The Moleskine Notebook

The Moleskine Notebook

Ah, the Moleskine Notebook. They come in all different shapes, sizes, colors, and formats. I use them in every day of my life whether it be the small plain notebook I carry in my pocket for day-to-day notes, lists, and idea-jotting to the larger sized notebooks or cahiers that I use for journaling or schoolwork or work-work.

And I especially love a deal on them on eBay, which explains the stockpiled pictured above in one of my many Cluttered Bookshelves. After pens and toys it's Moleskine's that I hoard. What's redeeming for me is that I use them and complete them pretty frequently: almost one evry other month, and I usually keep 3-4 in use at once. I also use one as a log of my job search info and contacts. I also use one for my eBay sales. I switched over to the large cahiers for these uses recently as I found that I could fill them up just in time for the stuff that was accumulating in their back pockets to make the books unwieldy to write in. Basically loose notes, receipts, packing slips, and other loose junk. They're also where the contents of many blog entries begin.

What's sad is that I've got a backlog of blog entries piling up in my M's and I've been too distracted to simply type them up. Oh well, until the job or book deal or both happen...

Moleskinerie.com is a nice little website devoted to these venerated notebooks, and I recently started contributed images to their photo pool on Flickr. Check out the link to their site or to my set of images on Flickr on the right. Also check out eBay for great deals on the Moleskine's. Personally, I hate paying retail, but if no deals can be found then these books ARE definitely worth it.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Wow, this was a surprisingly good and easy read.

For fans of Zorro and Batman and the whole playboy-by-day/hero-by-night genre of fiction, whether it be in movies, books, or comics, you need to read this. It's one of the originals and an inspiration for a lot of those more current popular works.

Orczy does a great job of educating the reader about the manners of speech, customs, and modes of behavior for the period without bogging down the reader with it and preventing them from enjoying the plot and story. And while the story started off slowly for the first chapter or two, during which I got a quick clinic on the previously mentioned dialect and customs of the time, once underway it really drew me in and I found it hard to put the book down.

I also recommend reading the forward which provides some biography of Baroness Orczy and some commentary on the book and how it's been received by readers from back when it was published until recent times.

I hear there are sequels...

Hellboy: The God Machine

Not a bad read at all. A very quick read, too.

The dialogue, characterizations, and settings all follow those established in the original Mignola comics, and also add to the collective canon of the Hellboy and BPRD "world".

I definitely recommend it for those sleepless nights when you want to stay awake.

Mozart: The Complete Works

So last fall I bought this 170-disc collection of everything Mozart composed ($120, Amazon), and since then I've pretty much sampled a few discs here and there every now and then. Let's face it, 170 takes time to go through, and while I consider myself a fan and own many smaller compilations of his works, I've got stuff to do and other things I also want to listen to.

It wasn't until this past January and February that I decided to take a more academic approach to listening to old Wolfgang. I'd started to listen to a 2-disc set of some of his works at night while driving in the cold (or relative cold of where I'm at). It was relaxing, like in the car commercial kind of way. And I developed some favorite parts. But when you've got tracks of varying length for compositions whose structure you're still unfamiliar with, well, all I'm saying is that I can't drive and keep my eyes on the CD player to mark my favorite track and times. Here I was appreciating something, and I couldn't even identify it to look for it elsewhere or name it to anyone if we were talking about it. Yes, I'm sure I could play the "match game" at home with the disc liner notes and a fast-forward button, but that wasn't the point. When you hear a Rolling Stones song on the radio, you know it's them. When you hear Eric Clapton, you know it's him. I wanted to at least be able to know Mozart when I heard him.

Then I found myself wanting to learn more about the man. When I was a kid, parts of "Amadeus" scared the daylights of me, but it was just a movie based on a series of very "creative" plays that just plain made a lot of stuff up. Plus, I knew there were stories about his compositions, too. He was a child prodigy, after all, as well as one of the leading composers both of and after his time. I guess it came down to my wanting to know as much as I could.

The Compleat Mozart is just the book I was looking for, and I got a used copy on Amazon. There's basically a blurb on every composition of Mozart's on a track-by-track basis. I can literally read about a specific composition as I listen to it, because both books use the Kochel notation method to identify Mozart's works, some of whom are named or numbered or have similarities among their names. What's good for me is that includes some biographical information about each piece as well as some discussion about Mozart's possible influences and how the respective piece was critiqued during Mozart's time and since. What's bad for me is that other parts of the discussion are too technical. They're clearly by musical scholars for other musical scholars.

That's where The NPR Classical Music Companion comes in. It's basically the encyclopedia I use to understand the esoteric (to me, granted) musical terms and concepts that are used throughout the book. It's a good thing I got it, too. I couldn't read one passage about Mozart's 1st symphony without referring to the guide after almost EVERY sentence. But I'm coming along. Soon I hope to retain some definitions and move up into concepts. While I do that, I'm also going to look into a book on music theory. Do those come in "book-on-tape" format?

I guess I'll start at CD 1, which also begins the Symphonies section, and list the tracks I've heard. It'll be nice to start the week this way.