The Notebooks

I have a little magnet on my fridge that says, “I Still Read Books!”, which I bought at Atomic Books, where I bought a lot of my favorite magnets (like the one with a disapproving waitress that says “God Knows When You Don’t Tip.” It’s true, you know). Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that I also need a magnet that says, “I still write in notebooks!”

My favorite notebook is definitely the legendary Moleskine, favored by Picasso, Hemingway and Van Gogh, with its trademark rounded edges, elastic band, and expanding inner pocket. I have tried both the small versions, the larger (but still portable) one, both with lined paper and unlined. Recently, my mother bought me two sets of the Volants notebooks in pink and green as a souvenir from my reading at the BMA (which was fantastic, by the way. The reading went off without a hitch, and it was a great thrill to hear my poem on the tour. Make sure to check it out if you’re in Baltimore anytime over the next year or so.)

There’s no better portable notebook than the moleskines, and if you ever see me in real life you can be sure I have one somewhere close by, either in the stacks of paper on my desk, the stacks of books on the bottom of my couch, or stuffed in the messenger bag slung over my shoulder. However, they are certainly not the only notebooks I have or use– sometimes I need bigger ones, and sometimes I need cheaper ones, and sometimes I just need one quickly, and so I have drugstore notebooks, bookstore notebooks (the hardbacked clothbound kind that come in black or red), and even hand-me-down notebooks. I have a small stack of pea-green notebooks upstairs that my father had from a long-ago govenment job– I guess technically they might be ledgers? Their papers are tissuey and thin, and I haven’t used them much, but I enjoy them as objects. I spent a few hours this morning jotting notes in a spiral-bound notebook with wide purple, cream and black stripes on the cover– I’m getting ready to teach Marx and Gramsci and a bunch of other big critical theorists, which for me has always meant taking copious notes.

I have grown pretty dependant on many electronic functions that have replaced paper ones– I love my Outlook calendar, and I love email, and obviously I’m rather fond of blogging– but for composing the written word, or for making sense of it, or even just as a daily habit, nothing will replace jotting or scribbling it down in a trusted notebook. I could lose every email I’ve ever written tomorrow and feel no pang, but those stacks of notebooks I’ve got scattered all over my house? Those are crucial repositories for poems, stories, journal entries, articles and all manner of lists and handwritten ephemera. Those are chunks of my own personal history, the closest anyone will ever get to seeing the internal workings of my puzzling brain. For me, no sleek computer or technically dazzling program stands a chance against a simple notebook, and no screen could ever hold the charm and promise of a lovely blank page.