On Gay Marriage

So. Guess what has been in the news a whole lot lately, what with the whole North Carolina and Obama news? Gay marriage.

I’m just going to go on record here as saying, I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever. There’s a lot of snarky quotes about gay marriage going around, and I’m going to sum up my views of the situation with one: “Being mad that someone’s (gay) marriage is against your religious beliefs is like being mad at someone who is eating cake because you’re on a diet.” I’m pretty sure I’m paraphrasing that, but you get the idea. Don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Don’t get married to another dude (or lady). And oh my god, the arguments about it destroying the sanctity of marriage when celebrities change spouses every couple of months… Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears have done more to destroy the sanctity of marriage than the entire gay community combined could ever hope to do. HERE, AMERICA. THIS IS WHAT GAY MARRIAGE IS DOING TO OUR COUNTRY:

Actually, I don’t think NPH and his boyfriend are officially married yet. But you know, OH MY GOD, THEY ARE GAY AND IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP AND RAISING TWO BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN IN A LOVING ENVIRONMENT. HOW EARTH-SHATTERINGLY TERRIBLE.

I went to a private Christian (Seventh-Day Adventist) school from pre-school through seventh grade. I had a lot of religion crammed down my throat: a mandatory class every year, coupled with chapel on some-but-not-every-Friday and a few curious times of actually attending proper Sunday Saturday school and church services. As a result, I am really good at the Biblical categories on Jeopardy, and I learned that I’m not a huge fan of organized religion.

I have some great friends that are Christian, or some variant thereof. Their faith is something important to them, and the great majority of them are awesome, reasonable, non-bigoted people. I am totally cool with that. There are a lot of Christians, or people calling themselves such, that are vicious, hate-spewing people. I am not cool with that.

I think the main thing I took away from private school, with the exception of a strange affection for vegetarian hot dogs, is that a lot of people that call themselves Christians are, in fact, hypocritical jackasses. I spent a lot of time hearing about how Jesus is love and happiness and rainbows and cuddling sheep, how he loves everyone and forgives sinners and lepers and what-have-you, and wants everyone to go to heaven… unless you’re gay. In which case, you’re pretty much hopeless and going to burn in hell for all eternity.

Even to a kid in elementary school, that didn’t make a lot of sense.

I’ve had gay friends. They were just as awesome as my straight friends. They were people that worried about math tests, just like me, and were concerned about their clothes, just like me, and had crushes they agonized over, just like me. They were just guys blushing over guys, or ladies blushing over ladies, which really doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Which is why knowing that people like this exist horrifies me in ways that I can’t adequately express in words:

There are a lot of things in America’s past that I’m embarrassed by. Slavery isn’t a great point in our past. Neither is segregation or racial prejudice. I sincerely hope that when we look back on this time in the future, we look back on it with the same amount of shame that I feel for a time when interracial marriages were banned. Because, as cliche as it sounds, we are all just people. White, black, Christian, atheist, straight, gay… whatever. Cut them open on an operating table, and everything looks pretty much the same.

…Unless you’ve got situs inversus or some other weird shit going on.

Despite the fact that I like vegetarian hot dogs, which most reasonable people abhor, I am not a vegetarian, or anything close to it. I’m the kind of person that piles meat on top of other meat. A filet mignon is made infinitely better by wrapping that sucker in bacon. Am I having a cheeseburger? Let’s add bacon to that, too. And a fried egg for good measure. I’m not a vegetarian, but I have no desire to pass legislation outlawing veggie burgers or tofurkey (as much as tofurkey creeps me out). Coincidentally, although I have no desire to marry another woman, I don’t see why women who do want to marry other women shouldn’t be able to.

I could list all the reasons why the arguments those against gay marriage use are wrong. Gay marriage ruining the sanctity of the marriage between a man and a woman? Oh, right, because celebrity marriages in Hollywood like Britney Spears’ three-day fling aren’t doing it. All the children being raised by gay parents will turn out gay themselves, further perpetuating the horror? Right, because straight parents never end up having gay children. Oh, some verse in Leviticus claims that man lying with man is an abomination? Well, just a few pages from that it also claims that blended fabrics are also wrong in the eyes of God, so you’d better toss that cotton-poly shirt you’ve been holding onto.

I think that America has taken steps to correct a lot of things over time. We no longer allow slavery. Women have the right to vote. Interracial marriages are legal. I can only hope that we’ll make every attempt to correct our country’s stance on same-sex marriages. Marriages that have, for the record, been legal in a number of international countries for awhile now, and have yet to herald rains of fire, seas of blood, or any other world-ending catastrophes.

I’m so incredibly proud that President Obama came forward and declared his support of same-sex marriages. I know that a lot of Republicans are crying that he’s only doing it for the vote in election year. Quite frankly, even if it is just for votes, I think it’s still a huge step forward in the right direction.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others died in the process of securing civil rights for African Americans. Matthew Shepard and Sean W. Kennedy and many others have died due to homosexual hate crimes. Can we please just get past all of this and stop hurting and killing people based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or any other factors like that? It’s horrible. It makes Baby Jesus cry. I mean, I’m an atheist, but I’m pretty sure if Jesus does exist and he’s out there, he’s shaking his head at us for missing the bigger picture.

Here’s some smart-assery from Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr I completely agree with:

So congratulations, North Carolina. Last night, you struck a decisive blow for loneliness. And tonight, as you go to sleep beside your heterosexual life mate, you can rest assured that all across your great state, a gay man or lesbian woman is crying themselves to sleep in solitude and making your relationship stronger with each tear.

-Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

And anyways… I didn’t want to end on a negative note. Not all those people calling themselves Christian are prejudicial bigots. Here’s a beautiful video from Brigham Young University, telling LGBT students and others related to the university, “It gets better.”

Why Analogue Books are Best: Two Views

(image via Bookshelf Porn)

Jonathan Franzen:

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring….Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough….Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change….Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Maurice Sendak:

Fuck them, I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be, I will be dead, I won‘t give a shit.

(via Austin Kleon)

PAX 2011 (Part 1/2)

Another PAX come and go. I’m sad, of course: there’s something amazing about being at a convention with so many other people that you have so many things in common with. It leads to wonderful random conversations and interactions. On the other hand, five days* of living out of a backpack in a hotel room (or a suite of two hotel rooms, this year) with 3-7 other people is kind of exhausting, as is all the walking, standing, and sitting on generally hard floors. My shower last night at home with proper water pressure and collapsing into my own bed at the end of the night was so amazing I have no words for it.

*My group arrives on Thursday, the day before the show begins, and Monday, the day after it ends, so that we don’t have to rush around and try to make flights an hour after PAX ends.

But! Here’s my wrap-up as far as the weekend goes.

LONG AND PHOTO-INTENSIVE POST FOLLOWING THE CUT. (And this is only part 1 of 2.)

More From the Archives (High School Edition)

What was a lovely benefit from spending a weekend scanning stuff into my computer? It makes for great and easy posts of curious and interesting flat paraphernalia. Like today’s high school edition! Last names and phone numbers have been edited to protect the innocent.

(1) This amusing and slightly terrifying drawing is from my Algebra 2 class junior year (where I met Chris). This is the kind of disturbing thing the teenage mind comes up with when faced with factoring polynomials. And when you have an openly gay friend that likes to make your completely-straight crush feel really, really uncomfortable on a daily basis.

(2) I found this letter in my locker at the end of my junior year. It was originally anonymous, reading:

Dear Kara

Even though school has come and gone, which means we have to part, From the beginning to the end of summer, you will always be in my heart.

From,

Someone

My friend Victor (who I had Honors English with) thoughtfully marked out the meter of the message (which he praised in the beginning, but criticized as getting a little sloppy towards the end), and then signed it as being from him instead, writing in his name and number. How sweet, no?

(3) A short sample of my biotech homework from senior year, just so you could all see my freakishly neat handwriting. I am sorry to say that it has only gone downhill since then. Or maybe it’s a good thing, I feel like my writing now at least has more personality to it. And I can still write as neatly (and smaller) than this if I really try.

Also, I really like whichever one of my lab table ladies kindly wrote in my name for me, and added that (very true) parenthetical message.

(4) My senior year I participated in the Moot Court contest with my friend, Davina. The case was Roper v. Simmons, which is about the juvenile death penalty. We were prosecution, if I remember correctly, arguing for his execution. The format was something along the lines of Opening Statement > Main Argument > Rebuttal > Closing, and as I was delivering the rebuttal, it was my job to take notes during the other side’s main argument.

I had a really awesome blue legal pad, apparently, which I kind of like a lot better than the standard yellow… I have no idea where this notepad is now. The majority of the page is actual useful notes on points I wanted to make (and a reminder to call my opponents the “opposing council,” apparently), but there is my half of a silent conversation I was apparently having with Davina across both of our legal pads, including calling her a brat, reminding her (and myself) of a Mock Trial meeting at Wednesday at 5, and inviting her to my family’s cabin the “weekend of 28th.”

Also, the judges were actually really sweet and great people once they weren’t judging us for competition, as the second page clip notes.

Also, in reference to the Totalitarian Regime and the Unarmed Protestors note at the end of my last post: today in class, my poetry instructor today said something along the lines of,

“I was going to go with the Infidel Leaders and SWAT Team 6, but I thought it might have been a little too soon.”

I am really going to miss this class when it’s over.

Art/Words

Sometimes I think that I over-think things. A lot. Case in point: this morning I spent twenty minutes agonizing over what kind of sketchbook to buy in the lower level of our campus bookstore, the entire floor dedicated to stickers, pens, notebooks, sketchbooks, origami paper, stamps, and other miscellaneous art/office supplies (swoon).

I tilted my head and stood in the sketchbook aisle and debated over…

• size (8.5 x 11? 9 x 12? bigger? smaller?)
• binding (permanent to squash the rip-and-toss mentality when I don’t like something, or spiral-bound for the amazing lay-flat-or-fold-over-for-workability-and-scanability)
• paper color (white? off-white?)
• perforation (wanted or not?)
• paper thickness (dry vs. wet materials?)
• tooth (texture)

…and any other number of factors. The only thing I flat out knew that I wanted going in was a thick/sturdy and plain black cover. I actually ended up buying one style (110 sheets, permanent-bound) before my morning poetry class, and then ended up returning it for a 80-sheet, slightly-thicker-paper, spiral-bound book. The permanent binding always ends up irritating me… even when they are designed to lay flat, they never really truly do.

(Pentalic Wire Bound Sketchbook, 11 inch by 8.5 inch, Micro Perfed 80 Sheets)

In any case, the underlying point I wanted to make was – journals. Sketchbooks. Notebooks. I’m kind of psycho when it comes to them. Also, I don’t draw. So, why the sketchbook instead of a notebook?

I have a Moleskine daily planner for 2011, in a bright and cheery red. It’s their large size (5.25″ x 8.25″), lined, one page per day. There are ups and downs to this: I force myself to write every day, because a blank day makes me sad. But… sometimes I don’t feel like writing. Sometimes I have more to say than can fit on thirty or so lines. Sometimes I want to draw, and the doodles get interrupted by lines, which bothers me.

So, a sketchbook. Unlined paper, so my handwriting can be as large and loopy and day-dream-y as I want, or as tiny and crammed together as I can make it. Ironically enough, my 8.5″ x 11″ sketchbook with PAPER SOURCED FROM CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE FORESTS, as the cover sticker proudly proclaims, with luxuriously thick paper (standard printer paper is about 20 lbs., this sketchbook is 70 lbs.), was under ten bucks ($9.95 exactly, since Oregon has no sales tax) – a journal, similarly spiral-bound with a comparable number of sheets, was like twenty-five bucks! There’s your lesson – if you feel like writing on large sheets of unlined paper, buy yourself a sketchbook. It’s $15 cheaper than essentially the exactly same book, marketed as a journal.

But I digress, again. I’ve been reading! Both real books and blogs. One post posed the question of how to get on with keeping a journal, how scary it is to write your first words in a blank book. One commenter, Erika, offers her take on the problem, which I thought was a brilliant solution:

Emily- This is what I do … my sketchbook/journal is an “EVERYTHING” notebook. Meaning that I use it for everything except phone messages (which I keep in a separate, smaller notebook next to the phone, so other people in the studio can refer to it).

In my “everything” notebook I sketch, write lists, make notes, write little journal entries. This eliminates scraps of paper and random little notebooks all over the place.

To me it’s less intimidating to draw a sketch of a client logo design next to an office supply shopping list than it is to draw on a blank page. I use the same notebook to write story ideas, write journal entries, paste magazine clippings, draw new letterpress card ideas, work through client projects, and write shopping lists …

I go through about one notebook every six weeks. Sometimes they are filled with pages and pages of business plans, and not many sketches, but sometimes they’re filled with great new product ideas. I always buy and use the same big spiral unlined sketch pad (sized small enough so that I can scan in an entire page if I need to). I basically took the label “journal” and “sketchbook” out of the equation, which made the entire process less stressful (I, too, used to be terrified to sketch in a beautiful new journal). Of course sometimes I still write notes and sketch on random pieces of paper, but I just paste them into the “master” book! Hope that helps. I like Jw’s suggestion of using different media, too….

As far as books go, this came in the mail:

The entire title is quite a mouthful:

Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum

Impressive, no? It’s really a wonderful book, though. Full of all sorts of lists, in words and in art, and brilliantly put together. I am savoring it a few pages at a time, because I just finished Writers and Their Notebooks, and it was amazing, and I wish that it wasn’t over.

I also have been spending hours on tumblr, which is wonderful and such a terrible, terrible time-sink at the same time. Also, it doesn’t set off spell-check’s ire on WordPress, which both surprises me and does not surprise me at the same time. In any case, i can read was my favorite all weekend. All their posts are words (quotes, thoughts, song lyrics, etc.) portrayed artistically – a wonderful mess of different fonts, handwriting, and art. Two of my favorites are below:

tl;dr: I bought a sketchbook because this weekend I came to the realization that the lines between art and words are blurred, and I can play with both.

(And sometimes I have more than 5.25″ x 8.25″ of things to say each day.)

Blast From the Past (Part 1)

I drove home this weekend to see the lovely Emma Sarconi, who chose to go to school in Toronto – not only clear across the country, but clear into another country.

While at home, I went back to sorting through the vast quantity of stuff I have managed to accumulate over the years. I know that’s a vague word, but it’s totally accurate. Movie ticket stubs, assorted papers and essays from high school, old clothes, visitor maps from museums, dollar pictures from Goodwill… I don’t think it surprises anyone that I’m going into Library and Information Science, with an emphasis in the Archival aspect of things. Here’s a not-so-secret-admission: I’M A PACKRAT. I SAVE EVERYTHING. 

Part of my goal before I leave for Los Angeles is to sort through all this junk and get rid of the things that need to be gotten rid of. Some duplicate books can be dropped off at the library, a few bags of clothes still in good condition can be donated to Goodwill, etc. It’s a slow process – because I save everything, yes, but also because I had to stop and read through a ton of things.

One of the things I dragged down from the shelf were my yearbooks. The senior one, particularly, is interesting, mostly for the Senior Quote section. I skimmed them, curious what people had chosen. They ranged from wise words of… well, wisdom, from sources like Buddha and Mark Twain, to song lyrics (Journey and Jay-Z), and smartass lines like “CHARGIN’ MAH LAZER 8 [ ]“. The usual variety, in any case.

I focused in on the quotes that my closest friends picked out, and I wanted to replicate those here. This is where the clique-y, insider bit begins, for those who I didn’t go to high school with and who don’t know my friends – sorry. But to the couple that I know read this that I did go to high school with… my god, isn’t this just everyone summed up perfectly?

• Marisa: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
• Chris: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” (Sir Winston Churchill)
• Miguel: “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” (Albert Einstein)
• Tom: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with sleep.” (William Shakespeare, The Tempest)
• Kara: “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” (George Bernard Shaw)
• Jeremy: “Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.” (John F. Kennedy)

In any case, I pulled aside a stack of things to be scanned while I’m home and can take advantage of my dad’s all-in-one printer-scanner-fax machine upstairs, including samples of my handwriting from high school (freakishly tidy), the only paper I’ve ever gotten 100/100 on (thanks, Mr. Derr!),  some notes taken during Moot Court my senior year (intelligent observations and reminders for rebuttal interspersed with stupid doodles and notes to my partner Davina), and some other little visual gems. I know, you must be nearly salivating at the thought.

My Latest Obsession…

…is Umberto Eco. This is a link to his Wikipedia page, in case you haven’t heard of him. He’s a brilliant Italian medievalist (see, people do go on to do things with a Medieval Studies degree!), writer, semiotician (he studies signs and symbols and such, a bit like Dan Brown’s character Robert Langdon, but, you know, real), and all-around genius.

He’s written six novels: in chronological order, The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) and The Prague Cemetery (2010). He’s arguably most well-known for his first novel (which I just bought a copy of today), in which he puts his knowledge of a medievalist to work, writing a historical mystery set in a monastery in the early 1300′s.

(He’s also clearly quite a clever fellow: apparently, when asked why he wrote The Name of the Rose his response was a quippy “I felt like poisoning a monk.”)

He’s written quite a lot of intellectual/non-fiction pieces and books as well. There’s a great article about his opinion on lists, on which he apparently opened an exhibit at the Louvre sometime around 2009:

The Louvre invites Umberto Eco: “Mille e tre”

Having extended an invitation to Umberto Eco, who chose to work on a theme described as “The Infinity of Lists”, the Louvre presents an exhibition of ancient and contemporary graphic works, as well as around 20 multidisciplinary events in the auditorium and the rooms of the museum.

The exhibition “Mille e tre” traces the evolution of the concept of a list through history and examines how its meaning changes with the passage of time: from its ancient use in funerary traditions to its present-day use in everyday life, via the creative processes of contemporary artists, the list is a vehicle for cultural codes and the bearer of different messages.

As a personal fan of lists (I compose them every day, sometimes going so far as to make a list of the lists I want to compose – yes, I’m a little crazy), I found the article really fascinating, and wish that I’d had a chance to see the exhibit. And, you know, the Louvre.

There was, apparently, a book released on the exhibit, that I plan on picking up at one point or another – though the fact that it ships within 1-2 months is a bit saddening! I’ve never had anything take that long from Amazon – although I suppose that it’s possible that a big, fancy, non-fiction book about lists might not be the most popular choice around.

Again, as far as the man being entirely quotable, one of my favorite lines from the SPIEGEL article is him trying to explain his interest in lists: “Why am I so interested in the subject? I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.”

An interview in the British paper The Telegraph had another interesting fact about Eco: in the description of his apartment, the writer notes,

We pass through a labyrinthine library containing 30,000 books – he has a further 20,000 at his 17th-century palazzo near Urbino – and into a drawing-room full of curiosities: a glass cabinet containing seashells, rare comics and illustrated children’s books, a classical sculpture of a nude man with his arms missing, a jar containing a pair of dog’s testicles, a lute, a banjo, a collection of recorders, and a collage of paintbrushes by his friend the Pop artist Arman.

While his curio cabinet sounds fascinating (and more than a little strange), what about those books! Some 50,000 volumes! Someday I hope to have a cozy little library/office/den, stuffed to the brim with books, but I can’t ever imagine having the space for 50,000 volumes. My closet is full to the point of overflowing, it has five or six shelves full of books, and that only comes to between 450-500 volumes – 1/100th of his collection! I’m dripping with envy.

So! I would continue rambling about this elderly Italian man I find fascinating, but I have some Statistics homework to finish, and then I intend to get lost in my comfortably worn copy of The Name of the Rose. (I think that books feel cozy when they come from a used bookstore, don’t you?) If you are at all interested in anything, though, look up some information on Umberto Eco – he has pretty much written a book or essay on everything under the sun!

Week In Review – The First of the Last

The title is referring, of course, to the first week of my last term as an undergraduate student, not the end of the world or anything. Although, what with Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, one can’t help but wonder.

In any case! I’m popping in for a quick update. I’ll get around to detailing the second part of my spring break (Monterey and Carmel) in, you know, detail, but a quick note: while shopping around in Carmel, I came upon one of those walls of square greeting cards with famous quotes on them. You know, these. I’ve always been in love with those cards – I collect quotes like crazy, my commonplace book is stuffed full of them, and they’re always designed so wonderfully, with interesting fonts and colors. This one in particular, though, caught my eye:

Isn’t that beautiful? Mizuta Masahide was, according to my ‘trusty’ friend Wikipedia, a poet and samurai from the 1600′s/1700′s. This was one of his haikus. I just love it – I might have to get around to ordering the card and one of their frames so I can throw it on the wall. I love collecting quotes, like I said, but I really love it when one reaches out and grabs you all of a sudden. This was definitely one of those.

Classes started this week. I ended up dropping yoga – I enjoy taking it for exercise, and my instructor was one of those hippy-dippy types who just makes me grind my teeth. I’m still taking 12 credits, though, 8 of which are creative writing courses (fiction and poetry), and all of which are lower-division. It’s kind of a joke schedule, in all honesty – three classes, two of which don’t have finals. Wednesday is the only day all week I have more than one class a day. I totally admit I’m lazy, but it’s my last term as an undergraduate, and I worked my ass off last term with 17 upper-division credits. The last three weeks of the term I almost went crazy, writing papers and studying for exams.

Also, my Introduction to Poetry instructor is adorable. He’s this skinny, hipster-ish boy from Kansas or some such central state, who is incredibly enthusiastic despite the fact that the class is at 10 am. We’ve only read two poets so far, one of which was Ted Kooser – apparently some incredibly famous American poet I’d never heard of before. (I mean, he was a Poet Laureate of the United States, which is kind of a big deal.) When it comes to poetry, I can usually take it or leave it, but I really fell in love with this one, for some reason:

Abandoned Farmhouse

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

a tall man too, says the length of the bed

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

says the Bible with a broken back

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

but not a man for farming, say the fields

cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house

in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields

say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

like branches after a storm–a rubber cow,

a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

 

A quick three other things, and then I’m off:

(1) I picked up a copy of a really wonderful book, Writers and Their Notebooks. It’s a collection of essays by famous writers about how they use their journals or notebooks in their profession. It’s edited by Diana M. Raab, and though I’m only about 25% through it, it’s really great so far. I actually busted out my Post-It sticky flags and I’m marking up the book as I go, which I basically never do. To anyone who is interested in writing or writers or who is just a big analogue geek like me (stationery! pens! notebooks! swoon), I highly recommend it. My favorite little excerpt so far is from Robin Hemley’s essay, a mention of a project he was working on at the time:

As I write this, I’m sitting in an apartment on Osaka, Japan, a place I haven’t been since 1976 as an exchange student at a sister school, St. Andrew’s. I’m here for a book I’m writing entitled Do Over!, in which, for a period of a week or so, I’m revisiting various sites of my childhood and in a sense doing them over. In the course of this project, I’ve spent the better part of a week back at summer camp, reprised a role from a school play in which I had flubbed a line, went back to kindergarten, and now have revisited both St. Andrew’s and Momoyama (St. Andrew’s in Osaka is called Momoyama). I wonder if I ever would have thought of this idea had I not been a journal keeper? I doubt it.

Seriously, how cool of an idea is that? Who hasn’t wanted to redo parts of their lives over? It really caught my attention, in any case. Plus, the cover of the book is so cool, I couldn’t help but buy a copy:

(2) I like to play the Wikipedia game, which, basically, is me looking up something, and then ending up clicking like four different links to other pages, and then I look up and three hours have suddenly disappeared. While I’m certain it’s a waste of time, it also means I learn a lot of cool and random things I probably would never have otherwise gotten to learn. The highlight this week is Lawrence Oates, an early English Antarctic explorer, who was a really noble and self-sacrificing guy.

He was exploring Antarctica with Robert Falcon Scott in the 1910s, and was, along with the rest of the group, suffering from scurvy and frostbite. His health was deteriorating faster than the others, and he was slowing their progress, but they refused to leave him behind like he requested. Finally, realizing that his slowing their pace would kill them all, he told the others that he was “just going outside and may be some time,” walking out into a blizzard without even bothering to put his shoes on. As Scott wrote in his diary, “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.” In the end, his heroic self-sacrifice didn’t save his companions from dying themselves, but it’s still a really amazing story. John Charles Dollman painted a piece about the story, too:

And, finally, (3) – Information is Beautiful is a fantastic blog using graphs, charts, and illustrations to share information. As someone going into Library and Information Science for grad school, I am in awe of this website. One of the recent posts included some vintage illustrations from various sources, including one on how long animals live:

The whole website is glorious, artistic “info porn,” and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Quote of the Day

“He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying … he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.”

-Ernest Hemingway on Ezra Pound, 1925

(Sure, the guy went a little crazy after World War I and said some pretty despicable things around World War II, but… that’s a pretty glowing review of a friend. Plus, I can’t detest him too much, because he helped get TS Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock published, and it’s my favorite poem, period.)

Commonplace Books

Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. First usage recorded: 1578. (OED)

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe… Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests. (Wikipedia)

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories:’ and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. (Jonathan Swift)

Commonplace books are something I adore. I’ve kept these my entire life, although it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve really known what they were ‘officially’ called. I made mention of mine once before, in a Thursday 13 post back in March of last year.

A little bit more description: I keep four specific notebooks in my purse most times. Which is a little crazy, I guess, but they all have specific purposes. One is a journal, another is the notebook I use to keep track of my 101/1001 project, one is a small, soft-backed cahier that I use for jotting down quick things or tearing pages out to give to people if necessary, and the last one is my commonplace book.

I’ve fallen in love with Moleskine’s large (8.5″ x 5.5″), hard-backed journal in black, with squared paper. The squared paper is important. More versatile than lines, and more structured than plain. Helpful for drawing in charts and graphs. Also, perfect for coloring in like a checkerboard during boring lectures. It’s full of quotes, snippets of dialogue from movies or television, lines of poetry, information I found interesting (like the OODA loop, how to purify water, Morse code, and the coordinates for the oceanic pole of inaccessibility), taped-in magazine clippings or images printed out from the computer, loose ideas for short stories, and all sorts of odds and ends.

Now that I keep a commonplace book, I have no idea how I managed to live without one. I’ve always kept loose scraps like this information around, but it used to be scattered all over in different areas. I would have interesting Wikipedia articles bookmarked in my web browser, an ongoing Microsoft Word document for lines of poetry or quotes copy/pasted, random Post-It notes (both in the physical/paper version and the digital type on my Mac dashboard), and a folder for magazine clippings. It took me forever to find what I wanted, and it annoyed me that they weren’t all collected in one convenient location.

Now that I have my own notebook, I love it. Sure, it’s not indexed, so I still have to flip through pages and skim for what I’m looking for. But often in the process, I stumble upon other things that spark in my mind, or lines that I’ve forgotten, or an image I saved from ages ago. It’s meaningful to me in a way that’s hard to explain, I guess. It’s a glimpse into the workings of my brain, a way to see what kind of things I find interesting or important, what was worth writing down or printing out to save.

There was an interesting two-part series of articles on the DIY Planner website about commonplace books. Part 1 deals mostly with the history of the practice and as a general introduction; Part 2 has more suggestions on how to start one of your own. They seem to be fans of a series of binders, preferably smaller ones of the A5 size (the same as a large Moleskine, 5.5″ x 8.5″ in size), arranged in an encyclopedia/alphabetic style with an index, allowing information to be quickly found. While that would certainly make it easier to find wanted information quickly, I throw everything into one notebook rather than an encyclopedic series, so I can carry it in my purse. One notebook is much easier to grab than a set of 26. I also happen to be a fan of writing out things by hand, or in the case of very long passages (like my favorite lines from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods), typing them up to print out and tape in. As one website elegantly phrases it:

…having copied the passages, you’ll always have your copy. Though photocopiers and scanners mean we can easily make exact copies at trifling cost, copying striking passages can remain a valuable exercise and a rewarding activity. A collection of selected passages makes a wonderful intellectual portrait. Shared with friends and colleagues, it also helps focus discussion and provides much food for thought… (Notes About Notes)

I happen to be a sucker for the art/act of handwriting, and while I bow to practicality’s sake for long passages (and Moleskine has a handy online application to fit text and images to their page sizes), I find it much more enjoyable and personal to flip through pages of handwriting than impersonal Times New Roman, standard size 12.

I think that commonplace books are interesting and valuable tools. Everyone needs a place to keep odds and ends that they find important or meaningful, so they’re all in one tidy place in case you want to return to them. I think that they are probably most useful to creative types, or to those that read a lot, but I think that everyone should keep one: on its own, in conjunction with a journal, as a physical offshoot of your brain.

A lot of famous people kept them, particularly writers and intellectuals. H.P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I’ll leave you with a few final (famous) words:

I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject. –Thomas Jefferson

I OUGHT not to offer a record of these days, interests, recuperations, without including a certain old, well-thumb’d common-place book, 1 filled with favorite excerpts, I carried in my pocket for three summers, and absorb’d over and over again, when the mood invited. I find so much in having a poem or fine suggestion sink into me (a little then goes a great ways) prepar’d by these vacant-sane and natural influences. — Walt Whitman

“[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink.” –Virginia Woolf