Co-Creation

The collected notes and notebooks of decades were with me out on the slate floor of the porch in the sun – a couple of stacks of writings and drawings, ideas and outlines, in every sort of form, from the oft-mentioned Moleskine notebooks to CVS Chunky Pads to sleek Apica books to notes written on the backs of check carbons (I have a lot of those). (Folded into thirds they fit in my jeans pocket on walks.) Forming a third unit or stack of sorts, I had with me for diversion a volume of Proust I’ve almost finished and one of John Hart (unopened – I have no idea).

I was immediately joined by our two female cats. Pi, the young one, got hold of a red file folder filled with recently excavated ancient notes and started biting the edges of papers and pushing the folder all around the porch. Lily, blind, beautiful and recently turned 18, found a way to recline against one of the piles of notes and the books, while Pi ceased her labors and stretched belly-up behind the other pile. I sat at the edge of the porch with my back to one of the posts, facing the sun. Lily and Pi, who’ve recently suffered incursions by a local feral tomcat, seemed to relax with me positioned between them and the yard.

I had felt on the verge of something, which was why I had the notes out there in the first place, but couldn’t bring myself to move anything. I sat for as long as I could in the sun, petting the two, then left them the books and my notes. The great synthesis, if there is one, can wait.

Sunset, Tuesday, 5 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The Onion ran a great item on a guy who writes in a Moleskine notebook so as to avoid the pedestrian experience of having to write in a cheapo pad from CVS. (“Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook.”) Especially funny to me because I do exactly both – I love my Moleskine notebook, which I use for combined sketches and notes (as seen, for example, here and here), but can’t function without my CVS Chunky Pad, which I write on every day. (Sadly, CVS now calls this product something else much more generic, but I’m sticking with ‘Chunky Pad’.) I’m sure to post a sketch someday in “Bic Velocity Ballpoint on CVS Chunky Pad.” Not archival, but you won’t be able to tell the difference.

To complicate matters, this entire entry began as a test of my theory about another notebook, the one I use most often. It’s made in Japan by Apica (here’s a plug for where I got mine). My theory: the Apica’s paper is so amazingly smooth, and effortless to write on, even though I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, this post would just start writing itself, automatically. Which it did!

Apparently writing pads, left to their own devices, like to write about other writing pads.