Partita

Partita began as a series of notes about what I was reading in the summer of 2004. My wife and I were spending six weeks at our small apartment on Tybee Island, Georgia where our days are filled with walks, swims, trips to Wal-Mart, listening to NPR (music, Garrison Keilor's Writers’ Almanac and Car Talk), email, a bit of writing, and much reading of books from our own growing library and Tybee's rather bigger one on Butler Avenue. The first book, one of the 5 volumes of Churchill's History of the Second World War inherited from my father in-law's library, surprised me by its power and initiated the brief commentaries. I then decided to go on copying brief passages and commenting on much of what was read in the order it was read. I did not think of a collection, let alone another sort of order or a book, although I did remember Walter Benjamin's desire to compose a book entirely of quotations and also remembered Ben Jonson's Tunber, the prototype of what became known as common place books. Here is Tunber's title page:

MADE VPON MEN

AND MATTER: ASTHEY

have flow'd out of his daily Readings; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of the Times.

By

BEN: IOHNSON.