Photo Credit: Jennie Anne Benigas
  

 

 JUDY'S JOURNAL

September 2018

James Wright to his son, Franz: “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”

 

 


Notebooks I Have Known

 Dear Reader,

September’s Judy’s Journal begins my 15th year as monthly Palette and Pen Studios blog-writer! Thanks to my web manager, Patsy McCowan, for jettisoning work from my office and studio to cyberspace!

As I was rooting around this month for a topic, I came up with offering a look at notebooks and sharing some brief excerpts to demonstrate how these written means of collecting thoughts, tasks and experiences keep me on track. I have written blogs about certain notebooks before: 2015 December - The Red Binder: A Look at Obsession a collection of clippings about writers and writing, morbid & gruesome articles, and writing that made me laugh out loud; 2014 September – A Woman’s Notebook whenever I read a poem and it sets my head spinning, I record it in these pages; 2004 October – Why Keep a Journal? Whatever the answers were then, I seem to be unable to abandon the practice of keeping a notebook. This month’s blog is an opportunity to look inside several to see what’s there.

New Yorker Desk Diary

My husband John gives me the New Yorker Desk Diary every year. The week spreads out before me, with plenty of space each day to make notes. This format is a boon to list makers everywhere. I have a full storage box of diaries showing what I have done every day for several decades. Writing & painting deadlines - dentist, haircut, committee appointments – gift & card buying reminders – museum visits – bills due – library visits – people to phone, email, or write to – trips – meetings of every kind. Real life. If it’s not written in my desk diary, I won’t show up or the task probably won’t get done. I circle it each item when it’s finished. At a glance, I can see what is left to do. Why I don’t throw away the desk diaries at the end of the year, I don’t know. Maybe it’s proof that I survived another year and managed to get things done. Maybe my subconscious is pointing me toward writing an autobiography or coping with severe memory loss.
Travel/Art Journals

This is the drawer in which I store my filled travel journals; the current one is on a bookshelf, waiting for the next trip to an art museum.

  • January 6, 2001, the Guggenheim, New York City…I saw Picasso’s woman ironing again. Copying it over and over last year, it felt as if I were seeing an old friend.
  • October 30, 2002, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York…something that surprised me about Modigliani – this guy was drop-dead gorgeous. Sigh…
  • January 15, 2004, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston…Talk about getting lucky. Today, instead of getting in to see the Rembrandt exhibit (“sold out”), we went to a 2-hour demonstration of his painting techniques. We saw in one of his self -portraits how he used cross-hatching to achieve shading and mixed minerals, bugs and crushed oak balls to make paint! Rembrandt was the genius of light who used little dots of pale yellow (white lead mixed with cadmium yellow) to make jewelry sparkle and fire leap off the canvas!
Red Suede Notebook

So named because its soft fabric cover, it is the first thing I retrieve when a quotation grabs me. Some have ended up in poems or essays, or sit there, ready to console me when I’m down.

  • From the New York Times Book Review, interview page: What was the last book that made you cry? John Waters: “The Visiting Privilege, by Joy Williams. ‘The dead just forget you,’ a character reasons, and boy, that is a sobering, ego-crushing thing to tell someone.”
  • Thornton Dial: “The more you work on something, the more ideas will come to you. That’s the way art is.”
  • “Ambiguities are the hinges of thought.” I.A. Richards
  • James Wright to his son, Franz: “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”
  • John McPhee: “I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe 20 or 30 years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than 90 percent.”
Manuscript Notebook

My current research project sometimes overwhelms me. This notebook enables me to make mini or maxi lists and write questions to help me get back on track. For example, I listed a chapter heading, with a question: Tarrytown – What had happened to SK and YHD by 1945? I found out what I knew and what I needed to find out. Another page is a list of documents found in the Mansfield, Connecticut Town Hall. I made a note to untangle a confusion in the mortgage wording. Sometimes, I will read this notebook if I am in a lull to reignite my brain.

A notebook can be all these: a tool, a life-saver, a collection site, a catch-all, a thought-provoking instrument, a source of inspiration, an eyesore, and a well of possibilities.