Eminem’s Boxes of Notes – by Jillian Hess – Noted
Anyone who thinks notes ought to be neat and tidy should look at Eminem’s lyric sheets.
Always fun to see an artist’s creative process. Even more fun when it is a crazy handwritten explosion of ideas out of which nuggets of pop/rap gold flow. Via Austin Kleon’s always excellent newsletter.
About nine months ago, after a tragic Kindle Scribe syncing accident in which I lost about 20 pages worth of journaling, I (mostly) swore off digital tablets and returned to paper and pens in a big way. I pulled out the two fountain pens I owned—a black Pilot Metropolitan and a Laban PF-900 Yellow that was gifted to me about 15 years ago—inked them, and started doing all my journaling, writing, and note-taking by hand.
A few weeks later, I bought a Lamy Al-Star (since gifted to a friend because it turns out I don’t like triangular grip sections) and a Bronze Kaweco Liliput.
Today, nine months later, I own 19 fountain pens. And I acquired four of them last weekend at the California Pen Show.
My partner and I moved to Los Angeles almost two years ago, so we were excited when we found out there was a pen show in our new city. We purchased VIP passes, so we arrived first thing Friday morning when the doors opened. My partner actually took the day off so that we could attend on Friday.
Going into the show, I knew I wanted to purchase at least one of two “grail pens”: a Montblanc Meisterstück 146 and a Montblanc Writer’s Edition Victor Hugo. The Victor Hugo was my priority, because if I could find one, the price would eat up my entire budget, precluding me from buying the Meisterstück or anything else during the weekend. I read Les Miserables last year, and saw the magnificent traveling version of the Broadway production at the Pantages, and I’ve wanted the Victor Hugo Montblanc ever since. I found at least three sellers who had it in their personal collection, but it must be a stellar pen, because nobody wanted to part with it. Now I’m even more excited to find one for sale in the future.
Failing to find a Victor Hugo freed up my budget for other pens, so on Friday I purchased a beautiful, gently used Montblanc Meisterstück Glacier LeGrand and a bottle of Montblanc Glacier ink to accompany it (the pairing is exquisite, and the pen writes smoothly with just the tiniest bit of pleasant feedback).
I spent the rest of Friday debating several other pens to spend my remaining budget on. I settled on a new Sailor Cylint, which to me has been the platonic ideal of a Sailor ever since it was announced last year, even though it’s not what most people want from a Sailor pen. I’m very pleased with it.
I took advantage of the show being hosted by Nahvalur and had them fix the piston knob on my Voyage Los Angeles. It took them only minutes to fix. I’m glad to have this pen working again, because I had Gina of Custom Nib Studio regrind it into one of her famous journaler nibs a few months ago, and I’ve been missing using it.
Friday afternoon, we attended a workshop by Joe Crace, The Gentleman Stationer, on Paper for Everyday Writing. We’ll be purchasing some of his recommended papers from his store soon.
Friday evening, at the close of the show, we attended a panel on vintage pens. This is where my partner, Aadrial, who hadn’t yet found anything within budget that piqued her interest, started find her direction for the show.
We spent Saturday at home, catching up on work, enjoying two new pens, and recovering from what had been an exhausting day for two introverts. But Sunday morning we were back at the show, on the hunt for a vintage pen for Aadrial. We spent an hour at the table of Myk Daigle, owner of MaD Mercantile. Myk, by the way, is wonderful. He taught us a lot about vintage pens (and earlier in the morning, he’d bought me a sparkling water at the hotel cafe after overhearing me grumbling about forgetting to buy one). He was also the only seller we noticed who had a chair on the customer side of the table. In the end, Aadrial purchased a restored Waterman W2 from Myk. But later that day, she found two more vintage pens, a Parker 61 and a Sheaffer that we’re still struggling to correctly identify, in a bargain bin in stunningly good condition.
Also on Sunday, I found a never-inked Laban PF-900 Yellow that I immediately purchased. This acquisition was particularly sentimental for me, because my first fountain pen, as I mentioned above, was a gifted PF-900 Yellow, and it’s been largely unusable due to a leaking section ever since I dug it out of storage nine months ago. I thought I could use the new one as a proxy, or even put the new one’s section in the old pen’s nearly identical but well-loved body. Unfortunately, the new pen struggles with ink flow after being left unused for more than an hour or so, but that issue should be easier to fix than the leaky mess that is the old pen.
As we were getting ready to depart the show, I spotted, quite randomly amongst a plethora of other pens on a table, one that I’d been thinking about purchasing for a while: a humble TWSBI Precision. I hadn’t yet purchased it because I hadn’t been able to find one in person to test out (I must have a thing for pens that don’t fit what most people expect from their respective companies, because nobody seems to care about the gunmetal gray Precision in the sea of TWSBI’s other, far more colorful offerings), and at $80, it’s not necessarily an online impulse buy. The one on the table, though, was only $45. I was more than happy to pay that, but then the seller told me to make him an offer, so I got this unused pen for just $35! Amazingly, after using it quite a bit in my bullet journal this week, it might be my favorite purchase from the whole weekend—and it’s certainly my favorite TWSBI that I own.
I rounded out the weekend by purchasing a bottle of Sailor Shikiori Suberakashi from Dromgoole’s. Only two days later did I realize I’d spent several minutes chatting about Kawecos with Ana Reinert from The Well-Appointed Desk, who was helping run the Dromgoole’s booth. Hi Ana! It was great to meet you!
(I’d also like to briefly shout out Jeremy and the fine folks at FLAX Pen to Paper, LA’s best stationery store, who had a table near the ballroom entrance. The only reason I didn’t purchase anything from them is because they’re my go-to the rest of the year.)
The California Pen Show was a fantastic way to spend a weekend. My partner and I met some wonderful people and acquired some wonderful pens. Part of me wishes I could attend a pen show every weekend, despite my introversion (not to mention what such a lifestyle would do to my bank account). We’re hoping to spend the entire weekend enjoying the San Francisco International Pen Show in August.
Long-lost Gershwin musical found by University of Michigan researcher – mlive.com
Because even in this digital age, if you want to to last long enough to be discovered later, you’ll choose paper.
I intend to start contributing to The Cramped more in the coming weeks after having contributed very little since 2019. Accordingly, I’ve updated my section of the “What We Use” page. Things have changed both significantly and not at all since I last updated it in 2018.
An Analog Library of All the Lives I’ve Lived – Josephine Sittenfeld , New York Times
I hold on to these journals because when I feel discombobulated and lost, reading through who I was at 14 or 19 or 25 years old helps connect me to myself. Paging through the diaries now, I’m startled to realize how far I’ve come and also how little I’ve changed. In Journal No. 1, I’m a 9-year-old living in Ohio. I’m 4 feet 5 inches tall, weigh 75 pounds and feel a kinship with Curious George. In Journal No. 11, I’m 20, working for my college professor on an archaeological dig in Syria and flirting with a German man twice my age. Journal No. 19 leaves off in June 2009, when, unbeknown to me, life is about to pivot: In a month I’ll become engaged, in six months I’ll be married, and in a year I’ll be pregnant with my first child.
What using ten years of Field Notes look like.
The Tools of Excellence v4, 1: The Notebook & Pencil – Nicholas Bate
1: The Notebook & Pencil Paper and pencil. There it is: no power needed, discrete, ultimately flexible. Portable. Breezes through security. On a plane, on the beach, back-backing in the Western Isles. The tool which allows you to plan, record, create, schedule, sketch, brainstorm and write a love note. Never be without the pair.
A handwritten blog by Hansjörg Schlüter. Though I’ve seen others before I still find it a neat idea that there should be more of.
Montblanc asked Wes Anderson to direct its ad. He did – and designed a pen | Vogue Business
Anderson agreed to their brief, which involved directing a short film focussed on the brand’s famous heritage and craft, but he also wanted to be the main character in front of the camera. Then, when he showed up on set in Berlin, the filmmaker presented a prototype pen of his own design that he asked the German company to manufacture. He’d even named it: the Schreiberling, which means ‘the scribbler’ in German.
10 Things Jerry Seinfeld Can’t Live Without | GQ – YouTube
Even if you’re writing comedy, a legal pad says. “I am taking this seriously.”
What we believe in.
(via Cultural Offering)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Login