Start the Week #42

Review of The Notebook + At last, the meeting they said would never happen

Greetings!

This post is mainly about writing, from different angles. I don’t mean writing in italics, but different aspects of the topic. It includes my account of meeting up with

Rebecca Holden

in real life! (Gulp!)

This email is a bit long to fit in an email, so it would be better to read it online or in the Substack app.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.

Terry

Conversations

We writers are never off work. Everywhere we go, everyone we meet, and every conversation we overhear are all grist to the mill. I had already planned to write about this, when

Alicia Kenworthy

beat me to it¹. She writes:

There’s a coffee shop on Main Street in Warrenton where I’ve taken to reading stories. Every now and then someone will sit at a table adjacent and hop on a Zoom call and for a time I lamented the lack of etiquette inherent to one-sided public conversations until I started doing it myself.

Read the rest of it here:

Knackered

Anyway, it’s quite odd hearing snippets of conversation as you pass people. They’re devoid of context, but you can use them in your own context in a plug-n-play sort of way.

A few years ago, as two women walked past me in the street one said to the other, “I’m feeling emotionally traumatised.”

This was said in a jaunty, not-obviously-traumatised, manner. I was able to use this a couple of years later when in a line for the till at a department store. A woman behind me was on the phone when suddenly, in a far louder than necessary voice, she said, “I think we are going to have to hire a helicopter if we are to get Sebastian back to St Gasworks Private Academy in time for the start of the new term.

I turned to Elaine, and said, in a voice she mortifyingly told me was like a stage whisper, “I’m feeling emotionally traumatised.” The woman left the queue and went over to the other side of the floor, where she continued her conversation at a normal volume.

My notebooks are filled with bits and pieces of conversation, ready for use instantly should the occasion demand it. I am determined that these notebooks be donated to the nation, perhaps via the British Library, when I am no longer among the living, where they can provide a useful resource to future generations of writers for millennia to come.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Gentleman’s magazine

On the subject of longevity, I was browsing in the London Library the other day when I happened upon a notice at the end of a rack of bound journals bearing the legend, “Gentleman’s Magazine”. The shelves were the ones with a wheel at the end for opening and closing. Having read the stern warning to check that nobody was browsing along any of the other shelves, I opened the rack I wanted and was gratified to not hear the sound of someone’s bones being crushed. I looked through a few volumes and alighted upon this one from 1783.

Photo by Terry Freedman

Always one for a good book review, I trawled through and came across this gem:

Photo by Terry Freedman

In case you can’t read it, here’s the title and the first paragraph:

Archeologies, or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity. Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, Volume VI. 4to. (Reviewed by a Correspondent.)

After an interval of near three years, the Society of Antiquaries have indulged the publick with a 6th volume of their lucubrations. If they proceed with this pace, half the monuments of antiquity will decay or be destroyed before their 7th volume appears.

Just think: 340 years ago an unnamed “correfpondent” wrote these somewhat tongue-in-cheek words, and over three hundred years later we are smiling at them. I find that remarkable.

Review: The Notebook

Click here to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)

I mentioned this book a few weeks ago. It comes out on 2nd November, but the publishers kindly sent me a copy in advance. It has a very readable style, and interestingly the footnotes are in a different font from, and bigger than, the main text.

I love the subtitle: A history of thinking on paper (my emphasis). I do think there’s much to be said for writing on paper, and there is no paucity of research showing the benefits of analogue over the digital approach.

The range of aspects and the amount of research that has gone into the book are breathtaking. From pre-paper note-taking to modern practices such as bullet journaling and authors’ jottings.

Bearing in mind my own predilection for jotting down overheard snippets of conversation, I was quite pleased to read of this, from Joan Didion:

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon…²

It’s also fascinating to learn how the notebook has been a kind of proactive agent in some circumstance. For example, Giotto’s ability to draw realistic figures, thereby hugely influencing the development of Western art, has been attributed to his habit of drawing in a notebook from life — as opposed to merely copying drawings and paintings that already existed.

The development of the notebook itself is an interesting story, one involving not only a technological revolution but economies of scale and even protectionism. Glance through the index and you find not only the names you’d expect, such as Pepys, but many you would not. For example, I was delighted to discover that both Perec and Queneau (of the Oulipo: see below) get a mention, as does the MP William Cobbett. I know his name from his book Rural Rides, which I very much enjoyed when I was studying Economic History (not that it proved useful from an exam point of view), but apparently he was a keen advocate of keeping a diary:

“It demands not a minute in the twenty-four hours, and that minute is most agreeably employed.”

How did Chaucer manage to write stories based on the work of Boccaccio shortly after Boccaccio had written them, in an age before mass communication? It’s a good question, one that had never occurred to me before. Apparently, the stories were brought from one place to another via trade routes. It’s kind of obvious once it’s pointed out.

Moleskine books were (and perhaps still are) regarded as a status symbol. I wasn’t aware of that, but two of my accessories while working in a proper job were, along with a suit/jacket and tie and, indubitably, double cuffed shirt with cufflinks, a Moleskine notebook and fountain pen!

Finally — and this is another thing that hadn’t occurred to me — some people regard the notebook as a kind of Oulipian object. The Oulipo is based on constraints, and a notebook is in effect a physical embodiment of that idea.

Comprehensive as the book is, there are some surprising omissions. For example, Victor Klemperer maintained a record of how words were being redefined, in effect, under the Nazis, but his name does not appear in the index. ³Neither does that of Dr Johnson, whose work on the dictionary, as far as I know, relied heavily on notes for its compilation. Perhaps these were not included because, I believe, they were on slips of paper rather than in a notebook.

These, though, are mere quibbles. The Notebook can be read chronologically, which I should recommend as it gives you a good, overall historical perspective. However, you can also cherry-pick the chapters and the order in which you read them. The author is to be commended on providing such a rich and fascinating reading experience.

The publisher is Profile Books.

Appetizer 

Last week I got chatting to a woman from Ireland, and I asked her if she’d read Ulysses (which I haven’t — yet). She hadn’t. I mentioned that I was reading the stories in Dubliners. She declared, “Oh, that’s the appetizer to Ulysses!” She hadn’t read that either, but I like the idea of one book being an appetizer to others. On that basis, I presume Ulysses might be an appetizer to Finnegan’s Wake, a massive novel consisting of one sentence in effect and made up words.

I haven’t read that either. Nor had she.

Meeting Rebecca

Notebooks and overheard conversations are necessary but not sufficient for the writer. What you also need is a supply of excellent writing. Fortunately there is plenty of that on Substack, but I’d like to draw your attention in particular to

Rebecca Holden

’s Dear Reader, I’m Lost newsletter. Rebecca writes beautifully, and illustrates her work with both photographs and her own wonderful mixed media artwork. I love reading her newsletter because she has the ability to take something as innocuous and inconsequential as a shopping list or a note, and run with it⁴. Send her a picture of a list, and she will embark on a journey of both discovery and imagination.

I have a confession. I’m not especially interested in other people’s shopping lists, but I always read Rebecca’s articles because really the subject matter is immaterial. I find the same with the articles in the sports section of the newspaper. I couldn’t care less about football, cricket, baseball or golf, but if the writing itself is superb, what does it matter?

Rebecca and I have also been writing letters to each other on Substack, and that’s been great fun. We always have a good chortle, and we seemed to get on well. Therefore it was only natural that we would decide to meet up at some point. The date was fixed for last Thursday. Rebecca and Jim and Elaine and I met up in London, and the illustrations below depict Elaine’s and my reaction on first seeing Rebecca:

Terry (left) and Elaine, on meeting Rebecca and JIm

Believe it or not, I was slightly nervous, because some years ago I met up with a person I’d been corresponding with by letter, and ended up having a horrible time. She was completely different in person to her epistolary persona⁵. I didn’t think that would happen this time, but of course you never know.

I need not have worried. We instantly clicked and it was smiles all round. Straight away we were all talking and laughing, and it was great to see Rebecca and Elaine engrossed in conversation at the same time as Jim and I were, and Jim chatting to Elaine while Rebecca and I chatted. It was a joy to discover that Rebecca is as interesting and witty in real life as she is on Substack. We spent getting on for six hours in each other’s company, and most of that time was spent laughing. Here’s a picture to prove it⁶:

Terry and Rebecca outside Guildhall in London. Photo by Jim Holden.

It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if Rebecca’s perception of the day turns out to be diametrically opposed to mine. We shall just have to wait and see!

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this. Please leave a comment, subscribe, and subscribe to Rebecca’s.

1. If you don’t believe me, look at this plan I made last week:

2. From On Keeping A Notebook, by Joan Didion.

3. CORRECTION! Victor Klemperer’s name does appear in the index. My apologies for this. I’ve left the original text in, though crossed through, because otherwise the author’s comment wouldn’t make any sense.

4. Usually with the owner running after her in order to retrieve it.

5. Rebecca has written about this sort of thing in On First Impressions.

6. It’s a representative sample.