A good assistant to your future self – Austin Kleon
He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”
What we believe in.
On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion (PDF)
But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with
meaning only for its maker.
A wonderful essay about the what and why for the author, Joan Didion, of keeping a notebook. Which may be different than the what and why you may have. And it is a point she writes so eloquently about here.
I may have to copy this whole delicious thing into my commonplace book.
After a year of exclusively using fountain pens and paper for my handwriting needs and foregoing any sort of digital tablet, I got an iPad Pro again a few days ago, with the intent to use it mostly for reading comics, academic papers, and the New York Times. Today, I found myself using it to take notes during an impromptu meeting. While I am alarmed at how easily, and usefully, the digital tool slotted itself back into my workflow, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my handwriting, which I spent months diligently practicing last year because I wanted to learn cursive again, was much more fluid on the tablet than it used to be—and more easily recognized and parsed by the software because of this, too. (Also, wondrously, I wrote this very post by hand, with the Apple Pencil, right into WordPress’s text editor.)
Your reading list, periodically shipped to you in a beautiful print issue… Each issue includes five slots for reading. You can pick an article, essay, interview, recipe, blog post, or almost any text-based content for each slot. Or you can connect your Twitter + Newsletter subscriptions and let us pick for you.
An interesting idea. Sure, you could print things yourself. But, likely not with the layout and binding this service provides. Might be worth trying with those really long reads I’ve have stored in Instapaper that have been guilting me forever.
But despite the influence of Locke’s metaphor, there is no such thing as a blank page – not only because claims of blankness miss the watermarks or the fibres or the chain-lines or the imperfections: presences which mean that writing is always an interruption of something already there, a disturbance in an existing order; it is never the beginning. But also because to insist on blankness is to erase the labour, and the history, etched into paper, a history of centuries of use, development, and refinement, in China, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. And as the poet and environmental activist Mandy Haggith reminds us, conceiving of paper as blankness means also forgetting the resources and the environmental costs on which paper depends: ‘We need to unlearn our perception of a blank page as clean, safe and natural and see it for what it really is: chemically bleached tree-mash.’ We need also to remember the ingenuity and work that lies behind, or within, or across, each page. As the print historian Jonathan Senchyne puts it, ‘Every sheet of paper is an archive of human labor.’ The story of Nicolas-Louis Robert – which is the story of someone being forgotten, of a presence fading to something like a watermark that can be glimpsed only with care, and in the right light – might serve as an enjoinder to look at, rather than through, paper.
From The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth, which I’m currently reading and a little more than halfway through. It’s an engaging, beautifully word-painted tour through the history of bookmaking, including some of the lesser-known innovations and figures.
Also, side note: I’m reading the physical edition of this book (and so should you, because to read an ebook version would be giggle-inducingly ironic), as I do with pretty much all books these days. But I used the Live Text feature on my iPhone to copy and paste the above passage for posting here, with very few errors that I needed to correct. Features like this—features that make it easier to interact with, share, and talk about the creative work of real humans, and to allow us real humans more time to do the real, physical creating—are what I want more of from AI. These are the technologies I was promised when I was introduced to Star Trek as a ten-year-old kid. I don’t want to send “delightful” AI-generated images “created just for me” to people in my text messages. I don’t want AI to make my writing “better” (I want reading, and sitting in the chair, writing, every single day that I can, for hours at a time, because I’m not distracted by algorithmically recommended content and incessant notifications and podcasts and videos full of pseudo-intellectuals and grifters trying to make a buck, to make my writing better). And I don’t want to interact with large language models trained on the scraping of unlicensed works of my fellow artists.
The Encyclopedia Project, or How to Know in the Age of AI | Public Books
It took two weeks for the World Book Encyclopedia to arrive at our doorstep in two thick cardboard boxes. A full, 24 volume set, its spine is decorated with a futuristic spacescape: an inviting swirl of purple, turquoise, and pink that beckons us to ask, open, and learn. “Look it up,” I explain, now means “look through these pages.”
Online searches are banished from the dinner table and school projects alike. Instead, my children can go to the encyclopedia for any question they can think of. And I promise to read them any entry they choose. They are fast learners, soon navigating the obscure alphabetical sorting of knowledge and the index volume, hopping easily from one topic to another. One bleary Saturday morning I find several volumes cracked open on the couch, my eldest nestled among them, who explained, “I’m just looking up Dubai.”
What we believe in.
They Just Work — From the Pen Cup
But then I had to reconnect ALL THE THINGS to the network as the settings had changed — the desktop computer, my Kindle, the Sleep Number bed, the Ring doorbell, the Generac generator, and probably some things that I haven’t discovered yet. Oof—everything is complicated and connected!!
Except for pens and paper.
I’ve been thinking about writing a little piece similar to this one the last few days. I won’t now, because the above says it all well, but I will add that lately I’ve been noticing how often modern digital technology just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Twice in the last few weeks my Apple Watch has stopped syncing messages with my phone, for example. As I type this, my MacBook won’t sync messages, either. I’ve had to reboot my laptop once today. My iPhone 15 Pro’s keyboard lags intermittently in every app.
My Kaweco Brass Sport, though, writes beautifully and smoothly every time I want to use it—as long as I keep it inked.
The five-year journey to make an adventure game out of ink and paper
I couldn’t walk away from the pen and ink thing,” says John Evelyn, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook adventure recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand drawn, from tiny flowers and insects to huge buildings and the clouds that float over them.
It was an earlier time filled with layout boards, non-repro blue pencils that made lines invisible to production cameras, technical ink pens to create registration marks, and typography and photography output on photo paper.
It was hardcore analog, with nearly everything done manually.
What we believe in.
