An online commonplace book
The thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive. Just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you.
– Dana Gioia
A masterclass on tap. Coincidence that two of America’s best writers, The Gioia brothers, are also openly very metaphysical?
Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?
Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.
It is hard.
Worth it.
As heard on the latest Art of Manliness podcast: The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper
McKay, Brett. “Podcast #1057: The Power of the Notebook—The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper.” Art of Manliness, [Date of Publication]. https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/podcast-1057-the-power-of-the-notebook-the-history-and-practice-of-thinking-on-paper/.
I found her standing on the hearth with her nose buried in a branch from a balsam fir, which she had hung over the fireplace. With it hung a harness strap of sleigh bells. The branch had unquestionably been whacked from a tree in the woods behind our son’s house in Maine and had made the long trip south. It wore the look and carried the smell of authenticity. “There!” said my wife, as though she had just delivered a baby.
E.B. White
E.B. White did the impossible, brought Christmas to Florida.
White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States: HarperCollins, 2014. pg 192
Bath, inspiration in; Bible, knowledge of; critical spirit; Edwardian; emotion at war with intellect; family feeling; fearlessness; foreign travel, distrust of; games, love of inventing rules for; generosity; honesty; intellectual severity; love, need for; pipe speaking; poetry, love of; rhyming, skill at; speaking ability; temper, loss of; tender-heartedness; transport, passion for forms of (railways, trams, bicycles, motor-bikes); understatement, tendency to.
As read from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life
Writer Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote a biography on her father and his three brothers. Fathers and uncles aren’t the typical biographical portrait.
The structure of this index could be something to replicate. Quick notes on a new topic or city. Similar to Jack Kerouac’s sketches.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. pg10
As the sketches tell us, anything Jack saw was important. Anything that caught his eye and that he wrote about became priceless. Because in the way that an artist like Picasso could see with a brush, Jack could see with his pen. He was able to capture the spirit of his time without making things up. And as it came to us from nowhere it certainly was astounding how concrete it all is now. It is as if the only true picture of humanity we will ever have was given to us by Jack Kerouac. All else is false and dressed up. Only Jack and Vincent van Gogh told the inner truth.
–George Condo
As read from the introduction of Book of Sketches.
Disagree with the last two sentences, uh Shakespeare.
Lovely book to dip into, also a great practice for writers, taking down quick prose “sketches” in a pocket notebook.
Notice. Notice. Notice
Kerouac, Jack. Book of Sketches. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2006. pg xi,xii
I’m the kind of person who is always early. I know a lot of people think it’s not very rock and roll to be punctual and courteous, but I disagree. I think manners are cool, and even revolutionary, and you won’t convince me otherwise. So fuck you.
As read from How to Write One Song.
Fight the power man. Be polite.
Tweedy, Jeff. How to Write One Song. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2020. pg 116,117
His name was Nikola Tesla.
A gifted inventor, a creature of habit.
A lover of animals, a friend to humankind.
A child of the storm, a child of the light.
A human flash of lightning, far ahead of his time.
- Azadeh Westergaard
Picture books are underrated. Children’s books are underrated.
Westergaard, Azadeh. A Life Electric: The Story of Nikola Tesla. United Kingdom, Penguin Young Readers Group, 2021.
One day, the writer was overwhelmed by the urge to paint again. He recognized in himself the desire that had been gagged and throttled, but never killed; he had stumbled upon the painter whom he had left for dead. He walked into a stationary shop, bought two bags of paints and pencils, and began to fill two dozen notebooks. His hand seemed to move of its own accord. One day it drew, the next day it wrote, “like someone autographing a page without even realizing they’re doing it.”
Collapse to the urge. Pull out the graphite. Pull out the pens. Pull out the paints.
Go!
from:
https://www.vqronline.org/fall-2024/art-portfolios/memories-distant-mountains
h/t – https://x.com/nabeelqu
Of course there are, occasionally, clever antitheses, antitheses that draw fine distinctions or tell you something that you did not know already. Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves’. But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were. The world would degenerate into one permanent epigram.
Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence is eloquent and full of surprise. The world degenerating into one permanent epigram isn’t a phrase I’d expect to see in a “writing” book.
Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. United Kingdom, Icon Books, Limited, 2014. pg. 19
Floodlights and Goalposts 