I’ve called this site a Commonplace Blog because I have far too many interests to be able to write a blog about a singular topic. I’m echoing the tradition of commonplace books, a sort of analog Tumblr from history, by having a blog that’s about whatever I feel like writing about on that particular day, whether it’s food, poetry, yarn, karaoke, history, politics, or general complaining.
According to Wikipedia, my favorite compendium for crowd-sourced, largely-factual information, commonplace books take their name from the Latin phrase “locus communis,” meaning “a theme or argument of general application.” To be honest, I don’t really know how that connects to what they ARE. I’ve always thought that “commonplace” is more about their quotidian nature; they are personal journals that assemble whatever information, knowledge, ephemera, quotes, recipes, poems, and other scraps of trivia that the writer sees fit to include. I love the idea of keeping such a book, and have kind of endeavored to do so this year with a bullet journal. Turns out my favorite thing to do with that is to keep track of every karaoke song I’ve sung, so it’s maybe not the best representation of a personal knowledge database.
Many famous writers kept notebooks filled with disparate ideas in this same vein; some have even been published as fascinating portals into the author’s mind. An Italian form of commonplace books is known as a zibaldone, meaning “a heap of things.” These hodgepodge books compiled grocery lists, important book passages, sketches, meals consumed — anything experienced by the writer that they deemed worthy of documentation. Again, it’s Analog Tumblr, although I’d argue a book is easier to navigate than a website; you can flip back and forth in a tangible format. I have a Tumblr, but it’s fallen into disuse after a brief obsession with everything Sherlock six years ago. I would rather write more than the format allows, so an actual blog seemed ideal. I’m also a scholar of LiveJournal, which allowed me to type forever into a word box and publish in a relatively uncomplex format.
The Commonplace Blog of Jess Crayons 