I love writing in notebooks! I can never tell if an idea is brilliant or not on the first go. It is so thrilling to have any idea at all that there's always a honeymoon period. A notebook is a safe place to store ideas so I can circle back around and revisit later. I think the key is to have one by your bedside and one in the car and one in your purse/backpack and not worry overmuch about if something is any good.
Really enjoyed this. I’ve always loved the idea of keeping notebooks but struggle to stay consistent. I fear I won’t leave much material for my future biographers.
I’ve been re-reading Anne Frank’s Diary and am struck this time around how she named her diary “Kitty” and addresses all of her entries to “her,” making the journal into a friend more than just an object. Because of the way her extroverted mind works, her notebook takes the role of external interlocutor rather than just an extension of her own mind. We experience the tragic benefit that her ordeal reads more like a lively and thorough correspondence rather than a private journal.
Thanks Lillian and sorry for the slow reply - I've discovered I don't have notifications on... I also struggle to stay consistent with notebooks... I always think the "next one" will be different. And yes "Kitty" is really striking isn't it. I wonder how common that was - if it was common? "Dear Diary" is familiar, but I don't know of anyone else who personified theirs so literally. But perhaps the line between a letter and a diary isn't all that clear.
The notebook as scene really is omnipresent here, there and everywhere. And, I’m really glad about that for I am a notebook man.
To continue your Larkin theme (I have to say as she appears in your piece, I always find Jones a very unsympathetic character with her vile anti-Semitism) it may well be the our mums and dads fuck us up, but it may also be the case that our notebooks (and latterly our attention to the notebooks of others — and, yes, I really dig the Allen both for its subject and for his writing) do a lot to un-fuck us up. Or at least to think creatively about our work and about our reading.
I, too, really liked the Brandon Taylor take on the theme (and, yes, the YouTube reference is pretty salutary a reminder of the shift in information culture in a very short time span).
One thing that does intrigue me is the impact the vast range of notebook advice and examples has on my own notebooking shtick; I might try a different way as a result of seeing a cool looking example in someone else’s notebook that they have posted (which always, to me, feels a bit off, a bit invasive…I’m much more aligned to @Katherine May and her view that, really, one’s notebook is one’s own and shouldn’t be seen by anyone’s eyes than one’s own) or reading the wise and helpful words of others…but, very soon it feels as if I were being made to write with my right hand and I soon drop the new found notion and return to how I’ve always done it. The one exception has been @Ted Gioia on the value of writing one’s own notes in whole sentences (something I seem never really did properly, relying on dashes—and utterances, so that when I return to them their meaning is — well — more gnomic than helpful).
Thanks very much for the comment. Yes Jones was hard to like, to put it mildly. Larkin wasn't exactly that sympathetic himself. I'm Jewish and will have to write about Larkin and anti-semitism at some point, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons.
And yes that whole question of whether other people's advice helps is really interesting. The thing about the Taylor method is that there's nothing personal about it, it's just the only/best way of taking notes while reading books! Hence why the way he frames the piece was so disorientating to me ("How I'm taking notes..."). But as for your own notebook and everything else that might go in one... I'm with you and Katherine May. It's interesting to think about ways in which notebooks might be more public or shared in some way, as they are for so many of the people Allen writes about. We can be too private, or at least I know I can. But if you're using a notebook as a diary, a little world, a scrapbook, a journal then I think you have to find your own way eventually and you need some privacy - sort of like becoming a person...
Hey, just to say I’m Jewish as well. I think it has always difficult to navigate and work through for oneself as a reader, for the work one writes, and for Jewish life and culture. And it’s very hard now.
I have gotten away from writing in notebooks. Mine had gotten so chaotic and confusing and I was using too many different notebooks at once. And I was starting to feel the pinch of having to STORE all the notebooks. All these physical objects. And they don't make spiral notebooks like they used to, with one long coil of wire so that you can turn the covers back on themselves. Now the darn things come off too easily and the back cover comes off and the pages start falling out. So I started trying to make my laptop into a virtual notebook where I could keep all the things I'm writing and thinking.
And yet I find trying to keep all my writing on the computer to be disorienting. I can never FIND anything on my computer. Because there's no physicality to it, no spatial recall. More and more I'm yearning to get back to writing in physical notebooks.
I love writing in notebooks! I can never tell if an idea is brilliant or not on the first go. It is so thrilling to have any idea at all that there's always a honeymoon period. A notebook is a safe place to store ideas so I can circle back around and revisit later. I think the key is to have one by your bedside and one in the car and one in your purse/backpack and not worry overmuch about if something is any good.
Really enjoyed this. I’ve always loved the idea of keeping notebooks but struggle to stay consistent. I fear I won’t leave much material for my future biographers.
I’ve been re-reading Anne Frank’s Diary and am struck this time around how she named her diary “Kitty” and addresses all of her entries to “her,” making the journal into a friend more than just an object. Because of the way her extroverted mind works, her notebook takes the role of external interlocutor rather than just an extension of her own mind. We experience the tragic benefit that her ordeal reads more like a lively and thorough correspondence rather than a private journal.
Thanks Lillian and sorry for the slow reply - I've discovered I don't have notifications on... I also struggle to stay consistent with notebooks... I always think the "next one" will be different. And yes "Kitty" is really striking isn't it. I wonder how common that was - if it was common? "Dear Diary" is familiar, but I don't know of anyone else who personified theirs so literally. But perhaps the line between a letter and a diary isn't all that clear.
I love the music in that little bit of verse! (Just had to shout that out of context).
Thank you - wish I could remember the rest!
Wow - thanks so much for this write-up! Absolutely delighted that you found so much to think about in it!
A total pleasure, I've been meaning to share it for ages.
Hey man, what a cool piece.
The notebook as scene really is omnipresent here, there and everywhere. And, I’m really glad about that for I am a notebook man.
To continue your Larkin theme (I have to say as she appears in your piece, I always find Jones a very unsympathetic character with her vile anti-Semitism) it may well be the our mums and dads fuck us up, but it may also be the case that our notebooks (and latterly our attention to the notebooks of others — and, yes, I really dig the Allen both for its subject and for his writing) do a lot to un-fuck us up. Or at least to think creatively about our work and about our reading.
I, too, really liked the Brandon Taylor take on the theme (and, yes, the YouTube reference is pretty salutary a reminder of the shift in information culture in a very short time span).
One thing that does intrigue me is the impact the vast range of notebook advice and examples has on my own notebooking shtick; I might try a different way as a result of seeing a cool looking example in someone else’s notebook that they have posted (which always, to me, feels a bit off, a bit invasive…I’m much more aligned to @Katherine May and her view that, really, one’s notebook is one’s own and shouldn’t be seen by anyone’s eyes than one’s own) or reading the wise and helpful words of others…but, very soon it feels as if I were being made to write with my right hand and I soon drop the new found notion and return to how I’ve always done it. The one exception has been @Ted Gioia on the value of writing one’s own notes in whole sentences (something I seem never really did properly, relying on dashes—and utterances, so that when I return to them their meaning is — well — more gnomic than helpful).
Thanks very much for the comment. Yes Jones was hard to like, to put it mildly. Larkin wasn't exactly that sympathetic himself. I'm Jewish and will have to write about Larkin and anti-semitism at some point, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons.
And yes that whole question of whether other people's advice helps is really interesting. The thing about the Taylor method is that there's nothing personal about it, it's just the only/best way of taking notes while reading books! Hence why the way he frames the piece was so disorientating to me ("How I'm taking notes..."). But as for your own notebook and everything else that might go in one... I'm with you and Katherine May. It's interesting to think about ways in which notebooks might be more public or shared in some way, as they are for so many of the people Allen writes about. We can be too private, or at least I know I can. But if you're using a notebook as a diary, a little world, a scrapbook, a journal then I think you have to find your own way eventually and you need some privacy - sort of like becoming a person...
Hey, just to say I’m Jewish as well. I think it has always difficult to navigate and work through for oneself as a reader, for the work one writes, and for Jewish life and culture. And it’s very hard now.
I have gotten away from writing in notebooks. Mine had gotten so chaotic and confusing and I was using too many different notebooks at once. And I was starting to feel the pinch of having to STORE all the notebooks. All these physical objects. And they don't make spiral notebooks like they used to, with one long coil of wire so that you can turn the covers back on themselves. Now the darn things come off too easily and the back cover comes off and the pages start falling out. So I started trying to make my laptop into a virtual notebook where I could keep all the things I'm writing and thinking.
And yet I find trying to keep all my writing on the computer to be disorienting. I can never FIND anything on my computer. Because there's no physicality to it, no spatial recall. More and more I'm yearning to get back to writing in physical notebooks.