Tag: Samuel R. Delany

I was going to put this Michael Bierut post among the week’s Unrequired Reading, but I thought it deserved its own entry. It’s all about the notebooks that Bierut has used for the past 26 years. He’s up to #85.

As anyone who knows me can imagine, I find this sorta thing fascinating. I love looking behind the curtain and seeing the processes and tools behind work. It’s the same reason that I enjoyed the Wrap-Up Show on Howard Stern (before Rufus chewed through the antenna cable of my Sirius unit in a fit of pique and left me radioless).

While he does explore his work process, Bierut also manages to discuss the significance of the notebooks as notebooks, without treating them as dreaded Art Objects. His stories of Never Leave a Notebook Behind reminded me of the brunches I spent with Chip Delany, who would invariably bust out one of his cheap spiral-bound notebooks to jot something down in mid-conversation. They were as much a part of him as his trademark Santa-beard.

I’ve never been good at note-taking. I do keep a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook in my Bag of Tricks, but rarely take it out anymore. I bring a second one with me to trade shows so that I can appear to be interested when companies give me long technical descriptions of their new products. At the office, I use notepads of employees who were fired. I find it kinda funny to take notes on phone conversations and write to-do lists on pages that bear the names of magazines that were shut down five years ago.

Still, it’s an effort for me to keep a piece of paper and a pen nearby when I’m reading those Montaigne essays. I do write down a line here or there in the Notepad of my iPhone, but they only seem smart at the time. I’m more likely to write down the beginnings of a post here in WordPress and save it as a draft. That way, there’s even less evidence of what my thought processes are.

But I digress (which is what you came here for; admit it); go read Bierut’s post nowish!