When I was a teenager, I had a blog on Tumblr. It wasn't anything special, and 99.99% of it was reblogged content belonging to others (the rest was comprised of vaguely tenable attempts at very-online humour.)
The whole thing was a glorified scrapbook of inside jokes, post-ironic shitposts, and weatherbeaten, dada-esque memes. It was crude, surreal and esoteric - and hugely important to me.
It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I can see my Tumblr for what it really was: a digital commonplace book. There, in that bird’s nest of other people’s witty, if vulgar, gags, my sense of humour began to take shape.
Commonplace books have a long history, and I don’t propose to rehash it here, save to say that the idea has always been to collect the thoughts and quotes (and I suppose nowadays the websites, images and videos) of others for periodic reflection.
It’s up to you whether you want to let them speak for themselves, or put your own gloss on them. Commonplacing is, as Michel de Montaigne puts it, gathering the flowers of others.
That’s exactly what I plan to do here with this site. Maybe it will become a linkblog, that quick and dirty to express yourself through other people; maybe it won't.
Either way, I'm going to sow the seeds of others, and let there be a thousand blossoms bloom.
2024-11-27
