Getting a New Notebook

I’m almost done with my little notebook—the spiral-bound best friend of anybody who takes up the task of writing.  This is an occasion of great sadness and joy, triumph and despair, loneliness and possibility.  I am filled with emotions best described by the words you might hear on a Bossa Nova record:  tristeza. 

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Now, imagine that word accompanied by a guitar, an ever-so-subtle piano and the generous voice of a woman with a drooping scarlet hibiscus in her hair.  This is the feeling I get when the time is spent.

I do all my preliminary writing in notebooks and almost none of it is good.  That is because it’s very slapdash.  Bits of dialog.  Lists.  Leads to follow up.  Things To Do.  Books recommended.  Smart-sounding phrases.  Quips.  It’s important to get all this stuff down because when I get up to write in the morning, I often don’t have many ideas.

moleskine-planneripod

Your relationship to a notebook is an intimate one but it is also casual.  When I was first buying notebooks, I used to spend days plotting the purchase of a new journal.  It had to be cute enough so that I would want to write on it.  But it also couldn’t be too nice.  Or else I would think it was too good for me and I would never dare to mess it up.  I have friends who buy those nice moleskin notebooks.  And when I was teaching college, I could and did purchase those pricey notebooks on the English Department’s dime.  But I couldn’t write in them.  The pressure was too great.

sexy-girl-at-bar-counter

For me, picking up a notebook is like picking up a broad in a bar in a detective fiction.  Yeah, she’s a bit cheap.  But water finds its level; you gotta feel natural around a dame.  And I feel natural around someone that’s a little world-weary, that’s okay with being knocked around, that’s expecting to be manhandled.  “I have to be able to take you out at a moment’s notice, baby…and you better not complain.”  That’s what I tell each notebook I look at before I drop a pretty penny on a purchase.  I try to treat each notebook nice at the beginning.

 

 

4 thoughts on “Getting a New Notebook

  1. Khanh – I think any time you write your thoughts down, whether it’s in the form of a journal or a writing notebook, what you write on becomes an extension of yourself. So no wonder you develop an intimate relationship with it. And starting a new relationship? Both exciting and awkward. No wonder a new notebook is an event…

    • Well put, Margot. People get so exasperated over my notebook fuss. It’s really the only purchase I think deeply about–not cars, not televisions, not clothes. All that stuff, I decide on in a blink of an eye. But a notebook! Because my wife is Korean, I used to spend a lot of time visiting there. The best notebooks are in these shops designed for little girls–“fancy stores”–and I must have cut a strange figure in the aisles. I would spend hours in the aisles among my peer set: little junior high girls who too adored cute notebooks with sweet cartoon characters…

  2. …and we are not alone in that, judging by the explosion of Moleskine clones in stores I see. And for good measure, check out Diana Raab’s “Writers and Their Notebooks” with a voyeuristic look over the shoulders into the notebooks of a number of noted authors. It’s addictive. And now, too, when i can’t find EXACTLY the one I want, I’ve discovered the myriad sites that teach you how to easily make my own pocket-sized customized notebooks (as if there weren’t already enough things to keep me from ACTUALLY writing!
    😉

    • It’s a fine line between obsessive and obsessive compulsive…I have walked in that nebulous borderland many a time. The key to finding the right notebook for you is the question of functionalism: after you get it, are you actually writing in it? I bought my wife a beautiful leather notebook from Italy made from an antique book with custom papers: it was an artifact. She wrote in it for about twenty pages.

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