The Blog as Commonplace Book

In the “still here” post that I published last November to announce that I had managed to resurrect The Teeming Brain after a two-month site crash, I mentioned that I didn’t know what the future would hold for this blog in terms of new activity. That was not, of course, a particularly novel revelation. Long-time readers have seen activity wax and wane here many times over the years. That’s just the nature of my energy levels and cycles of motivation, in combination with my concrete circumstances and available time.

Going forward, at least for the next little while (which could mean anywhere from a month to a year or more), you’ll see me start using The Teeming Brain in one of its aspects that has always been present, but that has shifted in and out of prominence over time: as a commonplace book.

Readers of Maria Popova’s excellent and formidable Brain Pickings—a blog whose title always mashes together in my subconscious with George Carlin’s sublime but unrelated Brain Droppings—have seen her do essentially the same thing. She has used the blog to track her wide-ranging reading of various books, authors, artists, thinkers, and ideas, drawing a positively galactic web of connections among them all. In her case, the central thread, as stated in the blog’s subtitle, is to conduct “an inventory of the meaningful life.” The Teeming Brain’s subtitle similarly states its theme, which I conceived 15 years ago to deliberately articulate a focus that’s both specific enough to be meaningful and broad enough to be all-inclusive: “Channeling the Multiverse of Ideas.” The difference is that Ms. Popova’s blog work has been focused and dedicated; it’s her main career project. Mine has been a side gig, though it got kind of focal for a couple of years when I invited other writers aboard in 2012. In both cases, the blogs have served as, among other things, repositories for tracking a wide range of reading.

For me, the “problem,” if that’s the right word, in posting here has always been to find the time and muster the motivation to provide an explanation, reaction, justification, or some other contextual frame when I share an excerpt from a book, article, essay, or blog that has caught my attention. Except for a relatively small number of posts, I’ve never felt free just to dump things here without some kind of accompanying commentary. It’s a self-imposed rule, to be sure—and one that has, over the years, prevented me many times from posting a simple excerpt or link. The past repository of Teeming Links posts illustrates one strategy for addressing my felt need to provide some kind of meaningful frame or shell for such things, even if it’s just the frame of a links post, which has become a recognized genre in the blog world. But even the creation of those requires a level of time, energy, and motivation that frequently isn’t available to me.

And yet I’ve posted bare links and excerpts at the likes of Facebook (back when I had an account there) and Twitter with something resembling abandon. Most of those have gone unrecorded here. I find that unfortunate, for the entirely selfish reason that lately I’ve been discovering that things I’ve posted here at the blog have become a record of my mental and spiritual trajectory over the years and a valuable index to my shifting interests. In recent months, when I was putting together the manuscript for a book that collects my writings on weird/horror fiction and philosophy over the years (something I’ll say more about in coming weeks), I’ve had the odd experience, repeatedly, of going online to look up some remembered idea from a writer, book, article, or essay that struck me in the past, and finding that one of the first or only resources to which DuckDuckGo or Google directs me is a past Teeming Brain post where I quoted it.

Of course, it’s also possible to forgo publicly posting such things altogether. Why not keep a more traditional commonplace book, a private one? Why not use a pen and paper? Or a word processing document? Or Evernote, Google Keep, or Microsoft OneNote? In fact, I do use these things. I’ve maintained a handwritten journal-cum-commonplace book for decades, and I use a couple of digital tools as well.

But for some reason, there remains the draw of publicly sharing some things. I said above that I often don’t have the energy or motivation to write up a blog post that requires me to produce original words of my own. At the same time, there’s the strange fact that there’s an energetic motivation all its own that comes from sharing selected items in this form. Simply because you, my audience, are out there, I’ve written things here at The Teeming Brain—such as this, this, this, this, and this—that otherwise wouldn’t have been written. The performative aspect, as it were, of blogging possesses its own energetic charge. When I had the audacity back in 2006 to launch this thing, I had no idea whether my speculative assumption—that a small audience might find my thoughts, impressions, ideas, and observations, offered in this form, to be worth reading—would prove to be true. Somehow, it did. And that’s a motivator of its own.

So, in essence, this post right here is just a long way of doing two things. First, I’m saying thank you for reading, and I’m telling you that I draw energy from knowing you’re out there. Second, I’m offering a wholly unnecessary preamble to a coming faucet drip of posts that will say, without my actually saying it, “Look, here’s something I find interesting enough to record, preserve, and share, and I thought you might find it interesting, too.”