about

Welcome to my Commonplace book.

What is a commonplace book?
Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler's responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Old Marlboro ads.

King Henry VI part 1, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1977.

My thoughts are whirled like a potter's wheel; I know not where I am, nor what I do;
— HENRY VI PART 1, ACT 1 SCENE 5

"Van Sant mixes and matches scenes of documentary-style realism with campy musical set pieces, improvised dialogue with bowdlerized Shakespeare, dream sequences shot in grainy Super 8 with 35 mm vistas of the Pacific Northwest, and, on the soundtrack, Rudy Vallee with the Pogues."

"Idaho’s fragmented editing style—its heterogeneous visual associations and dense layering of words, sounds, and music—and its split-second shifts between the burlesqued and the heartfelt evoke Mike’s confusion of inside and outside, past and present, dreams and waking life."

"The schizoid structure of the scene is, for once, not a projection of Mike’s fragmented psyche but rather a mini-allegory of the economic polarization of America that was already grotesquely evident during the Reagan–Bush I era and is even more pronounced today."

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. — Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"

"I am ash. The earth is ash. The earth is a goddess. Therefore, I am not dead." (An epitaph from a grave on the Via Latina)