As live evolves, so too does my writing and with it also this blog, which has been where I’ve published a fair amount of stuff since 2015. Reflecting on the blog as I mulled over the latest reincarnation, I remembered my previous blog. Published on Blogspot, which became Blogger, I was pleased when I found the very first few pieces I posted back in 2007 (those earliest posts aren’t public anymore). In 2011 that first blog got a new lease of life when I refocused it around teaching. Just like this new blog, my first showed no prolificacy. Like the new blog, it was very much fits and starts.
Dipping into my early posts, there is the same variety of interests and, much to my disappointment and yet to little surprise, a little too egocentricity. Some posts read more like a diary written in public, which as you can tell is a habit I’m still trying to break. There were more polemics, again something I’ve not quite erased from my repertoire. Amidst the diatribes though, there is evidence of the intellectual hinterland I was tapping into, the books I was reading, the giants whose shoulders I was clambering atop of. Embarrassingly it quickly became clear that I was definitely reading more then that I have done recently; oh to have the time to read again!
Drawing on reading, the ‘magpieing’ of ideas, is a constant thread, which lends itself to the notion of common placing. While I won’t note everything I come across of interest here, everything here will probably be based on interesting things I have come across (whether interesting or not).
I forget which National Trust property it was, although I do think it was Dunham Massey, when I first happened across historic examples of commonplace books. These notebooks act as a record of any and all interesting quotes, facts and ideas that a person would come across in the course of their reading and other pursuits. While the habit fell out of fashion with the advent of the mass printing of reference books and later the Internet, there are still plenty of people who practice commonplacing today, both by hand and using digital tools.
Some interesting articles I’ve found about commonplacing include:
- Shane Parish (of Farnam Street) who explores commonplacing as part of the creative process.
- This eponymous (and solitary) article from commonplacing.net. The post also includes some useful links to other resources about the practice of commonplacing.
- This article from The Writer’s Collective looks at how commonplacing supports the act of writing.
- Writer Ryan Holiday explains how he uses common placing and sets the practice within some historic context too.
Being a (somewhat) self-aware one of those sorts of people who thinks they’re really clever, I am delighted that I can embed a little wordplay into the new blog title. As a geographer, I am of course fascinated by places and also the very theory of place. Is there such thing as a common place at all?
Looping back as everyone finishes rolling their eyes, another time I happened across the act of commonplacing was in Tim Cresswell’s book on place, Maxwell Street, who describes it as ‘a way of recording the wisdom of others, and gradually drawing upon it to form a unique new assemblage – your own kind of illuminating wisdom’. Cresswell also quotes Robert Darnton:
“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality.”
Robert Darnton, ‘Extraordinary Commonplaces’, New York Review of Books, 21st December 2000.
Commonplace 