In today’s newsletter I open up my commonplace diary:
You can read the whole letter here.
Shelves of diaries
Today’s newsletter was about my shelves of diaries in the studio and my practice of keeping a stack of “on this day” diaries I can re-read when I have a spare minute: “Same but different.”
The notebook is where you figure out what’s going on
I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:
“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.
It was me. Many years ago!
Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.
(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)
Tiny rare books
I was charmed by this @nypl post on Instagram:
Miniature items from the Rare Book Division must be three-inches or less to qualify as *mini* and hitch a ride in a repurposed card catalog where they’re snugly stored.
And then I realized I have my own tiny rare books collection in my own card catalog:
Old complaints and grievances
“When does a diary pay off?” I asked earlier this week.
One of my favorite things about revisiting old notebooks is all the little complaints and grievances I find. The pettier the better, like this one, which I jotted down on our honeymoon trip to New York in 2007 that almost reads like a haiku:
MERCURY LOUNGE
great sound system
you could hear just
how bad the music was
Or this one, from February 29, 2004, written in Cambridge, England:
“I am tired of spelling ‘February.’ Ready for March.”
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