Tag Archives: notebooks

Foray into the contents of a Moleskine

Four A’s
Four as
For as
Forays

Red&BlackAtheist AScarlet Lettersupport Art moleskine

The Four Red As? A collage that never made it onto my teandoranges blog.

Anarchy: in a perfect world I am an anarchist… and an anti-christ(ine).
Atheist: a descriptor that is useful and accurate yet too loaded to use flippantly. I use it nevertheless.
Adulterer: I’m not sure what Adultery means.  I’ll let you know once I figure that out.  Hester Pyrnne is All Women.  The Scarlet Letter can be a badge of honor and survival.
Art: a sticker I threw on the dull Moleskine black to spruce it up. I do Support Art… and so should you: http://the-a-project.org

The contents of a Moleskine. Not the pocket notebook I wanted back in April of 2008, but the notebook I ended up with. I saw “no lines.” I saw “pocket-size”… a size I always have in addition to larger notebooks.  I saw what I wanted to see and I bought it.  Once I removed the cellophane I discovered that the pages were THICK… heavy artist’s stock… like cardboard.

I took for granted the softness and pliability of paper … writing paper … until I found myself forcing a ballpoint pen across reluctant artist’s paper.

Such is life.  I have stacks of these small notebooks.  Most of them are not Moleskines.  Maybe none of them.  Buying small notebooks is as mundane as buying toilet paper… can’t live without them.  The purchase is also like starting a new relationship as I read words on the page that aren’t there.  I get giddy when I buy new notebooks. Twitterpated.

contents of a moleskine

The back pocket holds two sheets of OM stickers and an old 2008 horoscope message by Rob Brezsny.  I like to take horoscopes out of context… not necessarily the wrong sign… but at the wrong time: a week late; a day late; a decade late.  Since I’m an evolved post-theist, I get to choose whether or not portions of the message are still relevant.  If not relevant for me, read this as relevant for you.  It is yours… yes, your horoscope for Today.

  • Don’t just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the hummingbirds and listen to a friend. Use your imagination to actually BE the snapdragons and rain and wind and hummingbirds and friend. It’s time to not just behold the Other, but to become the Other. –Rob Brezsny

I kept this horoscope because it reminded me of something by J. Krishnamurti I read while writing lyrics for a song I collaborated on and recorded back in the day. More on that later.

The OM stickers? I was in the throws of a yoga teacher-training program.  I’m in the process of sticking them around Minneapolis, knowing someone will see them and think, “OM… namaste” and someone else will see them and think, “fucking hippie hipsters.”

The remainder of the contents need more time to decipher.  I’m looking for a catalyst for a new piece.

Of triptychs and oxen

tranquility

tranquility

The first journal I pulled out of my first drawer-stack of journals is a dream journal from 2004-2005.

Hopefully I didn’t lose my vast audience with the words “dream journal”. I have a couple of them… 2ish to be exact… in addition to dream descriptions splattered throughout most of my journals. We’re all guilty of this, right?

Things Fall Apart.

Things Fall Apart.

Journaling my dreams was a necessary phase.  They were a practice of transcribing ethereal images before they disappeared.  They also represent me scrambling to, aptly enough, archive my brain.

In 2004 I didn’t yet have the balls to embrace the term atheism.  I often described myself as an agnostic atheist… something I clung to all the way to the first 2007 entry of my Hot-For-Jesus blog.  Perhaps my preferred descriptor now is post-theist, but through it all I wanted to believe that my, Our, subconscious held the keys to Everything.

“I think too much of psychic overload, reincarnation, parallel lives.” (from first dream journal entry)

What did I find in the coffee-stained dream journal?

  • Performing, rehearsing, singing, seeing myself in a reflection – ‘blond’ (which I’m not), ‘dusty pink dress, cream pearls’, (both of which I made for a H.S. performance in the early ‘90s) and ‘sexy legs’ (whatever that means)… and I said to myself, “Damn. After all this time, Christine you still look fucking sexy and sound great and you’d make your family proud.”
  • Dying… as a foreign child in a disaster situation and not feeling pain… and needing to let someone know that I/she/he was dying pain-free. The dream convinced me I was channeling the suffering of others, in particular the 2004 Tsunami days before it happened.

You get the picture.  It is full of nonsense.  Absolutely necessary nonsense for the time… full of apocalyptic Armageddons… apocalypses galore camouflaged as war, disease, floods, tornadoes, solving mysteries that uncovered new Mysteries.

As I re-read it now I still look for signs, proof that I knew things before they happened, or parallel to their happening… proof that the dreams were significant if I just could properly interpret them… a holdover from the fundagelical glamorization of Daniel and other Biblical dream-interpreters.  But all I found were themes of houses, lovers, trains, siblings, music, mothers, frustration and apocalyptic intrigue.  No proof of anything but a woman trying to untangle knots of spiritual abuse and normal human life.

Anything worth sharing?

A Helper shared this koan with me.  I wrote it down in red ink:

                                          The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.

Take it. It is yours to keep as long as you need it.

Better for the wear.

Better for the wear.

The triptych of dream journal coffee pics can also be found on my Tumblr blog, User. (Triptych’s subtitle: put a fucking bird on it.)

Paper Migration: wo wir beginnen/where we begin

When a lodgerlover left, I noticed the empty drawers full of space I previously didn’t know I had.  My bras (top), underwear (middle) or socks (bottom) won’t be stuffed back into this newly discovered space.

Paper Migration: Into 2013...

The drawers are the perfect size for 8.5×11 paper… of which I have plenty.  I have boxes and drawers of notebooks of all sizes.  We begin with the paper and notebooks from the plastic file cabinet tucked sideways under my desk.

Paper Migration: Out of Dreams '04

The migration to the wooden drawers will force me to shed some paper weight and rediscover the ideas I filed away with good intentions of revising/revisiting some day. The plan is that one day I will have a new book to add to one of my bookshelves… spine color To Be Determined.

Paper Migration: color-coded bookshelves 2013

This color coded organization of my books is in part inspired by David Weinberger’s book Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. I work full-time in public libraries and have a history of working in three library systems and a bookstore before this current job.  We read Weinberger’s book for an Indexing & Abstracting Library class. My copy is marked up with pen and kitty teeth and claw marks.  We will revisit some of the margin notes in future posts… as an act of archiving the trail of influences.

Tumblr has a ton of BookPorn sites, many of which I follow. Which sites on any blogging format are your favorite eye-candy sites for books?