Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022
Jeanne Bonner: On Keeping a Notebook: A Reading List - Longreads
I keep lots of notebooks, but perhaps the most important is the small one I stash in my purse. It’s a baby notebook used for appointments and reminders that doubles as a “bits journal,” to steal a phrase from poet David Kirby, since I use it to record any image, phrase, or event that strikes my fancy and could contribute to a piece of writing later. I look at it obsessively throughout the day, re-reading my to-do list or jotting down ideas for stories, articles, poems, or gifts for my son. A typical day reads something like this:
Follow up on sleep pitch.
1 p.m. haircut.
Add “intimacy junkie” to the Di Lascia translation pitch cover letter.
Pick up birthday cake.
Finish book review for the Kenyon Review.
What about a piece called something like, “In Defense of Sleeplessness?”On my way out of the house, I instinctively grab this daily notebook since I never know when I will think of lines I want to add to a piece in progress.
What’s more, it has given me a constant vocation that doesn’t allow much time for obsessing about other concerns. I’ll get a new phone if I lose the one I have but if my daily notebook goes missing? I’d lose my mind. In fact, it has such power — and provides such security — that I fear (somewhat ridiculously) for its safety.
Just writing things in a notebook may be worth the time spend doing it, if for no other reason than it keeps me off my phone.
Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022
An Astronomer Falls in Love with a Film Leica - Leicaphilia
I’m also partisan to the idea, expressed here and elsewhere, that the steady increase in resolution and sensitivity is completely pointless in terrestrial photography. In astronomy, of course, that is not the case, and we have been very grateful for our highly sensitive wide-format CCD detectors. These detectors have now trickled down from military to science to consumer. But how has this increase in creative and artistic possibilities been translated into better art? Show me a great photograph taken outdoors in the daytime that couldn’t have been taken with a roll of Tri-X at any point since the 1950s.
Monday, Nov. 28, 2022
Now, nearly fifty years later, as I stand before the mirror, I would say, Luca, that the tattoo is the least of my worries. It seems to be just one part of a general emerging calamity.
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022
I don’t know when Drafts introduced autocomplete of other draft titles once you start typing [[, but it’s there now, and it’s one more thing making me indecisive about where notes go. Drafts is supposed to be a temporary holding station for my stuff (in theory, not in practice), so this function gives Drafts even more gravitational pull to keep notes in its orbit. Aighhhh.
Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022
I want this book real bad: Mark A. Rodriguez - After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead, 1965-1995
Featuring dozens of interviews with tape enthusiasts and members of the Grateful Dead organization as well as the show stopping visuals from hundreds of archival cassette covers, After All Is Said and Done is artist Mark A. Rodriguez’s exploration of that history, a saga of homegrown psychedelia, anarchic graphic styles, and black market fandom as written in magnetic tape.
Kevin Cummins: Telling Stories: Photographs of The Fall
It’s here from England! A book like a thick steak, filled with photos of The Fall and Mark E. Smith from 1977 to 2014. How did Kevin Cummins manage to be the one with the camera in the middle of the storm all those years?
