Notebooks

Burned all my notebooks.
What good are notebooks?
They won't help me survive.

--David Byrne, "Life During Wartime"

I haven't been blogging at all for a few weeks and it's because of the damnable notebooks. I was cleaning up my office way back in June when I stumbled on a cache of writer's porn: eight blank notebooks and some fine-tipped pens in an unopened box. They were all gifts to me from various co-workers, friends, enemies when I embarked on my year abroad in 2002, a year that was supposed to be full of well-fed meandering through German vineyards, morosely cogitating in a German way about the life of the mind, and hour upon endless hour of writing, blissful uninterrupted writing. What really happened: I got pregnant. It ate my brain. All of it. When I wasn't watching the Americans bombing Baghdad, which so far has happened EVERY time I move to Germany, I was sitting quietly brooding about the kick inside. And so my notebooks were packed home in the first crate, along with the very excellent pens, and in that crate they dwelled for three and a half years. Until by misfortune I unearthed them in the garage on June 22.

There is nothing so thrilling in the whole world as a blank piece of paper. Except when that paper is bound in an expensive hand-tooled Florentine book, inscribed in Italian and English to the effect that hurray for it, being the book in which my first best-seller began. Or when that paper is glued into a lovely brocade book handed over solemnly by the world's most creative person with the words "Here begins a new life." Or one of the six other generous, gorgeously-felt gestures that resulted in the lovely stack of books on my desk. Their emptiness is howling at me right now. I don't have a thing to say. I'm just sitting here with my hair being blown back by the howling emptiness of those books.

It's clearly time to do what I always do when I'm faced with writer's block. Eat an entire package of Twizzlers in one sitting and then listen intensely to what my duodenum says about it. There's binding and then there's binding.