a writer's notebook
jotter
These little notebooks from MUJI, 48pp, were recommended on Wirecutter for their paper quality, and I found them at MUJI for two quid each plus, at the time of purchase, a decent discount, which meant I could grab ten for like one-fifty each.
Being passport size, they fit the Wanderings Passport perfectly. I still have an old roll of large white plain stickers, and I can bung one on the front of each to write my indexes on.
Comments closedSome years back, Dr. Andrey Geim succeeded in levitating a frog through magnetic fields. Briefly, we lived in a world of hovering frogs. Following that, it was revealed that a parallel line of research has achieved the levitation of other small creatures through ultrasound. From my perspective, that was a strange day. Yesterday, animals were floating on music you cannot hear.
There’s a line in A E Van Vogt’s novel THE SILKIE, where it’s noted that the Silkies of the title, enhanced humans, have music that sounds like monotone drone to ordinary humans, because they can’t hear the ultrasonic variations built into it for superhuman Silkie ears. This connects with the minor cause celebre a while back concerning messaging devices with sonic tones designed to be inaudible to adults. Only young ears could pick up the sounds. It’s probably no coincidence that most people of my generation and beyond have had our hearing wrecked by loud music. I remember Kevin Shields gloating in an interview that all of us who listened to his band My Bloody Valentine’s “Feed Me With Your Kiss” with the volume cranked up have been rendered deaf as posts by the dissonance and feedback. Bastard.
I share a conviction with many that we live in a science fictional world. Not the one everyone expected, of course. But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. It’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.
People have spoken at length over the years about the death of sf, and even of the death of futurism. This isn’t new. In the 1980s, grand masters of the form such as Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley talked of sf losing its way when the common visions of the form were abandoned: Silverberg in particular (author, curiously, of some of sf’s most depressing stories) spoke of the cyberpunk/radical hard sf landscape being one he did not choose to inhabit, and so turned to writing fantasy. Today, sf, like so many arts, is utterly fractured, with several competing movements, none of them gaining much traction, while sales slip, magazines struggle and the written genre slides out of general view, dragged down to Davy Jones’ locker by the bony hands of the Western.
I love science for the fiction in it. Every great scientific innovation has poetry in it. In a BBC TV play about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson says upon seeing the assembled DNA double helix for the first time; “I knew it’d be pretty.”
The challenge in sf now is, to an extent, the one William Gibson met in PATTERN RECOGNITION by not writing sf. When we live in the science fiction condition, what’s left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer? If we’re living in the science fiction condition, why invent castles in the air? Especially when it turns out that the space elevator technology for reaching them will see you dead of radiation poisoning before you reach the top, as has recently been deduced — you can’t shield the elevator ribbon from the Van Allen belt, and if you shield the car you pay a weight penalty that not even an array of frog-levitators can alleviate…
(originally written 29 December 2006)
CONNECTED:
I love these pens. I already have one that’s lemon with black accents, and I decided to get the contrasting one. I buy mine from Cult Pens. Drehgriffel means “twist stylus” – you twist the knob at the end to pop out the pen nib. Based on a Bauhaus design from 1920, made from aluminium and brass, and I refit mine with a Parker G2 gel fill. Once you get the right refill in, which is a bit trial and error, it’s an absolute joy to write with – the hexagonal barrel has a nice weight and is easy to hold. Anything infused with the Bauhaus has its own special resonance for me.
I mean, let’s be honest, any old pen or pencil will work to write a story, and fetishising the tools is usually a road to nowhere. But I probably have my own dedicated landfill for used-up disposable plastic pens, so if I can scratch the design itch and be more sustainable, then I’m calling that a win.
The Bauhaus Archive sells a drehgriffel too, and I may well be shopping there soon.
3 Comments
Expensive whiskies come in wooden boxes. I therefore have a few wooden boxes. Turns out they fit Field Notes nicely. So I have a repurposed storage system now. Hail whisky, the cure for all the world and the water of life.
(The sticker is covering over the title of an unannounced project in production)
Comments closed
The one on the left is my Wanderings Passport with three notebook inserts – daily working notebook, LTD development and Orbital Operations development. The one on the right is new, the newestor Field Notes sized cover (UK) (currently unavail in the US, maybe elsewhere?), which contains three Field Notes notebooks, each for a different project. I picked up the pen loop last year, and it’s running with an old Parker I had laying around that I refitted with a G2 gel refill.
You may note that the Wanderings, which I’ve owned for three months, already looks like it’s had the shit beaten out of it.
I just couldn’t make the Wanderings sit right with four inserts, and I touch the three books already in there every day, so swapping them out on the regular wasn’t going to work for me. So I got the newestor, which was reasonably cheap, to run a second project notebook with the ton of Field Notes I have stacked up in the office from having been a subscriber for years. Eventually I may pony up for one of those handmade “fauxdori” on Etsy that can contain six Field Notes booklets. Like this one.
This is Not Ideal. But we’re going to give it a go.
CONNECTED:
Comments closed
I have solved the notebook storage problem. I have to drink more whisky.
Comments closedThat winter light with just a little mist in it, the mist that reflects the light everywhere. The air glitters. That pearly newborn morning when winter feels like the start, not the end, and anything is possible.
Comments closedIt took just my first few seconds outside LAX to understand why films happened around Los Angeles. The quality of the light is astonishing. And also uncanny, because, of course, I’d seen representations of that light on film and television for my whole life. To the point, now, where I will often, near-subconsciously, appraise a film on its ability to capture that strange light, that very Los Angeles light that happens nowhere else in my experience. That light that facilitates filming but is so very hard to properly reproduce on film. A century of trying to trap that light in a can.
Comments closedTesting wordland.social as a posting option. Chrome on iOS isn’t thrilled with it, which makes it a bit fiddly to use, but it does feel a little faster and more frictionless than opening the WordPress app. I may try adding it as a Safari app. The trick with writing on a weblog these days is finding ways to do it that are as easy and slick as using a social media app. As previously noted, personal publishing is a deprecated function on internet enabled devices now.
Comments closed
So a while back I installed an HP Envy printer. I finally sourced affordable 4×6 inch matte photo card for it. I have a collage app on my phone that I’ve used to make four-image A4 pages to send to the printer. I convinced the app to go to 4×6, and eventually managed to convince the phone to print to the photo tray rather than the A4. Ran a quick test and it does indeed spit out a print that can be scissored down the middle without trimming and pasted straight into the Passport notebook.
(I admit, I am still kind of hankering after a Roterfaden)
For me, this is a bigger deal than you might think. I’ll be able to combine notes and finds and send them to the printer when I’m thinking about it without having to go for a thermal printer for that task, which does not produce archival print.
I’d been thinking about getting a wireless thermal printer just because I want the transmission from phone to print to be relatively frictionless. I also still kind of miss the Little Printer. But thermal prints fade fast.
All my thinking and probably half my referencing is in analogue. Being able to paste a greater range of material into my notebooks is all to the good.
Comments closed