Things to Do with an Empty Notebook

“You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy.”

Lemony Snicket, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002)¹

 

The notebook I keep my poetry in. It has served me well these past eight-odd years.

I love notebooks: page after page of beautiful, clean, blank paper, waiting to be filled with those wondrous little things we call words, all conveniently bound together by some kind of aesthetically delightful cover. And other people, happily, seem to have picked up on the fact that I love notebooks, because I tend to get given them as presents a lot. Exceedingly pleasing as this fact is, it does mean that I end up with rather a lot of notebooks. Not that I’m complaining even in the slightest; thinking up ways to employ these notebooks is a joy rather than a burden, and today I offer for your perusal a selection of possible uses to which one might put an empty notebook.

1)       Write creatively.

In the fifth book of the A Series of Unfortunate Events sequence, The Austere Academy, we meet Isadora Quagmire, who keeps a commonplace book in which she writes rhyming couplets: I would rather eat a bowl of vampire bats / than spend an hour with Carmelita Spats and the like.² Couplets or otherwise, creative writing is fun. It doesn’t have to be great literature or anything. Case in point, the notebook I’ve been steadily filling with the poetry I write for the past eight years or so. This one’s called ‘The Ironic Poem’:

I keep on writing poems about poetry.

I think I do it almost automatically.

And when it seems the urge might just be going going gone,

I’ve only gone and written yet another flipping one.

2)      Keep a dictionary.

This may be one of those things that I’m in a minority for considering fun, but I’ll throw it out there anyway. Every time I come across a word I don’t know – be it in an academic article, a work of fiction,  a restaurant menu, wherever – I try to look it up, or make a note of it in order to look it up later.³ Then I write down the definition and etymology (if it’s from a language I have some familiarity with) in the notebook I have set aside for this purpose. The contents so far (rearranged into alphabetical order):

abrade · accouchement · acedia · acrimony · affidavit · alacrity · allomorph · allopathy · amniocentesis · amnion · amoebean · anaphoric · anaptyxis · anepigraphic · anodyne · antichresis · antipathy · antitype · aphorism · apocope · aposiopesis · apotropaic · apropos · arraign · ascetic · autophagy · bellicose · bombastic · bruschetta · burlap · cachet · cadastre · cadence · cadre · calque · carrel · castigate · cateocic · caudate · cavalcade · cenotaph · chalcenteric/chalcenterous · choliambic · chorion · chrestomathy · code-switching · cognizance · colloquy · commensurate · comport · concatenation · connubial · conterminous · copula · correlative · corollary · coterminous · counterpose · croton · cuckold · deictic · denominative · deontology · determinism · diatribe · diffident · diglossia · diktat · diptych · docket · doctrinaire · dyad · elenctic · epenthesis · equivocate · esoteric · euphorbiaceous · exponent · expressionism · firebrand · floruit · foursquare · fenugreek · gamut · garrulous · gazetteer · giro · hackney · halberd · haplography · hermetic · hierophant · homeopathy · homily · hypallage · hypocoristic · ideogram · ignominy · immolate · inconcinnity · indolent · indigent · ingenuous · instantiate · interlard · investiture · isopsephism · isopsephy · jurisprudence · lampoon · lexeme · lintel · litany · litigious · majuscule · matryoshka · metastasise · morpheme · morphophonemics · moussaka · mystagogue · nascent · neoteric · neuralgia · notary (public) · ochlocracy · ogive · ostracon · otiose · over against · palimpsest · panacea · paraenesis · patristic · penult · penury · pericope · periegesis · peristalsis · philately · phoneme · pilaster · pleonasm · polymetry · polysemic · prate · predilection · prelate · priamel · propaedeutic · prosody · prosopography · protreptic · psychagogue · punctilious · putative · qua · querent · redact · redolent · rentier · rigatoni · rumbustious · scazon · scion · semiotics · sequacious · sinuous · sinusoid · solecism · staurogram · stentorian · stereoscope · stratigraphy · subaltern · subsume · subvention · sunder · suppletion · tamarisk · tatsama · theosophy · theriomorphic · tort · trochee · uncial · univerbation · usufruct · vertiginous · vignette · vociferous

Can I recall exactly what all of these words mean consistently all the time? No. Has my vocabulary increased as a result of keeping a dictionary? Yes. Is this actually useful in day-to-day conversation? Probably not very. But words make me happy.

3)      Take sermon notes.

Until quite recently, I didn’t usually use to take notes in sermons and at Bible studies. I’m not sure whether I really thought myself capable of retaining all those spiritual insights by memory alone, but if I did, I was severely deluded. I suppose something in me was worried that taking notes would make a sermon feel too much like a lecture, which I felt would be a Bad Thing. On the contrary, however, the advantages of taking notes in a lecture – it’s easier to stay focussed during the talk, to recall the points made afterwards, and to check where the information you recall actually comes from – are surely equally advantageous for a sermon or Bible study. Arguably, they are even more so, the Bible being kind of the Infallible Word of God, Living and Active and Able to Discern the Thoughts and Intentions of the Heart, and in its entirety Useful for Training in Righteousness.⁴ By contrast, I can’t think of a single occasion when, say, Euripides’ Helen proved able to discern the thoughts of my heart or usefully train me in righteousness, and yet I was willing to take notes on that. So taking sermon notes is a habit I would recommend getting into.

4)      Start a project.

OK, so this one’s fairly vague, but that’s because the sort of project you might feel inclined to start is likely to be fairly specific to you as an individual, O Entirely Unique Reader. Personally, I keep the following:

a scrapbook of the lyrics to Owl City songs,⁵ written out and decorated by means of various artistic media, primarily collage;

a collection of informative lists, thus far consisting of UK counties, beach safety flags, the NATO phonetic alphabet, semaphore, Morse code, monarchs of England,⁶ and flags of UN states (I’m up to Jamaica);

a verse-by-verse translation of the book of Isaiah (I’m going for the whole Old Testament and felt disinclined to start at Genesis), including lots of parsing of Hebrew words.

Even if all three of the above sound thoroughly dreadful in your opinion, dear reader, I hope I’ve given you some sense of what I mean by a ‘project’. If you’ve ever felt that it would be a worthwhile thing if a certain set of information were collated and presented in a particular way, why not be the one to collate and present it thus?

5)      Keep a commonplace book.

As per the original Lemony Snicket suggestion. Even if one is not an orphan trying to solve the mystery of the fire that killed one’s parents while evading the dastardly schemes of a Count intent on stealing one’s hereditary fortune,⁷ there would surely be some value in keeping a book about one’s person in which to jot down any interesting or significant information one happens to come across or conceive of. Like, I don’t know, ideas for blog posts, say.

Footnotes

¹ A Series of Unfortunate Events is set to become a Netflix original series at some point in the future, though nobody seems able to decide whether this rather enthralling teaser trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnwnFOb0hF4, is actually anything to do with what Netflix will be producing or is completely fanmade: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/netflixs-take-on-lemony-snickets-a-series-of-unfortunate-events-already-looks-brilliant-10368031.html. Either way, I look forward to the adaptation being released and sincerely hope it’s done well.

² Thanks to the Lemony Snicket Wikia for its compilation of Isadora’s poetry: http://snicket.wikia.com/wiki/Isadora_Quagmire.

³ My first port of call tends to be the ‘British Dictionary Definitions’ section at http://www.dictionary.com/, but some specific technical vocabulary is absent therefrom and requires a little more online sleuthing.

⁴ Everyone’s favourite verses about scripture, Hebrews 4:12 and 2 Timothy 3:16. As always, they’re worth looking at in context; here’s the Hebrews to kick you off: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+4&version=ESVUK. Point to consider: yes, the word of God very much is that famous double-edged sword, but its message does someone no good if he or she is not ‘united by faith with those who listened’ (v2).

⁵ Owl City is one of the project titles used by Adam Young, who recently started writing soundtracks for historical events. A new one comes out every month, they’re free to download, there’s some seriously gorgeous album art, and the scores themselves are genuinely absolutely beautiful – plus, it seems from the information on the website that this is something Adam Young has always really wanted to do. So do go and check this stuff out: http://www.ayoungscores.com/.

⁶ Although I decided to start from Alfred the Great in my list, I can’t pass up the opportunity to link to this legendary Horrible Histories song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqHwMloqHY4.

⁷ A rough description of the plot of the series. For a rough (and extremely hilarious) description of the character of Count Olaf, this song is just the job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsS3reVFLJI.