Saturday, January 2, 2010

Please take off your dress


I thought about buying a digital recorder for speaking into but they are a bit too pricey for me right now. I think I gave all my money to the beer companies of the world last month. I have started carrying my moleskin notebook around again. I was inspired by my friend in NYC who is a really smart cat and although he tells me I exaggerate things I do know that he is one of the smartest people I know. Anyways, he has these little notebooks of the simple spiral design that he carries around and works formulas and other interesting tidbits of his work. (Don't ask me what he does but it is all mathy and important.) I peeked at one of his notebooks and it terrified and titillated me in the same moment. It was obviously loved and worn and bentish. There was commitment to that notebook.

Anyways, I want to have access to my thoughts on the go and it feels like I am always on the go and I figured it would be good for me to have it for writing my book and things that make me wild and inspirational bits that fall from the sky and all of the good conversations I hear and
man this is what I used to do when my brain was so focused on turning the world inside out and sucking the marrow from it.

I have boxes of the world in little notebooks in my basement right now.

You would freak out if you read them.
You may be in them.

Did you sit next to me in the 90's on a bus in Europe?
Did we kiss in discotheques?
Did you walk by me in Los Angeles?

I am about sick of having grocery lists and paper and the occasional Thomas the Tank Engine in my pocket.

It's winter- the pockets are deep.

So far here are the things that I have written down:


my love for
Jenny Owen Youngs
recipes for assorted comfort foods

the lyrics to Glycerine by Bush
all of the people that smell good
open and brave seven times

reminder to reread A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

ten small love letters

a new secret
the origins of the word panache
Prosopagnosia is a real disorder and I think I read once that Jane Goodall suffered from it
Phonetic version of please take off your dress in Russian



I think it's going to be good for me.
It's going to be a wild year.
I can feel it.





photo via ffffound

8 comments:

daniellexo said...

oh jenny sounds dreamy!

Grumpy but sweet said...

fantastic. :) my notebooks are still fragmented by embarrassed self-consciousness... i'm looking for them to become bastions of freedom. little records of life. thanks for the inspiration.

6512 and growing said...

I love my little pocket notebooks. But I feel sort neurotic about the way I'm constantly scribbling the marvelous, hilarious things my kids utter - instead of like just *being* there.

Succubus in the South said...

I can help you with "panache"... it meant Plume in old french and was then used to mean Flair or Confidence when a favored and reputedly brave king used to tell his men to follow him by looking for the feather he wore in his helmet.

Elizabeth @claritychaos said...

I have scribbled bits and pieces on scraps of paper forever. I only wish I would have used notebooks - maybe I wouldn't have lost all of those poems on backs of receipts that I scrawled between drying cars at my dad's carwash.

Maybe at the end of twentyten you can post a Best of the Notebook for all of us.

Unknown said...

reminds me of Sinead O'Connor's The Emperor's New Clothes (which happened to be my theme song for my twenties).

kisses in discotheques, ha, yes.

i have a trunk full of notebooks. sometimes it (life) doesn't seem real unless i've scribbled it down. i wondered if blogging would replace my notebooks. but no, because notebooks still provide shelter for me secrets, and my half-baked, brain-stormy thoughts.

village mama said...

I remember being on a hippie beach in Brazil in 1996 and a coffee shop owner asking me day in-day out 'what are you writing about, nothing happens here'?! If you'd been there Amy, you too would have seen the unseen.
I'm a notebook addict. I'm going to snail mail you the kind I use to record my life/stories/to do lists/contact info/the names of stores I want to re visit...xoxo

Muthering Heights said...

I just LOVE looking through old notebooks...it sounds like you had fun!

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