Saturday, January 29, 2005

You can never love your Moleskine…

…too much, but you can love it so much that your ideas for how extensively to use it become faintly ridiculous. (For those who don’t know (and why the hell don’t you?! HUH?!): Moleskine.)

Moleskinerie, an excellent, excellent blog on the pleasures we can find in the tactile, the retro, the writerly and open–eyed ways that passionately using any notebook implies, has recently linked to a guy who tells you how to organize your Moleskine as a blog. This strikes me as obviously silly. A blog is, and to be a blog pretty much has to be, a hypertext document displayed on a computer with an internet connection.

The connection is the key to a blog, allowing you to surf away from the blog using its links, and then to surf away from those links, using theirs. The possibility of a non–self–referential, chaotic surf. When you write, however creatively, in a notebook, what you have is — a notebook. Repeat: a notebook. Not a blog. A notebook. Lots of paper? Writing? Hard covers? No USB port? Ah yes, that’ll be a notebook.

The addition of page numbers or little sticky tabs to your notebook is your choice and may be helpful. But, more and more, these ‘moleskine hacks’ jarringly make me think of a hypothetical kid who likes a piece of driftwood he found on the beach so much that soon we hear the refrain: “If I find out how long it is I can use it as a ruler! Look, I can dip it into my soup, it's a spoon! If I burn the end of it, it can be my pencil! I’ve drawn a face on it, it’s a cat! Meow!”

*sigh*

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