A new notebook feels wonderful.  It’s full of promise;  of undiscovered words; of unseen ideas; of unknown adventures.  Sometimes it’s hard to write the first words in a notebook because you don’t want to spoil the pristine pages, but then you get over that as you start writing, doodling, and otherwise filling in the space.  It’s great.

Every now and then I go through the notebooks that I have on the go and see what’s there.  A lot of it is unusable junk, some of it’s OK, occasionally there’s a little flash of insight that’s worth chasing.  So I doodle, write, and add more to the notebook.  More ideas come and go.  Lots of fun.

Then I start noticing that there are more pages with writing on them than pages without writing.  I start cursing the fact that I started writing a note in the middle of something else.  I’m running out of room and the more that I look at the notebook, the more that a single thought starts to dominate:  screw it.   Use a different notebook, one that’s cooler and that hasn’t been marked in yet.  Then I start thinking “most of this notebook is utter crap.  I should just toss it and start a new one.  I’ll just rip out the good parts and keep them to be reused later.”

More of The stimulating yet relentless insanity of paper notebooks at Broadcasting Brain.

Taking notes in the field has been a passion of mine for a long time. I have stacks of pocket-sized notebooks full of observations made over the years and I’m in the process of re-writing these notes in a neater format along with photos that are related to each entry. Some folks use word processing programs and type their recordings, but I prefer mine to be handwritten. I do this because I feel something is lost when you type them up. Handwritten notes have character and personality. Each stroke of the pen or pencil contains a part of the person that made the observation

More of Capturing Notes in the Field

Below are some of his Moleskine art:

A sketchbook journal from October and November, 2008. Location drawings, collage, and cartoons. Music: NY, Artist: Meghann Robinson, Album: Drive

Source: zipchips

Hello companions of this lusciously mad journey,

It seems to be the wildest trip yet. I locked my right knee while climbing a tamarind tree in Assam, last December. Since then I’ve been hobbling along for a couple of months, with my crutch, or a walking stick, still travelling, and soaking it all in.
I had an arthroscopy to trim the torn cartilage, a couple of weeks ago, and I’m recovering and healing here in Bangalore.
This period, has definitely altered the wiring in my brain. Pain and circumstance has changed my cycles, and creative episodes flourish while I learn to run with my madness.
Here are some outpourings from the release of these episodes, during my time in the hospital, or details from various states of mind.

Hugs galore,
Getting Younger Old man Prash

Wolgang Amadeus Mozart (painting by Barbara Krafft)

Contemporaries of Mozart held the romantic notion that he composed “automatically, intuitively, and without conscious effort.” They saw the writing as a simple mechanical process that channeled the music from his head onto paper, ready for the symphony. But over three-hundred sketches and drafts have survived to the present day to cast light on Mozart’s compositional approach.

The historian Ulrich Konrad has written extensively on these techniques in Mozart’s Sketches [PDF 1.1MB]:

Mozart noted down his sketches almost exclusively on separate sheets of paper, using ink. He had no use for “sketchbooks” and almost never sketched in pencil. [...] The reliable report that Mozart also used a wax tablet or slate when producing his sketches is one we should do well to bear in mind, for, even if it does not extend our knowledge of the sketches themselves, it reminds us that sketches could be erased after they had been written down. If Mozart worked in this way, it means that he had little sense of any need to keep a sheet of paper once it was filled with sketches.

This suggests that the sketches were tools for thought, rather than a conscious effort to document ideas.

More of Sketching in Music at Design for Service

Photo by Flickr user seanmcgrath

Simplicity is achieved when there is nothing left to add and nothing left to take away. The simplest tool to use is the one that goes just as far as you need it to, and no further. While technology certainly will fit the bill sometimes, there are other times when the best thing that you can do is turn off your phone, shut down the lid of your laptop, hit pause on the iPod, and just sit down with paper and the writing utensil of your choice. So here’s five areas of life where you might want to consider shutting off technology for simplicity’s sake…

The Power of Paper: 5 Situations Where Paper Trumps Technology at simplifi.de

There are movies hard to forget. To build your own film archive there’s the new Film Journal, dedicated to movie lovers.

Alphabetically organized sections to fill in with film information, 6 tabbed sections to personalize, film festival list, adhesive labels, colored icons, 12 blank pages in which to unleash your creativity.

The black cover is fully embossed with movie world’s cult items, behind and before the scenes.

The Film Journal is part of Moleskine Passions, the new collection dedicated to Recipes, Wine, Books, Films, Music, Wellness.

(Source: Moleskine.com)

I bought some bottles of Rohrer & Klinger at The Writing Desk from the United Kingdom. The shop has a nice Col-o-rama. Rohrer & Klingner is a German company that makes all kinds of ink since 1892. I filled my purple Lamy Safari (fine) with this fine color.

More of the Rohrer & Klingner Old Bordeaux review at Inkyjournal.

I wanted to show you my monthly tab hack. First let me show you what I was trying to do. I love having monthly tabs (really just colored areas on the side of the page indicating the month) like the Journal 21:

More of the Moleskine Month Tabs Hack at Plannerisms.