Friday, August 10, 2012

Prolegomena to Any Future a Particular Commonplace Book That Will Post Itself On a Blog

I have a file on my computer entitled "Totally Random Quotes n Tidbits". I use it, basically, as a commonplace book -- a place to copy (or, more often, copy & paste) things I see of interest. The only criteria for inclusion in it is that I find it interesting and either want to have it handy in case I want to read it again or want to increase the chances of my coming across it again. Which is to say, inclusion doesn't necessarily mean that I think it's correct or important or anything. Just that I found it, in some way or another, interesting.

It doesn't have everything I find interesting in it, of course. Sometimes I'll bother to copy something, but far more often I won't. I'm much, much less likely to copy something if I'm reading it on dead trees than online, since in the former case I have to stop reading, go to my computer and retype the passage; in the latter, I just copy & paste -- takes a second. In fact, I started it, basically, to close a tab, which had a nice phrase in it I wanted to be able to find again. And over time I think the most common reason that I found myself adding something to it was just that: I had a tab I wanted to close.

It's led to a few spin-offs. For a while now I've been putting poems I come across in their own file (at least if I want the whole poem and not just a snippet of it). I have a different file for particularly long quotes (though that's short -- usually something is brief, or I'll just save the whole thing in some fashion).

According to the file into, it was created on September 10, 2006. As of today, it's 95 pages long.

I'm going to start posting some of it to this blog. Not all of it. Some quotes in it I've already posted; some are so, well, commonplace that I don't think they're worth posting. Some have staledated. But some of it.

This won't be in place of the blogging I've done heretofore. I presume I'll put up posts as I always have -- inconsistently: occasionally with great frequency, occasionally with long gaps, more or less as the spirit moves me.

But these I'll just queue up to post. I've got the first batch set to go up once a day for the next bunch of days, but after that I'll probably do them intermittently, so that they don't swamp everything else on the blog. They'll just pop up from time to time, intermixed with any other blogging I decide to do. Until I run out. Or get tired of doing it. Or distracted. Or whatever.

The first one goes up tomorrow. It's the one that caused me to start the file -- the tab I couldn't close. It's not, actually, anything important or notable or anything else. Just a phrase I like.

A totally random quote and tidbit.

More to come.

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