moleskine

My friend Zack left his keys in my apartment the other night when he bought his new bike. They are very very easy to carry, no? Mine have heavy bike keychains, and I need four keys for my apartment and mailbox. Not to mention my U-lock key. Poor me.

For Photo Friday: Minimalism.

Nietzsche was semi-quoted on “Law and Order: SVU” this year, and I was like, “Nietzsche? Oh, yeah, I remember him. Wrote a dissertation that was largely about him, or, at least, dealing with him.” I mean, Nietzsche is hugely quotable and all.  And I did spend months doing nothing but studying him, hate, and power.

I keep forgetting that I have a dissertation to edit and send to my committee and have since the end of last summer. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off because, once I send it, I’m unemployed. Now, I tell myself, I am a student. Even though, of course, in practice and in my own mind, my student days are effectively over. Still, it will be nice to get this out of my life and over-with. And for everyone to have the “option” of calling me Doctor.  It might have been nice if I had realized that I implied I was still a full-time student on every job application I have sent minus one.  Damn it.

I have a stack of Moleskine Cahiers with Nietzsche notes in them from last year.  Most of them have some of my favorite quotations on them, like these do.  Those notebooks worked well, especially since I spent last fall in a semi-nomadic fashion, much like Herr Nietzsche himself.  Not that I had any great thoughts long the way.

Please do keep any “Nietzsche hated women” and “Nietzsche was an anti-Semite” comments to yourself, lest you reveal that you do not, in fact, understand Nietzsche at all. Or, at least, have not bothered to read any of his books.  And if you feel the need to do it, don’t troll.  Come back and answer for yourself.  Nietzsche would.

I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?

Maybe even when he is fictionalizing his “stories” he was still honest to some degree, more so than one would believe when I started writing this post. Maybe he was a complete liar. I don’t know. Either way, you should still definitely check out this book. Or anything else by Chatwin you can get your hands on. I found this book, first edition, sitting on a stack when I walked into Normals one day this fall, after looking for that book for a long time. I exclaimed out-loud, “I’ve been looking for this! It’s like it was here just for me.”

But now I am restless. Very. When I read the first essay last week, I went shopping when I was pretty sick (and got sicker) because I could not stand the idea of staying home all day after reading something like that. Is that sad? I have finally gotten around to filling in a travel journal from our research trips in fall 2006. They were a bit of a pain at the time, when I was trying to get a dissertation written. But now I wish I could go back to New Haven for another chilly Friday morning wishing I brought something other than sandals. Or to New York for a thunderstorm on Broadway, ducking into the largest Barnes and Noble I have ever seen. Or to Boston, within a mile of where I lived for two years, remembering all things I loved and hated about that place. Hours at my favorite cafe’ there.

For now, I have to settle for books and other people’s experiences. And, of course, remembering my own.

[Larger images here.]

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Along with the small spending limit for gifts, we thought we’d have fun with V-Day this year with the help of homemade cards. I pulled out the Moleskine watercolor book a friend sent me a year ago and a watercolor set I got for Christmas in 2004 and set to sketching. What I wound up using for the card was a roughly-brushed heart and wash deal that I almost tossed. This is the corner of a bad little woods and sky sketch that my wife stole and took to work, only to return it when I had a hissy fit. A total hissy fit. I don’t think I can paint like I used to be able to.

I was, however, happy with the Moleskine watercolor paper. The original sketch books just let the water run and never soaked anything up, at least in my experience. Which is not to say that I don’t like that paper for making cartoons about funny things I read about and people I don’t like. The color and texture of the Moleskine watercolor paper are both just right for some quick dabblings. The pages are cut at the edges for removal, too.

Especially considered the sketch/notes nature of Moleskines, it was nice to have paper so welcoming to the watercolor. Regular Moleskines don’t take thick inks very well, but I always assumed this was because of their origin as notebooks, where ballpoint ink or pencil makes the most sense, on the go, in a pocket, waiting for a train or a lover.

Photo Friday: Art.