I’ve been planning on sending, among other things, a homemade tea blend to those handful of individuals to whom I want (or feel obliged) to send holiday gifts, and whom I think might enjoy a minty concoction. This was feeling like a lackluster scheme—which it may still actually be—until I thought about offering this gift as something I’ve been enjoying myself: a way to partake of a shared experience. While there’s much to be said about gifts that are finely matched to their recipient, it feels warm and sweet to me to invite someone else into my experience, widening a personal pleasure from its sphere of privacy into something shared.
It is in that spirit that I wanted to share, below, a few small fragments I’ve recently enjoyed or have returned to. I offer them to you as a glimpse into my current fascinations and the questions that are vexing me—a cursory digital “commonplace” book.
What’s a commonplace, you ask? A commonplace is something like a scrapbook of ideas. These ideas might be focused on an overarching topic, or broader in their scope. Either way, they provide space to gather a motley assortment of passages together, where they would cohabitate and perhaps refract off each other.
I learned of the commonplace by name when I was a student at Evergreen years ago. The concept felt like a legitimation of my pre-existing tendency to cohere (and find resonance in) small heterogenous scraps.
While I have fallen in and out of the habit of curating these scraps in any single place, I always find comfort in the possibility that the wild broth of ideas, fact, poetry, and perspectives I am always encountering is more than an overwhelming glut of media—that however loosely assembled its ingredients may be, we are taking in and shaping the world, through conversations less fragmented than we might tend to think.
Yours,
Siloh
A brief commonplace ~ an offering of ideas
A small collection of passages—interviews, excerpts from books—that I’ve recently been struck by
Interviewer: An idea that has gained traction lately is that we’re in a particularly boring period of popular culture. People have suggested certain structural reasons for that, having to do with, for example, an increased disinclination toward ambiguity. But what about you? Do you think we’re in a dull cultural moment?
Brian Eno: I don’t, actually. Right now I see quite strong movement in some rather unexpected areas. A.S.M.R., this whispering thing, that’s incredibly promising. It’s quite counterintuitive. You get the idea that the trajectory of media is greater acceleration, louder, more surprises, and here you have millions of people sitting listening to somebody brushing their hair and whispering. You have to take that on board as being one of the things that’s happening in culture and quite different from the story that we’re generally hearing.
— Interview between Brian Eno and David Marchese
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That is how it was—everything was shot through with so many, to use Kathleen Stewart’s phrase, animated strands of potential. The uncanny drift in which we were situated vibrated; the needle would skip across the surface of the record. Things were relational. Categories were punctured. As I experienced it, in every space, the conditions were hospitable to narrative because in every space there was the potential for emergence and the presence of juxtaposition, two conditions favored by both the disaster and the oracle.
— Selah Saterstrom in this interview
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Increase of light and increase of labour have always gone hand in hand. If today, when our gaze is no longer able to penetrate the pale reflected glow over the city and its environs, we think back to the eighteenth century, it hardly seems possibly that even then, before the Industrial Age, a great number of people, at least in some places, spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which, perhaps because of its relatively primitive character, makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we were able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented. That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the work day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. On the other hand, when we consider the weavers’ mental illnesses we should also bear in mind that many of the materials produced in the factories of Norwich in the decades before the Industrial Revolution began — silk brocades and watered tabinets, satins and satinettes, camblets and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes and florentines, diamatines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques — were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (trans. Michael Hulse), pg 281-283
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“When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child,” Marguerite Duras once wrote. “It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.” In Crack Wars, Avital Ronell refers to Duras’s works as “alcoholizations”—as saturated, so to speak, with the substance. Could one imagine a book similarly saturated, but with color? How could one tell the difference? And if “saturation” means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does “saturation” not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets, pg 57
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Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks (I listened to as an audiobook so page number unknown, but found in the appendix)
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Offerings
Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms
Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice.
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters