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Insights from the everyday?

For my first post, I’d like to refer you to this interesting short piece by Alan Jacobs published in The Atlantic in 2012 about the link between tumblr and the commonplace books of the past.

Consider this moment in particular:

“And I'm making a pretty reliable and thoroughly public record of the things that are catching my attention day by day, which is quite a different exercise than writing out the words of the great geniuses of the past, but perhaps, over time, a more revelatory one.”

What do you make of the binary opposition in this quotation, the division split the genius of the past and the things that grip us day by day? Can we glean insight from those everyday moments?