Tag Archives: notebooks

The Daily Planner:  Notebooks in a Box, Version with Complete Essay from Notebook

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I used to whine about the closing of The Daily Planner, a New York stationery store that sold its wares online.  I ordered the most splendid notebooks and notepads over the years.

And then The Daily Planner closed.

“Goddamn it!  Where am I supposed to get notebooks now?”

There was Target, there was K-Mart, there were office supply stores.  But I could not find any of the brands from the Daily Planner. 

And then… Eureka!  I was looking through a box today and found four notebooks from the Daily Planner. The orange Nava Notes notebook was still in the cellophane wrapping.  I’m clutching it to my bosom.

Let me very briefly catalogue these notebooks.

  1. An oversized orange Nave Notes paperback notebook. I love the quality of the paper and the spaces for Year, Day, and Month in tiny letters at the top of each page.  I used my first Nava Notes  for a book journal, but plan to be more eclectic now. .
  2. An oversized Clairefontaine green-and-purple pad (size A4, made in France).  Clairefontaine is known for its silky paper,  but, hilariously,  I used it to scribble an essay on the modern obsession with  butts.  (Essay below this list.)
  3.  a Miquelerius black and red spiral notebook, in which I have scribbled a strange story, or God knows what.    
  4. A light blue, aesthetic Apica spiral notebook, made in Japan.  I used it for notes on various Latin stuff I was reading.   There is a whole page on Latin synonyms for “conspire” and “conspiracy.”

And here is , yes, my infamous essay on butts, even cigarette butts.

Nobody ever talked about the Beatles’ butts.

On the cover of Abbey Road, John, Paul, Ringo and George are crossing Abbey Road. Their long suit jackets “cover their asses.” George wears jeans with a denim shirt tucked in. His butt is flat. I guess the question is, do John, Paul, and Ringo have butts? And the second question is: Do we care?

Personally, I’m more interested in their footwear.

John: white sneakers. George: white or tan desert boots. Ringo: black shoes. Paul: barefoot. Paul also holds a cigarette.

It’s 1969.  Were people showing off their butts? I don’t think so. Not unless they were Bridget Bardot. I don’t think Twiggy had  a butt. People “covered their asses” or “saved their asses.” Butts were also the ends of cigarettes. Unfortunate people are the butts of jokes.

But suddenly in the twenty-first century everything was about butts.  Women, by the way, are allowed to be flat-chested again – the first time since the 1920s flappers probably- because everything is about the cute, firm butt. To achieve that miracle, women are expected to work out at gyms and become as muscular as men: people in photos in the 1960’s and ’70s looked softer.

The obsession with butts is perhaps a bit scatological.

I’m too busy to think about it. But it’s very twenty-first century.

I am so silly. This is perfect blog fare. Sorry if I offended anyone.

I am normally in realistic mode, though.  No optimism about the future of the (daily) planet for me! I will use my new-old notebooks to  become a POSITIVE person. YES, I AM GOING TO LIVE MY LIFE AS A FANTASIST!

“Saw a unicorn today.”  Who cares if it’s a deer:  I say it is unicorn.

“Saw Gollum talking on a cell phone at a coffee house.”   

“A Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sighting in Omaha.”

“Shelley Duvall comes back to life and will star in a new movie.”  (I loved Shelley Duvall.)

I’ll fly in my house to the mall this afternoon.  It’s the new transportation.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?  DO YOU KNOW THESE GREAT BRANDS OF NOTEBOOKS?  WHAT BRAND, OR NON-BRAND, DO YOU USE?

LET ME KNOW.

Reading Gear & Book Series:  What You’ll Need This Summer

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This looks uncomfortable! A woman reading in the woods, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE Magazine, 1959

They tell you that you don’t need gear. They think they know, but they do not. “You’ve got a book.  What else do you need?”

Yes, you need the book. That is minimum gear.  You also need bookmarks, stickies, and a pencil. Some readers use popsicle sticks as bookmarks and highlight passages with lipstick. That’s their choice.  The rest of us need gear.

If you’re going camping, or reading outdoors, you’ve got to have gear.  Because any minute a herd of deer may trample on your campsite or enter your suburban yard WITHOUT PERMISSION and you have to clap your hands or feebly yell to drive them away and you may drop your book in the mud.  And a mosquito might choose to bite you. You need your Calamine lotion Nature is serious stuff.

GUYS AND GALS, THIS IS A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME READING OFFER.  YOU NEVER KNOW:  I MAY DECIDE TO DELETE THIS INFORMATIVE POST TOMORROW!

SUMMER READING GEAR!!!

Lawn chair, camp stool, or hammock.  Be comfortable.  It’s the first rule of living outdoors (which is basically what you’ll be doing).  A picnic table will never do. You need support for your back, and your butt will get sore from the wooden bench.  So head to the hardware store and buy the most comfortable chair and/or hammock you can afford.  There are old-fashioned lawn chairs, camp stools, plastic Adirondack chairs, plastic upright chairs, outdoor living room furniture, and outdoor chair cushions.  I fancy an outdoor chair cushion. 

Books.  You may think you need only one book for a day outdoors, but you are wrong.  What if you’re stuck in the woods and George Eliot’s Romola doesn’t suit? No, you need at least two books, possibly three.  Perhaps a classic, a mystery, and one of the award-winning books of the year.  At least three choices.

Tote Bag/First Aid Kit.  A national magazine sent me a free totebag for renewing my subscription. I have many totebags, but can always use one more!  Everyone needs ONE TOTEBAG dedicated to the survival kit.  It should contain:  Kleenex, Zyrtec (allergy pills), bookmarks, stickies, Band-Aids, Calamine lotion, Neosporin, sanitizer, wipes, sun screen, energy bars, water bottle, hat, cardigan (if it gets cold, which it will not), bug repellent, deer repellent, flashlight, an apple, and a cookie (or a madeleine to inspire you to read Remembrance of Things Past (which I hear is funny in French!).

Notebook.  Some readers like to take notes. And so one needs a reading notebook.  Notebooks can be cheap or expensive:  you can buy spirals or composition notebooks for 50 cents at office supply stores, or Moleskines and similar hardcover or softcover notebooks for $10 and up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other stores online.  I like some of the brands more than others, but IT’S ALL PAPER!

Pens.  Some like ballpoints, others like fountain pens, others prefer Bics.  Bics and cheap pens used to be great, but the quality has gone down, and they seem to run out of ink after a couple of hours.  Personally I prefer inexpensive ballpoints.  Newspapers and various websites run reviews of pens and notebooks at least once a year, if you want to pick an extpert’s brain.

Iced tea.  Wherever you go this summer, you will need iced tea.  If you’re on the road, you can pop into a convenience store and buy a bottle, but it’s easy to make at home.  Stick five or ten teabags (you can get special iced tea bags with specific directions on the box) in boiling hot water for five minutes.  Pour tea into an icy pitcher and drink.  Sugar and lemon optional.  N.B.  You’ll need a jug if you’re taking this on the road.

And remember to bring snacks!

THREE RECOMMENDED SUMMER BOOK SERIES!

Are you committed to reading a series this summer? Here are three recommendations.

Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence quintet. This semi-autobiographical five-volume series tells the story of Martha Quest, a heroine every liberal woman identifies with. Lessing takes us through Martha’s rebellious adolescence on an African farm, through two marriages and secretarial work in a nearby town during World War II, nightly Communist meetings and activism in the Black community, and finally a move to England at age 30.

This last novel, The Four-Gated City, differs from the others in that it is part realistic, part experimental. Martha becomes a factotum secretary/editor/housekeeper for her leftist employer, Mark, who lives with three generations of his family in a large London house. Martha and Mark discuss and chart politics in his study, try to create a safe living space for his mentally ill/psychic wife, Linda, and deal with the impact of Mark’s brother’s defection to Russia: his Jewish wife commits suicide, and their fragile son retreats into himself and is almost too rebellious even for a progressive school.

Not only are Mark and Martha children of violence, born in the World War I era, but Mark’s children of the ’60s have grown up in the shadow of World War II, and their emotional psychology is also shaped by violence. The book ends on a surreal note, after an unidentified accident destroys parts of the world. This unputdownable, intelligent novel is well worth reading, still very pertinent, even better than The Golden Notebook.

Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger trilogy. Arnold Bennett is a neglected 20th-century writer, best-know for his classic, The Old Wives’ Tale. The Clayhanger trilogy is also stunning, set in the Five Towns in the Midlands, the story of a dissatisfied man. The protagonists are Edwin Clayhanger, a young man who longs to be an architect but gets stuck running the family pottery business, and artistic Hilda Lessways, who eventually marries Edwin, but still has feelings for her ex-husband, who had gone to prison. Bennett is a consummate storyteller and we especially feel for vulnerable Edwin. Hilda can look after herself, but she is a strong woman character, capable of dealing with what comes her way.

Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, a Golden Age Detective Novel series. My favorite is Five Red Herrings, because I like the Scottish setting, but Gaudy Night and Murder Must Advertise are more entertaining and brilliant. These mystery classics are readable and entertaining. Tuck one of these in your totebag and you’ll never be sorry.

Tablets, Diaries, and Commonplace Books:  “The Notebook,” by Roland Allen

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I am a fan of notebooks. It began with Big Chief tablets, three-ring notebooks, autograph books, diaries, spiral notebooks, and blue books (the booklets used for exams). 

Roland Allen’s charming new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, is a history of notebooks, tablets, commonplace books, diaries, sketchbooks, parchment and paper. Allen’s style is clear and casual, the organization of this vast subject economical,  and he links the styles of notebooks to artists, writers, businessmen, families, and publishers from ancient times to the present.

He begins by engaging the reader with the history of the classic black Moleskine notebook.  Moleskines were first manufactured in  France around the turn of the 20th century, and used by Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway, and other notebook lovers.

The travel writer Bruce Chatwin was a famous fan: he wrote about his Moleskine in his novel, The Songlines.  Allen includes the following excerpt.

“Do you mind if I use my notebook?” I asked.

“Go ahead.”

I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band.

“Nice notebook,” he said.

“I used to get them in Paris,” I said. “But now they don’t make them anymore.”

“Paris?” he repeated, raising his eyebrow as if he’d never heard anything so pretentious.

Inspired by this passage, Maria Segrebandi, an Italian translator, recommended the Moleskine to her friend Francesco Fransechi, who revived and manufactured it as a small signature item for his company, Modo & Modo.  The Moleskine became an international success, and is sold in bookstores everywhere.  Barnes and Noble, the largest seller of Moleskines in the U.S., has its own identical Moleskine knock-off, made according to the same design by the same manufacturer.  And of course the Moleskine now comes in many sizes and colors, in hardback and paperback.

The history of the Moleskine segues gracefully into ancient history. Allen describes the first prototype we have of a notebook, a palm-sized hinged writing tablet, the detritus of a shipwreck near Turkey in 1305 B.C.  

Roman woman with tablet and stylus

 This marvelous book is full of fascinating details. He describes the pugillares (handheld writing tablets) in ancient Rome, illuminated manuscripts, ledgers in the Middle ages, the zibaldoni (commonplace books) used by Petrarch, Chaucer, Erasmus, Montaigne, and, much earlier, Pliny the Elder, the Dutch friendship books, sketchbooks used by Durer and other artists, diaries of writers and others, and the travel notebooks of Melville,  Mark Twain, and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

By the way, the Europeans had their own version of “Moleskines”:  publishers exploited the craze for friendship books and commonplace books by producing beautiful notebooks with floral borders and blank templates for coats of arms and other devices. 

Let me know your favorite brand of notebook. Are you a Moleskine fan?  Or do you prefer Rhodia, Leuchtturm, decomposition books, composition books, spiral notebooks, Paperblanks, or off=brand from WalMart or Target?   

What the Dickens? The Funniest Annotation Ever on Juvenal & Indecipherable Travel Notes

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We have duplicate copies of Dickens’s novels.  If it exists, we would like to  donate them to the  What the Dickens? bookshop

My husband points out that the name What the Dickens? would be a PR disaster.  For one thing,  people no longer say, “What the Dickens?” For another, the average person, unless he or she is shopping at Barnes & Noble,  prefers  to frequent bookshops with simple names containing the word ”books.”   And it is true that every independent bookshop in the state (except one) is called [Something] Books or the [Something] Bookshop.

The phrase “What the Dickens?” is obsolete in the 21st century, of course. It was not thriving in the 20th century, either. “What the Dickens are you doing?” my mother occasionally said. The phrase was  a polite reprimand for any number of silly, annoying things:  burning incense (it stank), wearing an Army jacket (we were citizens co-opting an army jacket as an anti-war protest tactic), or pinning a Frodo Lives! button on  a good sweater.

And it turns out that the expression What the Dickens? has nothing to do with Dickens. When  I looked it up in an old Webster’s dictionary I learned that  “dickens” means “devil” or “demon,” and is “used in exclamations or as a mild imprecation.” It is related to the proper names, Dick and Dicken, and was first seen 1590-1600, the lexicographer believes.

One shouldn’t even capitalize Dickens. What the dickens?

More on Annotation & a Comic Note on Juvenal’s Satires

Journal, 2015-2017

I have gently mocked the personal annotation trend and recommended keeping books pristine.

I am a notebook fan when it comes to note-taking. Today I came across an orange Moleskine notebook, which I dedicated to a variety of purposes from 2015 to 2017.

It is mostly a traditional book journal, with a few jottings and quotes. And t wrote what is probably the funniest modern annotation  on  Juvenal’s Satire VI (p. 40, in the Foiio Society edition). Juvenal in English is not for prudes, but his satires are more obscene in Latin, and like all Roman satirists, he is a misogynist. (The gentle Horace is even more misogynistic in his satires.) It is a genre thing. You have to accept it. Like Lenny Bruce.

Juvenal’s derision of women who fit the profile of groupies is so sharp and funny and true that I noted in response:   “Monica Lewinsky.”

Juvenal writes, “Others in winter, when the theaters are closed…/ will yearningly fondle souvenirs of their favorite actor,/their tragedy king-  his mask, his thyrsis, his jock-strap.”

My illegible travel writing is less successful. I observed on one trip,  “It is a [something] culture.” But what kind of culture? i can make out an “s.t”  Stream?  Street?  Steampunk?  Stylish? Stodgy? Stunning?

At the time the notes meant something [Something?].