Finally taking a look at SPIP — a CMS of French origin, ‘logiciel libre’. Used most in Spain, Italy and France, and much less for English context: http://www.spip.net/.

I’m only now beginning to appreciate the music & musicianship of Anthony Braxton. I have listened to him in the past, I have seen him perform live a few times, but his music never “arrived”, so to say, in my heart nor head. Yes, I loved him on Dave Hollands Conference of the Birds, I have a record with Ray Anderson, John Lindbergh and Thurman Barker from I think 1979 or 1984, I pushed record on the taperecorder whenever some Braxton would come on the radio. But when I was frantically discovering all the jazz, going from Parker to Dolphy to Coltrane and Ornette, and then on to David Murray, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill — I somehow skipped Braxton. I knew that he was considered a major voice and For Alto sort of a defining moment of seventies jazz/impro. I knew that I should try to get hold of his work with Barry Altschull. But his tone seemed so thin, he looked so rationally, unpassionately professorlike, that I never did.

But now look at his 1980 performance of Coltrane’s Impressions — at Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o0AYFRFX7g.

My discovery of Braxton is triggered partly by the discussion on 1970s jazz that travelled through various music-blogs last week — after Dave Douglas asked if someone could come up with a list of what is most worthwile from that era of jazz. See a.o. the wonderful http://destination-out.com/ & http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2006/08/ethan_iversons_.html. A difficult era — if you ask me –. Jazz lost it’s place in the hierarchy of music to rock, and after freejazz there seemed to to be no way ‘onwards’. Looking back in retrospect at the legacy of seventies jazz — even if one leaves out the European free improv-scene and some spaced-out jazzrock — this seems unbelievable: so many great new sounds evolved. I tried to make my list: Henry Threadgill (hardly mentioned, strangely), Lawrence Butch Morris (his conductions are, well, awesome — they move me deeply), Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Richard Muhal Abrams, John Carter, Gerry Hemingway (also hardly ever mentioned — his early trio with Ray Anderson & Mark Helias is wonderful), Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis… And that’s just a few of the persons who came up with new conceptions, mixtures and radical sounds. See, I don’t even mention New York downtown scene (some of the best Zorn-stuff is late seventies).

Next thing to do here is listen to Steven Shaviro’s lecture at the Thinking Through Affect-conference http://affect.janvaneyck.nl. Shaviro blogs here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/.

Very nice blog: http://www.waggish.org/. Mentions all my favorite writers :-)

Copied two articles from Critical Inquiry 31, (Autumn 2004) on the art of transmission & read those this afternoon:

Ann Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’ (p. 85-107)
Alan Liu, ‘Transendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’ (p. 49-84)

Ann Blair writes: “This historical interest [in note taking] is fueled not only by the rapid growth of the history of reading, of which the study of note taking is an offshoot, bit also by our current experience with new technologies and our sense (often more diffuse than articulate) that the computer is changing both the way we take notes and the kind of notes and writing we produce.” (p. 89)

Let’s make that ‘sense’ more articulate…

Apart from that, I think that my interest in note taking also derives from the fact that I have never been able to devise a working systems of note taking for myself, but keep on dreaming about it. Notes are in my notebook, on post-its stuck on the pages of books, in the margin on photocopied articles, in text-files on the computer (both in VoodooPad, TextEdit, BBEdit, MacJournal and — very rarely — a wiki), entries on my blog, and sometimes even sheets of A4-paper. I dream of having a database of quotations (like a commonplace book), a full bibliography with annotations, also covering websites. It seems so easy…

Just a sentence I read upon opening Dewey’s The Public and its Problems from 1927: “In general behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the public to the private realm.” (p. 50). Would that hold in times of ubi-blogging? Not if blogging is taken as publishing (which I think it should). Could you now write “In general behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the private to the public realm”? Not yet, I’d say. Though for some it would be true.

“In Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (1845), one of his published writings in which diary entries were frequently excerpted, Wright confessed that “writing a journal does me good. I can let off my indignation at the wrongs I see and hear. I am far happier when I write a little every day. I take more note too, of passing events, and see more of what is going on around me. I live less in the past and future, and more in the present, when I journalize . . . It saves me from many dark hours to write down what I see and hear and feel daily. My soul would turn in upon and consume itself, if I did not thus let it out into my journal.”

Right, this time it’s the quote as it appears in W. Caleb McDaniels article at http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/no-04/mcdaniel/index.shtml.

Also copy-pasted this bit — as it connects changes in technology to changes in reading & writing behavior; in the 19th century USA:

“Yet by 1850, this scarcity of print had given way to a bewildering abundance—a rapid growth no less impressive in its own time than the exponential proliferation of blogs in the last few years. Newspapers began to crop up not just in major urban areas but in smaller towns, and as print became more abundant, it was also diffused more widely and rapidly, thanks to a transportation revolution fueled by steam, railroads, and internal improvements like roads, canals, and an expanding postal service. These changes were, of course, not unique to the United States, but even foreign travelers to the young nation were awed by its burgeoning print culture.”

“The blog provides a means of processing and selecting from an overwhelming abundance of written matter, and of publishing that record, with commentary, for anyone who cares to read it. In some cases, these “readings” become influential in themselves, and multiple readers engage in conversations across blogs. But treating blogging first as a reading practice, and second as its own genre of writing, political or otherwise, is useful in forming a more complete picture of this new/old phenomenon.”

“Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s [a 19th century diary-writer] words, it is the need “to see more of what is going on around me.” And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.”

Caleb McDaniel at:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html

(I refered that article in the earlier post on commonplace books. Now I finally read it).

Lately I’ve been doing a tiny bit of research in the use of commonplace books. There is a close resemblance between the function of commonplace books (in for instance the Seventeenth century) and how some people use blogs. Some bloggers see, or call their blogs commonplace books. It’s a pretty well-known comparision, but I never really explored it until now.

Here’s some quick info, with links, and links to some pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46800

Here’s a danish blog that uses ‘commonplace book’ as a category — seems to have nice quotations… http://www.bookish.dk/index.php?cat=23. And a blog that calls itself a commonpace book: http://www.constantreader.org/v2/commonplace.html.

Some more relevant stuff:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html
http://cut-and-paste.de/
http://www.diyplanner.com/

There’s much more, but my dear reader, you can google as well as me.

In Making Things Public Anke te Heesen has a very nice short article about notebooks. I copied quite a few paragraphs from it; waht follows here is a digest of her article. I love the way she sees the notebook as a paper machine, as a technology that is an actor in how we write, store and process thoughts.

“The notebook as a paper-machine consists of the function noting and storing notes. ‘To note’ means first and foremost ‘to write down’, from the Latin notare, with the connotations sign, mark and writing, or from noscere, which means ‘to get to know’. ‘Note’, from notitia refers to this, namely, ‘to be known’. (…) Therefore apart from the actual act of wrigin, noting also describes a particular kind of perception: taking notice of something. Etymologically, here writing and taking notice are contained in one procedure, which at the same time implies habitual forming of a person and results in a praxis with paper that requires certain gestures, performed acts, rituals and tools.” p. 584

“From the sixteenth century on, bits of knowledge have been noted down in books with blank pages, stored in special boxes or placed in pigeonholes or compartments on bookshelves. In that era, the notes and small pieces of paper were the smallest material text-units of intellectual work. Organized note-taking was understood as a writing technique that could be learned, and it was one of the essential skills in the learned world.” p. 585

“Already in 1605, Francis Bacon recommends in Advancement of Learning the use of ‘commonplace books for entering the fruits of reading, quotations and references: ‘I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.'” p. 586

“The philosopher John Locke, who influenced entire generations of English gentlemen with his instructions of how to make commonplace books, rendered the procedure methodical. In one of his texts, published in 1706, he described how to keep such a notebook. The ‘Memory is the treaurey or Storehouse,’ he said, but one must provide memory with an orderly basis. ‘It would be just for all the World as serviceable as a great deal of Household Stuff, when if we wanted any particular Thing we could not tell were to find it.’ This organization begins with reading. One should first read a book but not write anything in the notebook. ‘The places we design to extract from are to be marked on a piece of Paper, that we may do it after we have read the Book out.’ So after putting in all the bookmarks, one should read the book a second time and decide what is relevant enough to be written down in the notebook. ‘I take a White Paper Book and what Size I think fit. I divide the two first pages, which face another, by parallel lines,’ and make an index. In so doing, one froms one’s own keywords. A commonplace book thus refers a quotation noted down to its original context (its origin, the book) and, a the same time, is a stock to draw on for the memory, the speech to be given or the text to be written.” p. 586

“Entire generations of intellectuals and young gentlemen were educated to practice this technique. The notebook was a technique in service of discipline.” p. 587

“Notebooks were a place for collecting things, a technique for discipline, chronological recording and evidence. Such a book with its blank or gradually filling pages was a paper-machine which took in what one fed it but at the same time directed the entries.” p. 588

“From the beginning, this paper technology adhered to certain rules: The entries had to be written in a straight line , and no blots or spots should mar the paper. A margin, which in the earliest years was often signalized by a fold in the paper, provided space for notes and commentaries and played a significant role in administrative forms of writing (files).” p. 588

Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook, A Paper Technology’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 582-589

So now on my desk:
John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place Book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0326.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/adv1.htm.

Ok, I’ll not try to summarize how Latour outlines his idea of Dingpolitik — (that we do not have hard facts, but matters of concern & that it’s about how publics gather around an issue, how an issue is a ‘thing’, not a fact but a gathering together). He uses of course etymology and refers to the Icelandic Thing — the parliament — to describe what a thing is; I’ll not go into the important role of mediation, of deliberation and yes, rhetoric; I’ll just say that I find this redefinition of politics very exciting and very clear. It also makes me pick up the texts that he refers to, specifically Dewey’s The Public and its Problems — Dewey being a favorite of mine ever since I read Art as Experience.

I’ve spent lots of hours in the shady garden in Kanne, going through every page of what N. calls ‘the brick’ (the catalogue). No I did not read every word, but at least I’ve seen every page and I’ve read a good deal of the articles. Sometimes I put a post-it on a page, sometimes with a few words scribbled on it. I’ll go through those ‘bookmarks’, harvesting the quotes…

‘Gathering’ (coming together, collecting): how — I thought — is that connected to the current technology around blogs…. rss (our own, personalized collection), gathering of different bits of content through keywords, using folksonomy; how Technorati (etc.) aggregates content; how even search engines do this. A blog collects bits of writing (and images, and links, and keywords) and people (readers) and other blogs. But the content is also collected, harvested, gathered.

I’m not stating anything new here — I’m trying out the words, and try to think (or visualize even) the different layers of mediation.

When I do this, I’m actually also going back full circle to what is probalby one of Latours many starting points for Making Things Public: the issue network-research of Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, that lead, in any case for N., also to the rediscovery of Dewey’s ideas about the public, and how publics gather (form) around an issue.

I somehow like to tie that in to current webtechnologies and current practices of online writing too. (Speaking as a blogger, blogs as partial conversations, blogging for oneself, publishing without a public, yet one’s texts are gathered, and most importantly maybe — bringing in rhetorics — the ‘ethos’ of the blogger).

Well, maybe it’s also sort of tying it (‘my thoughts on blogging’) into the politico-philosophical discourse.

Just thinking aloud. // Some quotes then…

“The cognitive deficiency of participants has been hidden for a long time because of the mental architecture of the dome in which the Body Politik was supposed to assemble. We were told that all of us — on entering this dome, this public sphere — had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses. Taking our seat under the transparant crystal of the common good, through action of some mysterious machinery, we woudl then collectively endowed with more acute vision and higher virtue.

(…)

Unfortunately, much like the Tower of Babel, those ‘palaces of reason’ (…) are no longer able to house the isssues they were supposed to gather.”

Remember how ‘messy’ is the world of blogs…

Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 30