“As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Happy New Year! The rain on New Year’s Eve day kept the people indoors, but today brings the sunshine of a new year. Perhaps, like me, you are making plans.
Now that our kitchen is complete and the presents have been put away – I’m excited about my new socks – we can turn to our plans and resolutions. My plans involve writing projects of various sorts. Like my son Truman, I would like to finish at least one book this year. To have occasions to write is like visiting an oasis, like watching an unexpected rain shower on a summer afternoon in Davis. I agree with Gloria Steinem who said that “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
I’m reviving an ancient assignment for the Silicon Valley Journalism class that I’m teaching this winter. The philosopher Seneca said, “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.” But what do we do with these “pieces of teaching” after we have found them? We collect them in what Webster’s Dictionary calls “a book in which extracts, poems, aphorisms, etc. are copied down for future reference, often together with one’s ideas and reflections.” We call this a Commonplace Book.
I suppose I work on three such commonplace books every week: I have a huge Google doc where I collect ideas for poems and book projects, I have another huge such repository for all my topics for Pub Quiz questions, and I have the collections of ideas and quotations that appear in these newsletters that I share with you every week.
David Allen said that “Your head is for having ideas, not holding them.” What method should we employ to have and to hold one’s ideas? In his book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte explains what he calls his CODE method for building a “second brain” that focuses on holding: the CODE acronym stands for “Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express.” You can imagine how these elements work: first one captures all the data, with a focus on wisdom and not just facts; then one organizes or categorizes the information is such a way that it is actionable; then one distills the most useful information from the whole; and then one expresses it to an audience, such as I do with these newsletters.
Commonplace Books invite tangents. For example, speaking of distillations, I remember now that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks said that “Poetry is life distilled.” I think of that quotation from my own commonplace book when I try to enrich this one precious life of mine with the distilled lives of others.
I will ask my students to make at least small eight additions to their commonplace book every week, averaging at least 400 words a week. Their entries will come from the following categories, with the first five being mandatory:
- Two or more quotations and aphorisms
- Response to a compelling paragraph from a news story concerning Silicon Valley (paste the paragraph)
- Responses to assigned readings (assigned for our class or for another class)
- Response to a friend’s or classmate’s blog or commonplace book
- Response to an original photograph or a royalty-free photograph that you share
- Responses to topics brought up in class by Dr. Andy, guest speakers, or peers
- Links to five or more discovered resources (including articles, podcasts, books, websites)
- Reflection on a digital tool (such as one you use or are investigating) or social medium
- Goals for the week and reflections on your previous week’s goals
- Contemporary analogues to people or phenomena covered in O’Mara’s book Code
- Responses to non-assigned readings
- Quotations from your correspondence with others
- Up to 50 words of redacted writing that you don’t want others to read (you can substitute Lorem Ipsum)
- Topics and resources that you are researching for a future assignment
- An anecdote about something you did this week
- Responses to examples of discovered innovation, entrepreneurialism, or productive collaboration
- An update on your path towards professionalism as a writer
- Meta-analysis of your own work as a blogger, thinker, writer, student, or keeper of a commonplace book.
400 words is not very much (this newsletter already over 800 words so far), so I think the students can handle it. I hope that this assignment will both build writing habits in my students and help them see the connections between the downtime or low-impact writing that they should be doing all the time in order to prepare themselves for any sort of intellectual or journalistic work in the future. Flannery O’Connor said that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
On this first day of the year, I have so much more to say about 2022, and so much that I plan to say in 2023. As was the case with poets of yesteryear, some of that composing I will do while walking, as I did this year. During his 1831 tour of Scotland, Wordsworth would sometimes walk 20 miles a day. Of course, he did not have access to light rail or tour busses. Whereas I did surpass the 20 mile mark on occasion in 2022, I will save the summation of my yearly miles, of what Wordsworth called “very much pedestrianizing,” in a future newsletter.
In other news, next week we celebrate my son Jukie’s 22nd birthday, so that will mean a fundraiser for the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation. Check out the new website now so that you are in the mood to give! In preparation for next week, and my eventual pitch to you, my reads, I will see what persuasive quotations I can find in my commonplace book.
Happy New Year, and thanks for your support and readership!
Dr. Andy
P.S. Thanks to all the individuals and teams who support this endeavor every week. I continue because of my supporters on Patreon. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mountain Ranges. The San Jacinto Mountains are found in what county that starts with the letter R?
- Pop Culture – Television. Netflix on December 12, 2022 disclosed that 60% of its 223 million global subscribers (134 million) regularly watch original BLANK content. What K word fills in the blank?
- Another Music Question. Born Brenda Gail Webb in 1951, who had a 1977 hit with “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”?
P.P.S. Allegra Silberstein (she’s 92!) is our featured poet with Jean Biegun on Thursday night at 7. Join us! See https://poetryindavis.com/archive/2022/12/allegra-silberstein-and-jean-biegun-read-at-7-pm-on-thursday-january-5th-2023/ for details.