The commonplace-book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century.
William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.
In this debut collection, award-winning poet and baker Kate Lebo redefines everything we thought we knew about pie. An eclectic mix of prose poems, fantasy zodiac, and humor, A Commonplace Book of Pie explores the tension between the container and the contained while considering the real and imagined relationships between pie and those who love it. Expanding on Lebo's successful chapbook of the same name, this volume includes new poems as well as more than two dozen Americana-themed illustrations by artist Jessica Lynn Bonin. Bonin's art adds a sense of nostalgia alongside Lebo's modern style, and together with the text, puts pie and the art of baking in a fresh, contemporary context. Kate Lebo makes poems and pies in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, and Poetry Northwest. When Kate is not creating poems, she is hosting her semi-secret pie social, Pie Stand, around the US, teaching creative writing at the University of Washington and Richard Hugo House, and pie-making at Pie School, her cliche-busting pastry academy. Jessica Lynn Bonin is an illustrator and mixed-media artist whose work adds a modern twist to familiar images of American culture. Bonin's murals are displayed in New York,Oregon and Washington state. She lives and works in a former hardware store and lumberyard in Edison, Washington.
Common Place is about how we can develop community and create convivial and sustainable places in the face of disjointed and fast-placed growth. It offers strategies for reclaiming and improving our neighborhoods and cities, which today are increasingly dominated by fear and disintegration and the automobile. Douglas Kelbaugh offers here a personal, passionate statement of how architecture and urban design can enrich our lives. At the heart of the book are summaries of eight design workshops, or charrettes, each consisting of five days of brainstorming by university students, community leaders, and design professionals. The charrettes apply design concepts to real problems such as housing, transportation, and suburban sprawl. Thousands of hours of creative effort have produced a blueprint for the Seattle region that is pertinent to other regions. Bridging academic theory and on-the-ground practice, Common Place is an indispensable book for designers, planners, city officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.
Why do some people call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept devastating loss or actions without complaint? Sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey examine more than 400 case studies to explore the various ways the law is perceived and utilized, or not, by a broad spectrum of citizens.
"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." —The Washington Post Book World The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography—these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture. Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments? Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.
Reading is perhaps best understood as a peculiar form of writing, and vice versa. Renaissance thinkers took this paradox seriously, giving it concrete form in their "commonplace books," manuscript journals of passages copied from assorted texts and organized under various headings. The origins of the practice lay in the preparatory methods of classical oratory and medieval sermon composition, but commonplacing achieved the status of a true art among humanists like Erasmus and Montaigne, who used these notebooks to maintain command over an ever-expanding body of published texts, while culling material for their own correspondence, essays and literary compositions. The perfect gift for the itinerant thinker, this handsome volume is a facsimile of a notebook originally printed in 1797--the only remaining copy of which is held in the rare books collection of Princeton University--and reprints its introduction to the principles of commonplacing as practiced by the philosopher John Locke, as well as 144 blank pages for collecting and cataloguing your own thoughts.
The notes and commonplace book employed by H. P. Lovecraft, including his suggestions for story-writing, analyses of the weird story, and a list of certain basic underlying horrors etc. etc. designed to stimulate the imagination.
Common Place negotiates intimacy while navigating the complexities of memory, addressing shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes challenged by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush hour transit, Sarah Pinder explores seeing and being seen in our most private and public of moments. With considered, quiet urgency, these poems name our ambiguous, aching present and look towards what comes next.
A thrilling new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been adopted by an American couple. Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change. Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city. After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations. A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters.
