Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches. Collecting useful snippets of information so that they could be easily retrieved when needed, or re-read to spark new ideas and connections, was one of the functions of a commonplace book. But the practice of maintaining a commonplace book and exchanging texts with others also served as a form of self-definition: which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality.
14. Do you ever think that checking your email every few seconds is like having a sharp, piercing sound that blasts right next to your ear occasionally, scrambling whatever thoughts you may have been forming, and making it difficult to form new ones? Remember that story where the guy's watching ballerinas with balls and chains on their feet on TV, and he's got this thing that makes a piercing sound attached to his head, and the government put it there because he was so smart it wasn't fair to everyone else? What was that story called?she said, she said.
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