a commonplace project

This blog is a digitized version of my physical commonplace book, kept for a college course on Book Love. I have used hashtags to index my entires, similar to J.G. Ballard's short story "The Index." As a viewer, this site is somewhat interactive, as you can click on each tag to view all the posts containing that tag. I believe this blog is considered a digital commonplace book, because it is a place where I can quickly add quotes that catch my interest or inspire me in some way. This digital commonplace is as portable as a physical book, because I can update and edit the blog on my cell phone or on my laptop. After logging all the entries from my handwritten commonplace book, I have added ("reblogged") quotes that other bloggers have already posted. Because of the reblogging feature on Tumblr, this digital commonplace becomes somewhat collaborative.

[arterialtrees]

claudia rankine

don’t let me be lonely

[heteroglossia]

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Philosopher (via heteroglossia)

[speciesbarocus]

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater.

Walter Benjamin, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings [x]. (via speciesbarocus)

[gwranda]

Tumblr in the 18th century

“A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories’ and, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.”

—from Jonathan Swift’s A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet [1721]

[treesofreverie]

We gulp words and phrases when we read quickly, but we also may choose to savour some texts, and roll them on our tongues.

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund (via treesofreverie)

[intricateworlds]

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund 

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

Doesn't reading a novel mean producing a private play of sorts? Reading is casting, set decoration, direction, makeup, blocking, stage management... Though books do not imply enactment in quite the same way that plays do.

Peter Mendelsund, “What We See When We Read”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

I've never kept a journal-- or rather I've never known if I should keep one.

Roland Barthes, “Deliberation”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of a film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one's mind. This is a very real hazard.

Peter Mendelsund, “What We See When We Read”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

You may feel intimately acquainted with a character (people like to say, of a brilliantly written character, 'it's like I know her'), but this doesn't mean you are actually picturing a person... Our mental sketches of characters are worse than police composites.

Peter Mendelsund, “What We See When We Read”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

We imagine that the experience of reading is like that of watching a film. But this is not what actually happens-- this is neither what reading is, nor what reading is like.

Peter Mendelsund, “What We See When We Read”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

Jorge Luís Borges, “The Circular Ruins”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

...what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection.

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

I have just written the word 'infinite.' I have not included that adjective out of mere rhetorical habit; I hereby state that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

[tryin-to-put-it-into-words]

The bibliomania also troubled, and gave definition to, the nineteenth-century presentation of the love of literature as its own, legitimate form of romantic love.

Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Loving Literature”