Evidence in Notebooks

How to forgive my own tardiness? On my own brief? How?

Even though it's a pleasure, this kept falling through the cracks, I think a mixture of time management unskillfulness and fear of doing it wrong. Or the realization I don't spend time with notebooks the way I once did. I even got out "supplies," really just a pencil case with a lot of colored Sharpies, and put them on the table to entice myself to doodle, to draw, and I DID NOT. 

I use notebooks at work. I take scrawled notes that I rarely go back to. When I mentioned to someone at work that I was going to maybe use my work notebook for this assignment, I joked, "But I will be careful not to reveal any industry secrets." She was weirdly grave and acted like that was indeed a risk. I felt even less like I had any "material."

I have this notebook that Leigh gave me whose cover is an old book cover, a book called "Speech Correction: Principles and Methods" by Van Riper. Whoa, it's a real book, but it doesn't look like this. The notebook is blank, as notebooks are, but there are pages from the real book ("Speech Correction") sprinkled throughout. It's one of those notebooks. Leigh gave it to me because we joke about our lisps. I may not have a lisp anymore. I did as a child but attended speech therapy to rid myself of it. Now I hear a sibilant "S." I think I sound like a baby with a lisp, when I hear myself recorded I cringe, I feel the same way when I hear Drew Barrymore speak.

This is the a page of from notebook:

I don't know.

So I had my performance review at work. I took notes throughout the whole thing. It was a nervewracking experience and may also be a reason why I felt so spent during the week of the brief. It went well I guess. I found the experience intense. 

Hettie's name is one there as I was writing things down on a page that were on my mind before the review started. I think I was grounding myself in the things that I think are important. Not being reviewed, that's not important.

I had a reading from a psychic. I'd never done it before. This was someone recommended by a friend of  a friend. I mean and barely recommended. I heard that someone's friend saw a psychic and I immediately decided, after learning the friend is not nutsy new-age or nutsy at all, that I would have a reading. It did not change my feeling about psychics. Which is I am suspcious. This psychic is evidently in an HBO documentary called No One Dies in Lily Dale. It looks kind of good.

Then my mom had surgery and my dad fell and there was no time. I guess I watched two documentaries about South Africa. I am still obsessed with listening to Graceland. The Paul Simon album. I had it on when Natalie and I were working and someone came in and said, "Is this PAUL SIMON?" as if nothing dorkier had ever happened. Maybe that was true.

I went to Workman and did paper crafts and thought of you, Coo, and made a very schizoid valentine. Not that I think of you as schizoid. I had thought to make a valentine for you since you couldn't come. I got there late and there were no instructions so I had to go rogue. Very rogue.

This is the ugliest thing.

A Tale of Four Notebooks in One Week

I have four  notebooks I takes notes in and doodle in. I sometimes wish I could just have one notebook for the notes and doodling but that has never happened. Some lives require more than one notebook. 

The top one I take with me everywhere. It is known as the "small jotter", it can fit in a pocket or an evening bag. I don't really have an evening bag but if I did the small jotter would be in there. I am a firm believer that a writer type should never leave the house with out the tools of the trade. In the past, brilliant ideas have come to me and I have not been able to jot them down. I cannot actually testify to their brilliance but I would be able to if the small jotter had been present.

This was the coloring that happened in said jotter this week.

It was a week of many long meetings. The above list hails from a meeting of the Artistic Development Committee at a theater I am a part of. I have to get in touch with these people about various things. As per usual, I committed myself to call and contact five people and start a whole new program. I think I have to both write a mission statement for something and devise some sort of system of talking about art with a very nice chap, named Russell. I would much rather just get a cup of joe with Russell. And for the record, the words "mission statement" fill me with dread and make me want to take to my bed. I am uncertain what those dates are for in March. This should trouble me but it doesn't, perhaps because I colored them in.


The second notebook is my paper datebook. I do still have one. I have to look at a week in three dimensions. I sometimes use electronic calendars and often think about using some sort of electronic task completion system. I enjoy reading about those systems on productivity websites. There are many of them that seem to transform  people's lives. I have yet to let one of them transform my own. I write and rewrite my list in this little fellow, lovingly known as my "date book." I am often screaming at my husband that I have lost it and more than once have accused him of hiding it from me.

I always color in this book. Sometimes, I draw a cartoon face to sum up my day. Usually, the face has a guilty look born of procrastination or not going to yoga or the gym. I have started adding a little blue sticker dot to days I go to the gym, walk, or do yoga. If you look closely, you will notice there is only one blue sticker dot for this week. I think I read something on a productivity site about crossing off X's on a paper calendar and not breaking the chain. I adapted the system and as you can see it is working like a charm.



The third notebook is known as my "everything" notebook. It is a Muji notebook and I hate it. I thought I loved it and bought two. The first one fell apart while I was working on a production of a play. I have important notes in it but now it's clipped together with a binder clip and I never look at the them. I have no idea why I thought it was a good idea to start using the second notebook.

This is the place I keep notes for projects, rough ideas for classes, notes on other people's work etc. It is not my diary. That is a whole other notebook that I forgot to include. I rarely use it anyway.  I go through these "everything" notebooks very quickly. I really look forward to be done with this one. Also, don't be conned in to buying Muji pens. They dry up when you most need them. Muji really let me down 2012.

The above are notes from a meeting about a children's theater company in Ohio that is commissioning people to write plays. I am not really sure why I thought it would be a good idea for me to go to this meeting.



These were some doodles from Hettie's class on Monday. I colored them in today. I often draw bird people. Not sure why. I also often find myself making lists of events from my life in that class. I would like to make a story board of ideas, as Hettie suggested. The problem is, I am already story boarding something else. How many notebooks and storyboards can one person have?

The fourth notebook, with the swirls is where I plan my lectures and exercises for classes. I don't doodle in there. Yet. I couldn't tell you why. I love this notebook. I love most notebooks at the beginning.

All of this rambling about lists, coloring, notebooks and doodling made me think of this. I loved looking at artists to do lists in this exhibition and every since then it made me think that a notebook could also be an artifact. It also made me think about  this class that Lynda Barry is teaching at the University of Wisconsin this semester, where a part of the class consists of coloring in pictures while you listen to lectures on the brain. Doodling helps you concentrate more. It is a fact.

One of my other secret past times is listening to public radio podcasts while doing needlepoints of cats. I always remember more when I am doing something with my hands.

Her notebooks have also always stuck with me.

Brief: The Fourth

Sketchbook week. Take inspiration from what's here or go your own route. Fill as many or as few pages as you like. Coloring. Doodling. Writing. Manic optimism. Cutting despair. Let it all in.

Nat

Yes peculiar and yes precious: Natalie. She is consistent and mysterious, I spend all day with her and often the evenings these days and I know her and I do not. I read that Penn and Teller do not ever socialize and if they didn't have the act they would not be friends. I don't know if that's so here. She is my partner, she is my opposite number.

I tried to write down the things that make her peculiar and precious. When I went to scan it in the precious parts didn't make it in fully. These don't seem specific:

I think she's most precious because for all the ways in which we differ, we are partners. She is reality in days filled with cross purposes, confusing signals, mixed messages. I wish I could draw and I'd draw her. I wish I could tell her what she means to me but we're not at that place.

Peculiar

 

 

I sometimes prefer my doodles to my writing.

I hold no illusion that they are good but they are different from the writing, which is more expected, more like a relative you love but can only take in small, lethal doses.

I often begin writing by coloring in a doodle.

I used to feel terrible about this.

It seemed very unprofessional, not the sort of a thing a real writer does, color-in like a toddler.

Well, this writer does.

Anyway seems a strange thing to be professional at--writing.

It's what I look at in my old notebooks.

 The play of colors and shapes are more interesting to me than the manic optimism or cutting despair that belongs to journals.

I can only force myself to write a to do list if there is some drawing involved.

Most things on the list are not done, even if they are colored in.

This is the human condition, it seems and I am just a little happier since I accepted this.

This is not a poem.

Please don't think it is a poem about doodles in notebooks, on scripts, in datebooks and post its.

Sometimes I wonder if I could make a career of this doodling?

It seems more likely that I can make a career of being a playwright or telescope designer.

I think careers are for the birds and artists should not try to "have" them.

You'll be "had" if you try too hard.

My husband often shows me the handwriting in his journals--it is perfectly rounded and even, 

unlike my own scribbling which a friend one likened to the EKG of someone dying.

Sometimes he writes with a fountain pen in green ink.

He shows me his penmanship, I show him my doodles.

We are stuck at the same age,

somewhere between seven and nine.

I think that is part of the reason we've lasted.

We can muster up excitement about anything, morning coffee,  a TV special about Lemurs, the prospect of lunch.

We are becoming more peculiar with age. 

It happens. 

The trick is to perhaps find the precious in the peculiar. 

Otherwise, you could be angry all the time.

And then there would be less time for coloring.

Brief: The Third

Describe, display, invent, draw, or channel something or someone that is "peculiar and precious" to you. So specific and yet so complicated but so present in life, these two things. Live in the contradiction. And do it fast. Spend no more than an hour on this brief. And that is an order from HQ.

Anatomy of a Dinner Party

First Course 
On a rainy day, we say: At home, there is soup.
In the evening I went home and had a little consommé.

In shallow bowls with wide lips we serve soup.
Carrot or squash? No one knows. Slightly sweet in the spoon.

Second Course 
This is the lighting we wanted. We look, we love. We love
How we look. The crystal goblets so thin you could bite right through.

I am no longer young the young man says and he laughs.
Every time we laugh in unison the battery of the night recharges.

Main Course 
We have turned off the lights and clutch hands around the table.
Eyes squished tight we send a squeeze around the circle, me to you to her.

If you asked them later about the menu they would say: Bolognese.
But it was not the food for which they came it was the benediction.

Dessert 
Tomorrow there will be a stack of dishes but tonight!
There is a stain the size and shape of Africa on the tablecloth.

The door to the yard is open. Inside, there is a peculiar and precious weather.