Perhaps you’re here because you’ve read some of the various things I’ve written (or that have been written about me and my projects) around the web in the past few years. I’ll admit that some of that writing has been what the Supreme Court might whimsically term “commercial speech”—which is to say that it often took the form of the kind of professional wish-thinking advertised as expertise that has become something of a global idiom of late. This, as all the indignities of commerce, I regret.
This venue is different. After having recently sold the second of the two companies I built (each is now in more capable hands than my own), I have found myself in a felicitous, if perhaps temporary, sort of mini-retirement. I thus no longer feel the burden of plausibility, or the need to corral web traffic like a herd of livestock on its way to auction.
The tawdry gaze of the web hipster no longer moves me.
What you’ll find here is rag-and-bone collection of doubtlessly unflattering whimsies and intellectual trinkets: collected Star Trek statistics, endearing self-recriminations, suggested byzantine Starbucks drink orders, the results of behavioral self-experimentation (one is loath to use the befouled term “life hacks”), recipes, book reports, spot-on quotations, and if I’m lucky maybe even the odd picture of a cute guy—quite simply, the effluvia of this particular dilettante's roving attention.
The products on display shall document my floundering attempts to find a few gratifying diversions in this fleeting existence as an awkward mammal living in an indifferent universe.
There is a nihilism at work here perhaps, but a happy one.
If you like some of the less venal things I’ve written in the past—or if for by some quirk of personality you share my idiosyncratic predilections–maybe you’ll enjoy some of what is to be collected here.
But probably not. This notebook was written for me.
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.
Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.
Good luck Ryan! You are a great writer so I look forward to seeing all that your musings have to offer.
Posted by: William Bridges | 03/01/2010 at 02:28 PM