the Mathom-house

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits”

When I see something online that I think I might want to read, I send it to Instapaper. As I have commented before, if I wait a few days before checking my Instapaper queue, I typically find that at least 75% of the articles I have saved are no longer of interest to me, so I delete them. That has happened to me so often that I have incorporated it into my intellectual method. But usually a few of the things I’ve saved seem worth reading.

Sometimes when I’m reading them I’ll see something that I know I want to write about — I may even know precisely what I should say about it. In such cases the relevant passage goes straight into a text file and I begin drafting, or anyway sketching out, a post or an essay.

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain.

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings. Now, that practice inevitably creates misunderstandings, because most people online think that if you post something you obviously agree with it, unless you explicitly attack it. Before the day is out I’ll get emails from people shocked, shocked, that I posted something related to Renaud Camus without denouncing him. But spending a few minutes a day deleting angry emails is a relatively small price to pay for having a better way to sift and reflect on what I read.

So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it.