I'm going to use this new weblog to start a commonplace book.
Commonplace books arose in the renaissance as a means for learned men to record quotations or observations that seemed important to them. I came across the idea when reading about the architect Leon Battista Alberti, who kept an apparently extraordinary commonplace book.
Writers like Wallace Stevens, WH Auden and EM Forster in the last century kept commonplace books, which have been published for the insight they give to a writer's mind. I'm in the middle of Forster's commonplace book, and it's a wonderful lagniappe of quotes from whatever he's reading, together with his own observations, and oddities culled from his daily life.
Just like a lot of weblogs, in fact.
6:01:02 PM 
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