“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk (the Nobel prize in literature winner) is an astounding novel.
Imagine an Agatha Christie like murder mystery (and that already is high praise, because Christie knew how to spin a murder mystery plot like few other writers do). Now set it in a “Fargo” like setting, including the hostile weather, the small town, the eccentric people, and the quirky, pragmatic and deeply insightful main character (if this is ever made into a movie, Frances McDormand would make a perfect Mrs. Duszejko). Now cast it all in fantastic prose, tie it to Blake, to Eastern European history, to morality plays and religious texts, and finally, to the ultimate revenge narrative, “The Count of Monte Cristo”. Mrs. Duszejko isn’t a brooding sailor exposing the cruelty, corruption and foibles of upper-class French society, but she most definitely is woman in her 60s doing the same for the chauvinistic, cruel, corrupt, hunting neighbours around her.
Tokarczuk created a Character (with a big, bold, capital “C”) like no other. Mrs. Duszejko is the heart, the essence, the meaning and the end of “Drive Your Plow”. She is our way into the story, she maps out our way through it, and she judges us in the end. How we feel about her after the final page says more about us than it says about her. She is a character both full of contradictions and yet an integrated, believable whole at the same time. She is an engineer and a teacher, with a solid STEM background, that is also an astrology believer and practitioner. She is a non-religious person that constantly talks about God, a recluse that keeps making friends, a cynic that somehow manages to see good in people at their worst moments. She’s rational and pragmatic, and also deeply emotional and oftentimes impulsive. She’s powerful and fit, and a frail invalid. And she’s completely, utterly, with every molecule of her being, a real and believable human being. She’s a more believable person than I am, astrology and all.
The way that Tokarczuk ties the men’s treatment of Mrs. Duszejko (and other women) to the way they treat animals is masterful. “Drive Your Plow” could have been a parable, an allegory, a morality play, and yet it performs all that and so much more without driving the reader away. Like “Fargo,” it could have been a meaningless farce in less adept hands, and yet it manages to deal with issues that we have learned to be cynical about (the value of life, particularly as deemed valuable or useless by important men) with great earnestness and sensitivity.
There is much of Agatha Christie in the construction of the plot (particularly “And Then There Were None” and “Murder on the Orient Express”). There is much of Blake in the morality and moral outlook of certain characters. There is much of Dumas in the social observations tied to the revenge plot, and there are many post modern writers that are echoed in Mrs. Duszejko’s first person narrative. The result, however, is entirely unique, entirely Tokarczuk’s own, and well worth reading even if you have never enjoyed any of the authors echoed in the narrative. “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a modern masterpiece, and one that is deeply moving and thought provoking at the same time.
I love Present and Correct’s packaging and I didn’t want to throw it away, so I repurposed it as bookmarks using some washi tape and scissors.
This was originally glued to a paper bag.
The have these cool vintage lending slips glued to their paper bags so I cut it off the bag, and used washi tape on the back to tidy things up a bit. I’m currently using this in the book that I’m reading (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead), and I love it.
The next bookmark is messy but I don’t care. I took a slightly crumpled brown envelope that contained pencils, cut out the interesting part and taped it shut with washi tape. I didn’t bother using a ruler so it’s a bit wonky but I don’t care. The result is still useful and I like its imperfections.
It took a few minutes to create these, and they make me smile. I enjoy giving new life to old packaging, and I hope this and my paper bag sketches inspire you to give it a try yourself.
While I’ve really cut down on physical book purchases, especially while I’m abroad, I always end up buying a few books, and this last trip was no different. On Thursdays there’s a decent antique market in Spitalfields (it also includes several food carts and a good selection of vintage clothes stalls, plus it’s a few minutes away from Brick Lane), and I oftentimes find interesting things there. I’ll likely write a separate post about my haul there, but I did get three Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series books: We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea”, “The Big Six” and “The Picts and the Martyrs”. They’re hardbacks in decent condition, with the dust jackets and the original Ransome illustrations, and I’m very glad that I found them half hidden in a comics and book stall. Ransome is an excellent British children’s book author, and if you liked the Famous Five and the Secret Seven or Kipling’s children’s book writing you’ll likely enjoy Ransome’s work.
The other two books are paperbacks that I bought at Waterstone’s Piccadilly while waiting for a friend (I’m not to be trusted in bookstores). I’ve been wanting to read something by Lawrence Durrell for a long time and “White Eagles Over Serbia” seems like a good place to start. J.L. Carr is a superb writer, and although I’m not sold on “How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup”‘s subject matter, “A Month in the Country” was good enough for me to want to give this a try.
I still have April’s book backlog to finish reading, but these two books are next on my list.
While I was in London I went to Present and Correct and purchased mostly woodcase pencils (and some paraphernalia). Here’s a breakdown of what I got there and why:
Blackwing Eras – I also purchased the previous Eras pencils from Present and Correct. These are very expensive (and overpriced) but after hemming and hawing I decided to splurge. These have the extra firm Blackwing core, which I enjoy writing and sketching with, with a little bit of zing with the nostalgic arrow punch design. I have a project in mind for them, and will feature them in a separate post them.
Eberhard Faber pencils. These are vintage, and I’ll post a review of them separately, but they are gorgeous and I love vintage pencils, so these were the first thing that I got once I saw them.
Musgrave Tennessee Red – I have several boxes of these, and yet I got another one. These pencils are gorgeous, and they’re great for both writing and sketching. Some people find their corners too sharp and prefer the rounds, but I’ve yet to obtain the round Tennessee Reds, so I can’t compare between them. I wrote a review of them here.
Mitsu-Bishi 9850 and 9852 – Japanese pencils. The 9850 is for “office use” and the 9852 is a “master writing” pencil. I have only one or two 9850s and I wanted a pack because they are excellent pencils. I haven’t tried the 9852s I think, and anything with that wild green and pink package with “master writing” on it is a must.
Loose USSR vintage pencils and graphite stick – I got these as a gift for my purchase at Present and Correct, together with the…
Faber Castell Goliath – a wide barrelled vintage, USA bonded pencil that was meant for school children just learning to write.
Woodcased pencil haul (and one graphite stick – the one to the immediate left of the Goliath)
I also got a set of salmon coloured Japanese pencil sharpeners there – I have another two sets that I bought there and enjoyed – one that I’ve gifted and one that I regularly use. There are surprisingly few pencil sharpeners of this kind that are actually good, and these are very convenient for my sketching kits as they are small and light.
I also got two mechanical pencils, one from London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden, and one from Gibert Joseph in Paris:
Sharpener set and two mechanical pencils
The top pencil is the Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr. 2 mechanical pencil (purchased at London Graphic Centre). I will be writing a review of it once I get to use it a bit more, but for now I’ll just say that it’s an attractive desk object.
The bottom pencil is the rotring 600 in camouflage green. It’s the rotring 600 – one of the best drafting pencils out there – and the colour is a dark racing green that makes it look black upon casual glance. I bought this pen at Gibert Joseph in Paris and was about to go for the red rotring 600 when I realized that what I had thought was a standard black rotring 600 was indeed the green one. The colour is difficult to reproduce, but I find it fetching and intriguing, so I’m glad that I went for it instead of its red or blue counterparts.
Drehgriffel above and rotring 600 below
Overall I’m happy with my purchases, and can’t wait to start using them.
I returned on Saturday afternoon from a 17(!) day trip to London, York and Paris, and I’m still in the process of adjusting back to my routine. It was a perfect trip and a perfect break from the hard reality that I normally live in, and so it’s been tough getting back. I missed my cats, and I missed my running routine, but I didn’t miss the slew of doctor appointments and medical related bureaucracy surrounding my cancer and my mom’s cancer, and I didn’t miss the political situation here at all.
So I’m trying to find comfort in journalling, in talking to friends, in enjoying the things that I got from abroad (of course I bought pens, paper, pencils, ink, cool vintage stationery, art supplies, etc). And I’m returning to blogging regularly. I have quite a few reviews in the works, and one more post in the “Ghosts of Planner’s Past” series, plus as I’m getting back to my reading routine more books will be featured here.
For now I’ve filled up four new fountain pens (none of which I’ve bought on this latest trip). The ASC Triangolo is a pen that I don’t remember buying at all, which is extremely unusual, and likely means that I bought it at Mora Stylos in 2022, on my first trip after finishing Chemo. Chemo brain is a real thing and I have chunks of that time (during treatment and a few months after it) that are completely missing in a very scary sort of way. The pen itself is an Omas 360 look alike, made with gorgeous arco verde material and has a “magic flex” nib. It’s the largest and one of the heaviest pens that I own, and the nib has issues (both problems starting and issues where it puts down too much ink). I filled it with Faber Castell Deep Sea Green, which from my experience is a drier ink, but that didn’t seem to affect it much. I doubt that I’d get much help from the Pen Family (their QC and service isn’t known to be the best though I will give them a try), so it’s a matter of seeing if I can fix it myself, and seeing what I can do to get it tuned locally, considering that the main guy working on pens here has recently retired. The ASC Triangolo is the big green striped triangular pen right beneath the writing.
The Sailor Pro Gear Slim Manyo Cherry Blossom is a pen that I bought on a whim in Choosing Keeping in London last year. I haven’t inked it since I bought it, but now I did, using the bottle of Sailor Manyo Sakura ink that came with it. This pen, unlike the Triangolo, perfectly fits my tiny hands (it’s the pink pen with the blue finials).
The two Lamy AL Stars (one on each side of the page) are a recent purchase from Pen Chalet. I wanted to try out a Lamy B nib, and I really liked the AL Star Petrol 2023 special edition, and the Tourmaline (2020?) one. They’re filled with Sailor Ink Studio inks that I purchased in Choosing Keeping during my last trip there.
The Leonardo Momento Zero Blue Hawaii and the FC Sparkling Rock travelled with me to London and back. They were a joy to use, and I’m glad that I took them along as they caused no issues – no leaks, etc – and were fun to use when I journaled during my trip.
Here’s a bit of a closer look at the writing sample. The Triangolo’s is unfortunately a mess. The Ink Studio 340 and 224 are my favourite inks of the bunch, though the Ama Iro and 743 are also great. The Sailor Manyo Sakura is too light of my tastes, especially in such a fine nib (the Sailor MF is like a Lamy EF).
Break out a nice pen or pencil to use. It’s the little things that can help make your day.
The Phoenix Community Garden at the heart of Soho, London is one of my favourite places on earth. How much do I love this place, that was brought to greenery out of the ashes of a parking lot? I visualised it while I was going through my first and very painful biopsy. I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice to say that it took a very powerful positive memory to help me keep my body still during the intense pain of the procedure.
I love this new sign.
The garden is a haven for plants, people and wildlife in the heart of a busy city, and it is full of character. You get to see how bits of masonry and bobs of donations are recycled into a joyful mishmash of urban gardening.
No two benches here are alike, every pot and container has something weird or unique going on (from smurfs to little signs).
There’s a pond surrounded by broken paving that even has some goldfish moseying along in it.
And the place is cleverly built to be full of books, crannies, corners and elevation shifts, making it look much larger than it is.
I managed to get a quick sketch in before the rain started, nothing too fancy as my neuropathy was terrible today.
Find yourself a bit of green to find joy in today. We could all use a bit more of that.
I went on a sketchwalk with our local Urban Sketchers chapter to Dizengoff Square, a central square in Tel Aviv that has been a gathering place since before there was a state of Israel. It was hot for the season, and the place was jumping with colour and activity. This was sketched on a Moleskine Watercolour A5 portrait sketchbook, with Staedtler fineliners and Schmincke and Daniel Smith watercolours. The white was added with a Uniball Signo Broad UM-153 gel pen. You can see some process photos below.
Moleskine came out with a “Bullet Notebook” obviously geared for Bullet Journalling (BuJo) relatively recently. The BuJo started out on a squared large Moleksine notebook (surprise, surprise), and only later Ryder Carroll moved to Leuchtturm as his notebook supplier of choice. What surprised me was that Moleskine actually cared enough about BuJo to come out with a new offering, when they aren’t known for rushing out with new notebook formats very often.
The coral pink cover.
The bullet notebook is part of Moleskine’s is part of their Art lineup, which usually has better paper than their usual lineup, as it’s used for sketching or watercolours. The choice is a bit peculiar, but it speaks to where Moleskine appears to think that BuJo fits: not in their business lineup, but within the artists’ and creatives’ one.
It comes in three cover options: black, coral pink, and aquamarine. That is also a peculiar choice for them, as normally products in the Art lineup come in any colour you want so long as it’s black. The bullet notebook comes with 120 gsm ivory coloured paper and is supposedly fountain pen friendly. Note the supposedly in that sentence, we’ll get to that later on. It is noticeably thicker and heavier than their standard large hardcover notebooks, and it comes with two bookmarks in different colours – in the case of the coral pink one is pink and one is grey. Fetching.
Now we come to where this notebook really becomes interesting, the interior. The first page of “Personal Data” is taken directly out of Moleskine’s planners. There’s a bit of fluff at the end that I don’t think comes standard with their planners, but I still recommend not filling this page, ever. Especially not the passport details, driver’s license and any other thing that can be used to ID you should you lose or misplace this notebook.
Personal data. I’ve used this notebook for over two months, and this page remains purposefully pristine.
The next spread is the very cool Moleskine world map, the same one that you can find in many of their planners and other travel related products.
I love maps, and I love this map.
The next set of pages is where the bullet notebook starts to get interesting. It’s an index, with the first entry already printed inside: Pen Test on page 149. This is classic BuJo, and Moleskine delivers. There are five index pages, which should be enough for practically anyone’s needs.
The index
Inside there are 148 pages of ivory coloured 120 gsm dot grid paper. That’s less than there is in a regular Moleskine, but the paper is significantly thicker, and already the notebook is thicker and heavier than their standard notebook. They put the maximum number of sheets they could without making the notebook too bulky. The pages lay flat, and Moleksine’s binding and covers are built for endurance. The pages are numbered, which is also something that Moleskine doesn’t normally do, but fits well with the Bullet Journalling Method.
The paper inside.
There is space in the back for pen tests, so I immediately used it to test a slew of fountain pens. Moleskine claims that the bullet notebook is fountain pen friendly. It is not. There’s spread, there’s bleed-through, show through and sometimes spidering. This isn’t a fountain pen friendly paper on any count.
Pen test page.
The back pocket has something new and interesting going on. Moleskine stuck folded piece of paper on the back pocket and on the outside it looks like regular dot grid paper:
Back pocket and closed fold-out.
But when you fold it out there’s a key page inside. Very elegant and clever.
My key page.
I like that Moleskine are experimenting with new formats. I don’t like that they advertise this paper as fountain pen friendly when it clearly isn’t. The bullet notebook comes with a sheet of stickers that I didn’t bother photographing because it just looks like a sheet of solid pink, but it’s actually made of small stickers in various geometric shapes.
If you are looking to get into BuJo but enjoy working with mixed media or fountain pens, then look elsewhere. In terms of cost the Moleskine Bullet Notebook is about the same price as the official Leuchtturm one, and you get a better deal buying that if only for the official booklet. If you are looking for a more minimalist setup that what the official Bullet Journal offers and you aren’t planning on using fountain pens, than this is a decent offering, especially as it comes with more cheerful cover options. It is un-opinionated enough to be useful even to those who have never heard of BuJo in their lives. Do I see myself buying another one of these in the future? No. I am struggling to finish using the one that I have now (because I’m not a fan of dot grid). But I am glad that Moleskine is willing to give new notebook formats and paper types a try. If this notebook had this exact paper but in plain white or squared white, I would have bought a stack of them.
The Cortex Brand Sidekick is a notepad that is designed to sit between you and your keyboard. The Sidekick’s layout is a bit unusual: it’s mostly a dot grid pad, but there’s a checklist on the right-hand side of the page, and there’s a titlebar above both the dot grid side of the page, and above the to do list side of the page.
Page layout: dot grid on three quarters of the page on the left, checklist on a quarter of the page on the right.
The Sidekick is bigger than I expected. The full specs aren’t stated on the page (or on the notepad), which is disappointing, but it’s about 18cm tall by 30cm wide, has 60 perforated sheets printed one sided in dark grey and 100gsm Munken Lynx paper (that is stated on the back of the Sidekick). The paper is smooth (but not Rhodia coated smooth), white and fountain pen friendly.
Front cover with Rhodia pad like folding crease lines and prominent Cortex logo embossed.
The cover material is made from recycled coffee cups, which is very cool conceptually. Coffee cups aren’t otherwise recyclable because of their coating, and this is a way to make good use of them. The front cover is rather thin cardboard, but the back is substantial. As the front cover is designed to fold over and leave the pad itself open for writing, it doesn’t close very elegantly when not in use. It’s not a major issue, but you do have to be careful when slipping it into your bag to make sure that it is covering the pad, and I flip the Sidekick on its back when not in use to help the front cover retain its shape. This issue occurs with Rhodia pads as well, and is inherent to the fold back design.
Front cover popping up.
Although the Sidekick seems to want you to use a page a day, that is too wasteful and expensive for me (more on the price later). I’ve been using this page from the 27th of February and I’ll be finishing with it sometime in the coming week – so that’s almost a month of use. I keep a Field Notes “Heavy Duty” nearby for jotting down and doodling things, and I use my Sidekick to help me manage my current project. I’ve found the checklist on the side to be a bit baffling. It’s too narrow for me, and I have small handwriting, and there aren’t enough checklist items to actually cover a day if I was using the page as a daily page. The checklist could perhaps work in a meeting setup, but unlike what Myke and Grey (the makers of the Sidekick) I think that the Sidekick is not a good meeting notepad.
The Sidekick in use. These are my actual notes, censored. As you can see I used multiple kinds of fountain pens and inks with great success.
So why do I think the Sidekick isn’t a good meeting notepad? Its size. It is way too big and it really would call attention to itself in a “LOOK AT ME, I AM TAKING NOTES IN THIS MEETING” kind of way. There is no discreet way to carry it or use it, and you will be taking a lot of real-estate on any meeting table. What is does do well is sit between yourself and your keyboard (provided you have room for it) and allow you to take notes that way. If you plan on using it for Zoom meetings it may work, but personally my meeting notes tend to be messy, so I wouldn’t want to waste a Sidekick page on them.
The back of the Sidekick comes with a page that has a Daylight Savings Time table for various places and product info. I have no idea why it’s there, but I assume that there’s a design decision behind it. I would have preferred to just have another standard page, and have the product info printed on the back cover or available on their site.
DST page.Product info with Made in Britain proudly displayed.
I bought the Cortex Brand Sidekick the moment that it became available for purchase (I also added my first Theme System Journal to the order, but I’ll discuss that in a different post). I like good stationery and I know Myke Hurley does as well. I had no doubt that this would be a well-made product, fountain pen friendly, and that Myke would agonize on every aspect of this notepad’s design. He did. The Sidekick is a high quality, premium notepad. It is hand assembled in Britain. It uses cool and sustainable materials.
It’s very expensive.
Now, I understand the price and I had no problem paying for it (and I bought this before the YouTube product video came out or the podcastepisodesdiscussing the design and manufacturing process were published). This isn’t a mass market product, it uses high quality and expensive materials, and it is hand assembled in a small shop. These things make the price add up. The Sidekick is $32 dollars, to which you add shipping. That makes it a $40-50 notepad. If I were to use a page for every workday, I would be looking at around $200 a year on Sidekicks and shipping.
This is what makes the Sidekick a niche product, in my opinion. Myke said that there’s no other product like it, and that is partially true. If you like the page layout and the size, there is no other notepad but the Sidekick for you. However, I have been using a notebook that goes between me and my keyboard for quite a while before the Sidekick came out. It is small enough to fit on the most narrowest of desks, it has a plastic double cover and a chipboard backing that make it very portable, it is much smaller than the Sidekick, and you can take it to meetings without drawing attention to yourself (I have done so many times). It is also much, much cheaper than the Sidekick (coming in at less than $12 at time of writing, it is less than half what a Sidekick costs, not including shipping), and alas, as Amazon ships it, it is likely to be available with free shipping.
It’s the Maruman Mnemosyne horizontal A5 notebook and it is one of my favourite notebooks out there.
The Mneomosyne on top of the Sidekick, just so you’ll see the size difference.
This isn’t a Mnemosyne review, but I will point out that this notebook has 70 sheets of 80gsm 5mm grid paper that is fountain pen friendly. The Mnemosyne also has perforated sheets, plus space to write a title in. It is ring bound, which is normally not my favourite, but works well with the horizontal format (the rings don’t get into the way of your writing hand). It carries well both in the bag and around to meetings – I am never without one in my bag. While like the Sidekick the grid is printed only on one side of the page, because it is ring bound you can use both sides of the page if you so choose. To do so with the Sidekick necessitates tearing the page out first.
Maruman Mnemosyne
The Sidekick is larger, which gives you more room to think. It also has thicker paper, and better perforation. The Mnemosyne doesn’t have rounded corners, and so the corners do sometimes get dinged. I’ve used them both over the past month, and while I treat using the Sidekick as a luxurious treat, the Mnemosyne is my workhorse. I don’t coddle it or think twice about scribbling something illegibly on it.
Do I recommend buying the Sidekick? Yes, if you can afford it. It is a premium product for a premium price. There is a place for those kinds of products in the market, and perhaps there is a place for them in your life. I see myself buying one Sidekick a year, two tops. That makes it a product that I use with consideration, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to be considerate of what you use and why. The Sidekick is a beautifully made and thoroughly considered desk companion, and I suggest that you give it a try to see if it fits in your life.
Writing at Large 