The best reason to drop Moleskines.


(Larger photo.)

There’s a lot of hoopla on the net today about Moleskine because the company is holding a contest that a lot of people find offensive and that a lot of other people find empowering.  I don’t want to join that fray.  I’m not a designer and, frankly, I don’t understand much at all about the profession.  I have my own issues with Moleskine as a company and as a book.

Read about it here.  Read Moleskine’s condescending and badly-worded response here.

But I will repeat what I’ve said before, especially in light of all of the Moleskine proselytising I’ve done on this blog.

The best reason to ditch Moleskines is that they are not the only game on the block anymore, combined with the fact that they suck. 

What I mean is that the quality has gone to shit.  The company makes promises it doesn’t keep and makes too many damned products to keep their staple product both cheap and “good.”  (Look what happened to the price of standard Timbuk2 bags when they started making all that other stuff, and those babies aren’t made in the USA anymore unless you get a custom model.)  Also, there are many other notebooks out there with the same features (or a better set of features) than Moleskines.  You can get recycled small m moleskin “copies” made in the USA for the same price from Ecosystem, for instance, and their paper is much, much better.

That said, having issues with a company is a damned fine reason to stop buying their shit.  That was, in part, why I stopped using Moleskines after years and years of use and mucho money spent.  Not to mention time spend fondling the damned things.

Me?  Now?  I used a lot of different books, but my current favorite is Field Notes.  I don’t pet them.  I use the shit out of them.  The company never implied that they were made where they are not, and, they tell you exactly what’s in the book.  Also, well, shit, they are more durable and have better paper.  But, hey, that’s not the only reason we choose our notebooks, right?

Why I don’t really use Moleskines anymore.


Mind you, I’d been using them almost exclusively for nearly 8 (EIGHT!) freakin years.  That’s a lot of notebooks!

It started two years ago, when I got tired of searching for the perfect pen for Moleskines.  I say “for Moleskines” because that thin and crappy paper worked best with bad ballpoints.  As Stephanie from Biffy Beans puts it, it’s “Like trying to write on dead leaves” sometimes.  Nice and inky ballpoints would transfer to the other page when I wrote on the back.  Same for pencil.  Forget anything really and truly inky.  But, I realized that, for better or worse, I really liked them.  And that was that.

Well, it actually started a few years before that, when I wished that Moleskines were a little greener.  There were no green moleskine (small m) books back then, not that I could find.  Not like now.

Anyway, the pen search was annoying.  I know I’m not alone, either, and on blogs and Flickr and Facebook, people searched for something that would work in these over-priced books with lies on the covers.  Then, this summer, I lost my shit a little one day over my BRAND WHOREDOM.  I recovered, and the company that owns Moleskine, meanwhile, promised greener cover materials.

Yeah, not only are they not made of recycled paper, and not only are they kinda made in China, kinda made in Italy, kinda taken on a whole trip around the world before you pay too much for them (must be where that get all that “nomad” crap from).  They are also covered in freakin PVC.  People who were laser-engraving these things had to stop because burning PVC creates dangerous fumes.

WARNING : DO NOT LASER ENGRAVE MOLESKINES WITHOUT THE PROPER FILTRATION SYSTEM. BURNING THEM CREATES HIGHLY TOXIC GASES INCLUDING PHOSGENE AND CHLORINE GAS. THE HYDROCHLORIC ACID PRODUCED WILL CORRODE EVERYTHING IT CONTACTS.

PVC can make fire-fighters sick when it’s used in building materials and burns.  One of my favorite people in the world is a fire-fighter.  I feel like I shouldn’t contribute to the PVC market, especially when I can easily just, you know, not do it.  Most companies are taking it out of their products.  Many did a long time ago.  Again, someone from the company that makes Moleskine products promised greener cover materials in August in a comment to this post.  Last August.  No word on that.  That only that, but they won’t publish even the most innocent “hey, got a date on them there covers?” comment on that post.  I’m going to pass on talking about how they destroyed one of the coolest blogs on the internet by just making Moleskinerie a badly-written ad.  But censoring comments from people who leave a real email address and URL and who have had previously-published comments is just bullshit.

Also.  Yes.  The last three Moleskines I bought had to be replaced by the company.  They actually only replaced two.  One had every page ripped, and another had a BUG in the paper.  Yes, a dead bug.  They sent one to replace them.  Thanks.  Then they wrapped one of those fancy “passions” journals so badly in its unnecessary plastic that the pages barely opened from the bend-job they got on the book’s trip around the world and to my doorstep.  After three emails and at least six weeks, they replaced that.  It smelled like, as someone else put it, jet fuel also.  It sits and is not used near food.

I felt like a jack-ass already, not only for how many of those damned things I’d bought and filled, but for how many I caused other people to buy.  And how many I gave as gifts.  Etc.

Then, this summer/fall, I scored some better books and haven’t looked back since.  I can use whatever pens I want to.  Some of them are made of green materials, using green processes.  None of them have lies printed all over them and never have.  And, playing to my own weakness, none of them are prone to idolatry or fetishization from me — that I can tell.  Except Field Notes, but I, frankly, just write and draw in them, beat the shit out of them, and start a new one when it’s full.  I haven’t gotten batty about them.  Not yet.  If I do, I’ll quit using them, no matter how nice the paper is.

(This thing is FULL of Moleskines.)

But this made me poop in my own cereal.  Not only is Moleskine now just a brand for over-priced Notebooks.  It’s a brand for all kinds of shyte.  Check it out:

“Writing, Travelling and Reading. The new Moleskine collections include bags, pencils, pens, reading glasses, computer cases, a rechargeable reading light and an e-reader stand. A series of accessories, clip-ons and holders are perfectly compatible with the notebooks, ensuring the greatest range of uses and thus forming the ideal kit for the modern-day nomad. Designed by Giulio Iacchetti, the new collections are bound to the Moleskine’s very make-up in their functional and aesthetic traits: the elastic band, the rounded corners, the black color, the simple design.”

Moleskines are, officially, ruined for me.  I remember when they were actually made well (I don’t care what the company says, the quality has gone to hell in the last 2-3 years, with some exceptions like my 2009 planner), when they were still kind of esoteric and hard to find, when they felt special and practical — when a Moleskine was a notebook, not an over-branded pack of sticky-notes.

And, yet.  Still.  I totally want The Little Prince edition.  And, jeepers.  I find myself drawn to them sometimes.  I can’t say why. I readily admit that a large part of why Moleskines were such an issue for me relates to my own personality. They became like a woman who was really bad for me, but whom I really liked to involve myself with. In the stationery department, I mean.

Before you’re tempted to send pro-Moleskine hatemail, read the post title again.  No one’s taking away your planet-killing notebooks.  Just your money.

Curmudgeonly about loyalty.

This isn’t about anything that’s happened to me lately, but where the heck has all the loyalty gone?  We’re only loyal to brands now?  (I ask with four Timbuk2 bags in my closet and dozens of Moleskine products everywhere.)

I grew up a disloyal person.  I blame having two siblings close to me in age and the rivalries that led me to become a backstabber in my early teens.  What one has to do with the other, I’m not sure.

I’ve tried to be a loyal person my whole adult life, and it’s the stuff of jokes at times.

I rode home with my Dad today because we work near one another and got off at the same time (read, we both kicked it at 4:30).  After he dropped me off, someone on a crotch rocket cut him off.  I threw a bottle at the man’s head, causing him to hit a tree and break in half.

Wait, no I didn’t.  I just yelled bad words that he probably didn’t hear over the rocket he was riding.

Consumerism and compulsion are not a healthy mix.

I find myself stuck more and more these days not even on products I might want to have or use — long ago I lusted after a Dickie’s messenger bag, got it, used it, loved it — but to brands.  There’s a new Moleskine?  I need to have it.  I realize I might need to keep a binder at work?  I need to get the expensive Moleskine one.  I need to.  Anything bag related?  I need a Timbuk2 and even a very heavy diaper bag that I can pass onto Charlotte later for travel/school.  Because, you know, a bag has to be made of a material that was designed for flak protection in WWII to be worthy of a bag, right?

This could be my relatively boring life.  I never go camping as much as I used to, or travel.  So I sit and obsess over backpacks and messenger bags and what sort of gear I’ll need for my imaginary solo trip around Europe and the near East (which I’ll not only never get to take, but also don’t really want to take; my wife is a great travel companion as well as life companion).  When I was in my teens and camped more, I never really thought much of gear.  I had (still have) a framepack from 1990, and that was that.  My sleeping bag still has a cigarette burn from October 1995, in the mountains of Western Maryland and probably hasn’t even been washed since.

So I sit and read about bags to do things I don’t do.  Look on Flickr at pictures of Moleskines and other tools of writers, while I never write anymore.  I read adventure and manly books to imagine myself doing it.

And I don’t do anything.

I used to convince myself (even until this morning when I noticed a few meaningless broken threads on my precious custom Timbuk2 bag — one of FOUR I own!) that I really just needed to be able to enjoy my stuff, to love it so much that I didn’t care about the universal flaws that things which are made of material always exhibit (namely, never ever being or remaining perfect!).  That’s crazy.  The only entities worthy of being loved beyond their flaws are people and maybe your country.  Not your damned messenger bag that was made in San Francisco just for you or notebooks that have freakin PVC in their covers and paper that’s really, let’s face it, not great.  More properly, I need to regain my love of things like hiking and camping and traveling so much that I don’t care what beat-up piece of crap I carry all my stuff in.  I’ve been actually planning on buying a backpack to take to the mountains this fall.  Why?  I’ll just sit there worrying about and thinking about it.  There’s no point in spending a lot of time on it.  When I was a teenager, my journal was just a big spiral notebook I never needed for classes, and then the books people would give me as gifts.

I’ve gotten to the point where I would be ashamed if the people whom I admire were to learn about my sick ways.  When my dissertation director was here last month, I hoped I wouldn’t slip and admit how much I’d read about the little backpack I had with me at the time.  I’m not quite sure that Thoreau, Hemingway or Chatwin would own four Timbuk2 bags or even that any of them would get anywhere near a Moleskine, especially now that there are better and cheaper alternatives that do the same thing.

There was a time when the only things I was obsessed with were Space Pens, and I just wrote and traveled and camped and enjoyed activities and experiences.  This wasn’t that long ago, merely months before I started blogging, maybe a year.  I need to get back to that.  I don’t think I need to somehow learn to deal with accepting the imperfections of the stuff I am already obsessed with.  I think I need to get rid of and no longer buy the things I’m obsessed with.  Things that don’t obsess me don’t bother me regarding their imperfections.  Hell, I love shit that’s broken in!

My consumerism even extends to how I spend my time online and why the hell I even own a digital camera anymore, but that’s another post for another dark lunch-hour.

The bizarre urge to document everything.


Before Charlotte was born, we bought her a new Moleskine (sized A4) for a first-year journal, and I bought a new camera with the cash I was planning on buying an acoustic bass with. My better half is a talented historian, and I’m a little obsessive and compulsive. We planned on recording everything. Everything.

I didn’t mean to, but I’ve found myself watching important moments through my camera’s LCD screen, and I’m so behind in journaling (and I haven’t cracked Charlotte’s volume open) that I can’t stand to sit down and begin to write anything at all. Today, I noticed a nice red stuck pixel in the middle of my camera’s pictures. Great. I know that bad pixels are a fact of digital photography, but a red one right in the middle is disconcerting. I spent the night trying out CHDK, but their website and download pages have been down all night. And the firmware version is conflicting with what it’s supposed to be. Canon said to send it back to them. Okay, that’s like $15-$20 in shipping and a week or two (or three) without my camera.

In itself, that’s not the end of the world. I could do something scummy, like buy my camera over again and return the one I have now, since my return period is over. Aside from being scummy, I’m sentimental, and I don’t want to do that. This camera took Charlotte’s first picture ever. But I find myself hoping that she doesn’t do anything too memorable in the meantime. And this is stupid.

For another thing, if it were me, I’d rather hear the story from my parents than see the photos. My parents took tons and tons of photos of their boys as children. But my own memory and hearing my parents tell me things that I don’t remember serve me better for my nostalgic needs than photo albums. In fact, there are some I’ve probably never even bothered to look through.

I’ve developed a strange “I’m getting older” and “important things are happening now” penchant for writing everything down and recording everything (that sounds like it’s own blog post) over the last few years. I worked all day and spent half the time Charlotte was awake messing with my camera like her childhood depended on it. But worrying more about some photos and posting them on Facebook seems like a waste of energy to me these days.

But, you know. Tell me that.

While I’m away, tending to the birth of our child.


There are some excellent sites you should check out while I’m gone!

Armand, the founder of Moleskinerie, is back with a re-vamped Notebookism! I, for one, have missed a site devoted to all things stationery and the writing life, as Moleskinerie used to be. Stay tuned for what I’m sure will be one of your favorite blogs.

Joachim is travelling around the world between his 25th and 26th Birthdays and blogging about it all on 360 in 365.  I’m reminded  that all I did then was to worry about a car I didn’t like owning, jump through academic hoops and start a pencil blog.  Instead of regret, however, I’m just enjoying the stories.

And, of course, you should check out North Baltimore Bike Brigade, which I co-run with my good pal Dan.  There’s a blogroll of bike blogs on there of which we’re proud, and a nice community of cyclists, largely from Charm City.

Moleskine case.


The Mrs. P-designed Moleskine case to which I eluded earlier is finished. Thanks to the two blizzards this week, UPS was behind with deliveries, and then couldn’t get to our building (though of course USPS did). As such, our small Valentine’s Day gifts never came. A set of giraffe hair clips I bought on Etsy did come. So my sweet little wife set about knitting me a case to hold my pocket Moleskine and planner, with a pen to boot.

It’s a perfect fit. Nice and snug, without having to bear-grease the two books get ‘em in there. Holds a pen, probably a few to boot. The opening is slightly tapered in, to keep it all in and together. Wonderful! The wool she made it of is very nice and feels durable.  I almost can’t wait to go back to work this week, to get to carry them around.  Almost

Quiet Friday evening, with knitting and Moleskines.


I am on my Ubuntu Mini, with the laptop speakers hooked up, playing music that makes Baby dance inside Mama (The Doves, Frente!, The Smiths).  Mama is on the couch, knitting me a sleeve for my Moleskine/planner/pen.  Very swell evening.

I’m dehydrated enough that my fingertips are like sharkskin.  So I’m having tea instead of coffee.  I am eyeing the nice Guinness pub cans in my fridge, though, and the pint glasses I keep in the freezer.  Hmm.

2010 is a doozy already.


Getting ready for Baby. Now more name searching. Getting a dissertation defense date. Getting my dissertation in tip-top shape to be defended. Not to mention the whole, you know, work, family and normal life stuff. It feels like March already; I can’t believe it’s only January 13th!

Fake what til you make what?

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I was at a talk once during my first year of college wherein Maryland Representative Elijah E. Cummings counseled young African Americans to “fake it til you make it!” (As an aside, I should mention that I have very positive feelings for Mr. Cummings, very positive.) I was confused and horrified. Despite my own faking and non-making, as an 18-year-old, the idea of faking was odious to me. I mean, I walked around with a ponytail, Docs and philosophy books in my own efforts at faking and making. But I was too stupid to realize it then. Faking it? On purpose? What? Where’s the necessary connection between acting one way and then becoming it?

Well, I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve read Existentialism (Sartre, Nietzsche, et al) and Pragmatism and learned all about how our actions play on our conceptions, metal states, personalities, identities, etc. I also pulled my head out of my ass and realized that our personalities do not define our actions so much as the other way around. Even moods.  If you walk around bitching all day, you turn into a bitch.

In case you somehow missed it, I’m a moody man. Pessimistic. Nit-picky.  At times depressed.  In my defense, there are genetics (I don’t wanna talk about it) involved in depression and general gloom and resentment to a world that continually fucks us all over (don’t kid yourself).

But it’s also part of what has become my “image.”  I’m critical.  I have an opinion on everything, usually negative.  You know, people are more likely to think you’re smart if you act like that than if you think everything’s awesome.  Anyone can do that, right?  And if you’re insecure and arrogant (you can be both), you just about need everyone to think you’re smart and good and valuable and fun to be around  because the — at times — incredibly crushing things you say about people, products and situations tell people that you are witty and funny.

It also makes you a pain in the ass, as my wife reminds me.

With a little one on the way in six months, I think I’d like to learn to be more optimistic or, at least, less doomy and gloomy and hateful.  I thought about it, and in some essentialist bullshit decided that it’s not in me.  My blood comes from four grandparents.  One was depressed and, well, lost it, but was otherwise by all counts a sweet person.  (I don’t wanna talk about it.)  One was a terrible father to my father and the biggest example of a P-word I’ve ever met.  One turned out to be an evil bitch.  One I never met but never heard anything bad about.  My parents are very good people, but they each had one piece of shit to match their good parent, and my father’s mother died when he was nine.  Any sunny outlook on their parts came from sheer will.  So I should be able to do likewise, no?

How?  Faking it?  Maybe that’s bad terminology.  Acting like the world doesn’t disgust me is probably more than faking.  I mean, if we look hard enough, there are enough good things in the univserse that we don’t have to fake not wishing existence itself would cease, right?  Whenever I see the ultrasound image of my child, I can’t be mad or upset about anything.  I’m all smiles and giggles (yes, giggles, at work and  on the bus), and I want to buy everyone a coffee and give them free hugs.  So maybe it’s not faking it.  It’s in selecting what to judge the world by.

Hating is the new hip?

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It’s funny that some people are talking about hipsters and how hipsters are so not hip and how they are not themselves hipsters and how everything about hipsters is supremely lame — except for spending a lot of time and energy making fun of them for not being keen and hip about the same things the person doing the fun-making is into.  (Huh?)

Funny thing is, all this hipster-hating is turning into the new hip.

I can’t figure out how I fit in. I started riding a bike for transportation just before it got hip. Started drinking copious amounts of coffee before the current state of hip set in (when I was a wee lad pouring in tons of sugar). Started using Moleskines before they were hip and when they were too esoteric for early millennial hipsters.

Am I a hipster for these things just because they are hip now? Am I nearing the age of being clueless to what’s hip? Maybe; I don’t care very much about it.

I think maybe my own hip-ness can be defined by the new hip (see above). In that case, am I hip for hating on the hipsters? Oh, shit, they’ve turned me into one of them.

Freakin hipsters.

[Past talk of hipsters.]

On address books.

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I have always kept an address book, since I was old enough to know people to write to.  Before that, I always used the address section at the end of dayplanners starting in high school.  My wife has a fancy Longaberger dealy that holds address cards.  It’s very bulky.  I have a small red silk Moleskine address book that I scored for a buck-ninety-nine last year. There’s postal paper lining the inside cover, stamps in the pocket and addresses of people I know written in black ballpoint pen ink.

I think of that scene in the beginning of Amelie when the older gent erases his best friend from his address book when he gets home from his funeral and sighs heavily.  I imagine keeping an address book for a long time, like that.  That’s kind of morbid, probably.  But when I consulted my address book a few weeks ago, I noticed at least two entries of folks who aren’t around anymore: my grandfather and my great-uncle and his nice wife.  All three folks passed away in the last year.  I didn’t cross them out, though.  I won’t.

Anecdote about address books: My very good buddy and his lady are expecting a baby very soon.  For her baby shower, he called me on the phone to get my mailing address for what he claimed was the millionth time (it was only like twice).  So, amidst the clothes and baby gear, there was a medium-sized navy blue address book for him, with my mailing address in it. The weird thing is that I had a hard time finding it.  Other than Moleskines, I didn’t find a lot of address books at all.  And I checked a few stores with a lot of stationery.

Am I so old-fashioned that I went looking for an object that fewer and fewer people are using?  I’m not that old school.  I’m certainly a bit of a techno-junkie.  I’ve been blogging for five years and spend entirely too much time on Flickr and reading other people’s blogs.  I embrace technology more often than I really am comfortable with.  It’s also a little disturbing that my buddy didn’t already have one, since he’s more old-school than I am sometimes.  And I mean that in a good way.

Are address books going to disappear in favor of information stored in cell phones and computers?  Admittedly, phone numbers are more convenient when they are stored in the device you’re going to use to dial them (your phone), and the same is true of email.  I store phone numbers and email addresses that way.  But I never put anything else in my computer or cell phone address books on principle.  No phone numbers in the email client, etc.

This could be a result of the fact that I stubbornly use the postal service whenever I can.  A friend of mine in Oregon and I keep in touch via letters and mail.  I send postcards when I travel and beg others to do the same (and my brother always does).  Are address books going bye-bye with letters?  They have other uses, though.  Holiday cards.  Birthday cards.  Thank-you cards.  Or are less people sending them?  I get less every year, but I thought I might just be annoying people.

Geez.  I feel like I should buy all the address books I can get my hands on and hoard them for when people come to their senses and want them again one day.  I could give them out with the only form of payment requested being a letter once a year sent to me.  I’d give them out with my address filled in.  I always return letters and often include goodies like stickers and obscene ad-lib-ed pictures from junk mail, etc.

I’m so melodramatic.

Anyone else treasure their address books?

Off to Philly for V Day.

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I’m off on a 6am train for Philly today.  We’re spending the day in the city of brotherly love, going book shopping and drinking a lot of coffee. Between being excited and my neighbor’s early Valentine’s Day…banging around under my bedroom, I’ve been up since 2:30.

Happy V Day, if you’re the sort to like that.
(Yes, that’s a Moleskine City Notebook for Philly.)
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Shipping up to Boston.


Tomorrow, I go to a few meetings that are work-related. Then a concert at Pier Six at night. Then a 3:55am train to Boston! We’ll be in Beantown Wednesday and Thursday. Of course, I’ll be making my pilgrimage to Walden Pond, but I don’t think I’ll have time to take the long B Train out to where I went to school. We’re staying at the Adams Inn in North Quincy, right near where I lived for two years in North Quincy, a block from the beach.

Then we are taking the Acela Express to New York early Friday Morning, staying at The New Yorker and returning home to Baltimore late Saturday night. Two days at home, and then I’m off to Philly from the 12th to the 15th for some training. Then I officially start my new job on the 18th.

Awesome all around, though it means most of two weeks away from my beloved bike.

To amuse yourself, check out the video to the awesome song by the Dropkick Murphys — who are from Quincy, where I actually lived.

Office, fall 2006.


Dang it, I don’t start my new job and move into my sweet new office until next month. Here’s a workspace from my dissertation, in the fall of 2006, which feels like last month.

My stomach is killing me, which is why I’m still up.  I could go for some of that chai tea right now.

Photo Friday: The Office.

Minimal keys.


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 notes.


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.

Anatomy of Restlessness.

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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.]