Commonplace Books, Journals, Weblogs

Readers have kept journals about their reading probably since reading began. In the 18th and 19th Centuries the Commonplace book was an essential accompaniment to reading. Imagine how scarce and expensive books were! To read and then mark or annotate the text would likely have been a travesty. There were no copy machines or easy ways to capture what you read and if you had to return the book to a friend or library you were out of luck. The solution was to copy out passages you wanted to keep and refer to. This was different from taking notes; it entailed saving in your own "cache" the wisdom and style you wished to savor later. Clearly readers would also comment on and perhaps react to these passages and their ideas.

• The Beinecke Library at Yale had an exhibition of Commonplace manuscripts and they describe their display here <http://www.yale.edu/opa/v29.n34/story3.html>. Read it for a quick overview of commonplace writings in history. Examine this treatment of the same exhibition for its images. <http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm>
• For a quick look at a contemporary commonplace book, visit the Constant Reader's page called Commonplace book <http://www.constantreader.org/v2/commonplace.html> This site apparently has many contributors of noteworthy passages and does not include any commentary with the inclusions! We can assume the passages "speak for themselves."

Journals

Today journaling is less a mechanism to honor and save what we read and more a way to respond. It is a way to muse, to react, to let the reading take you to where ever it can. It seems by definition to be an entirely private writing, unsolicited, unstructured, even unread by anyone but yourself. Like any journalizing, it must meet your needs and your needs alone. A journal is a fine place to let your reactions go, to free associate, to wander away from that which was read if you like!

Now some journals serve other purposes than responding to what we read. In fact, writers often use journals as well to stimulate their creativity. We can imagine that as writers, they want to be writing all the time. As readers, they want to react to what they have read, perhaps practice similar techniques. There is probably not much to be gained from making hard and fast distinctions between the two, the reader's and the writer's journal.

Sometimes, the journal is assigned in classes of literary study. Here, for example, is a link to a site which is directed at teachers who wish to do this. On it you can get an idea of how the journal is thought of as an aid to a reader who wishes to understand and analyze literature. The page is titled "Reader Response Journals" <http://ep.llnl.gov/bep/english/9/tResponse.html> One good suggestion it makes is to think about writing "dialectically" and for that it lays out different roles you can assume in your journal:

• Straight Talker: Speak directly to a character and "give your two cents' worth". If you could stop the action at a particular point, what would you say?
• Judge: Evaluate an action or a decision by a character or characters. Do you feel a wise or a poor decision has been made? Why? What decision would you prefer to have been made? Why?
• Memory Keeper: Perhaps you remember a similar experience from your own life, about a time when you kept something secret . . . and because of that secret, events began "to snowball." Describe that experience; explain how it relates to the story.
• Artist: What visual images come to mind as you read the story? Draw those images. Write also what your visual image means or represents in the story.
• Palm Reader: What has occurred that you consider foreshadowing? What do you believe will occur in the future? Why?

This emphasizes the "response" aspect of keeping a journal. There are tons of sites online that encourage teachers to use the assigned reader response journal to encourage students to read and respond more deeply. If a journal is being used for assessment or grading, I would suggest you keep another one, just for yourself!!

Blogs

In print, keeping your private and personal journal of responses to what you read may seem pretty staid and secure. Today, so much of our constant writing has migrated online that no page on journalizing and reading would be complete without taking into account BLOGs or Web logs, journals in which the reader who writes shares with the universe just what they think about anything and everything. Blogging combines the attention and memorialization of the commonplace book (in that they often address other websites or blogs and link to them) with the expressiveness of the journal (in that the voices are personal and self-actualized) and they are public! Thus they also invite responses from readers who offer their reactions to the blogs.

Write honestly for yourself. Write honestly for others. Here is a splendid article in Salon.com written by Tom Bissell. Titled, "I'd Prefer Not To," the article presents Bissell's honest reactions to several well canonized authors, and probes why he has not ever been able to read them. You might find his candor shocking. Here he is a critic and reviewer, a clearly well educated, literate writer who admits he cannot read Henry James. He is included in this discourse on journal writing because he is obviously able to admit first to himself what his experience of reading has been. Conceivably he journaled about this reaction. Before you can write honestly for others you must be able to write honestly for yourself and journals seem the candidate for this!!

Speaking honestly, I picked up the link to Bissell's article from a blog! This blog is written by Jeff Ward and just one part of his website which is a compilation of his creative offerings. He is clearly one example of a READER who writes for the web. Here is a link to his main page: http://www.visibledarkness.com/ While there visit his essay titled, "Restating the Obvious" which he subtitles "Learning a Lesson about Reading." <http://www.visibledarkness.com/catalogue/obvious.html> Here is Jeff's blog. <http://www.visibledarkness.com/blog/> Explore and take note of his constant dialog with literature.

Here is another online blog which is worth your while. It is Mark Bernstein's blog. http://www.markbernstein.org/ Linked from his blog site are his reviews of books among which is a relevant review of a book on blogging, Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice for Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Bernstein's review is well worth your time for in it he describes and questions many aspects of blogging. <http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/WeblogHandbook.html>

So, what's to be done?? Let's assume you do not have a teacher who assigns a journal and gives you a set assignment! Start small; get a blank notebook and begin. Make it what you want it to be. If you want to involve technology, keep your journal in a series of files. What could be simpler? There are no rules but your own. Of course there are many books you can read on journaling, but then the idea is to write, not read about writing.

If you want to do a blog, you can get help for that online! Just ask Google.com or any other search engine to find you help for blogging.