I'm Reading My Notebooks: Books of My Own Making
 

NOTEBOOKS

F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"(1) some time after May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations. Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald, they are important.(2) Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.

R. Frederick Price(that's me) "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and 1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he lectured and taught.

Price's poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes that came from observations and ideas. By 2004, as this statement was being written, over one hundred two-ring binders and arch-lever files as well as over fifty booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.viii & p.ix.

It had become a massive embrace,
filled the spaces all around him
like a sprawling glove
that noone could wear,
like a collection of old shirts
nicely hung and arranged
to wear on cold or warm days.

He'd been warming to them for,
what, forty years now?1
It had been a lifetime
since that early start
with lots of practice
even in those earlier years,
perhaps as far back as '53--
surely not that soon,
not in grade four2
when the Kingdom
was just arriving
and that Crusade
to conquer the world?

1 1962-2002
2 I have vague recollections of 'notebooks' from school from about 1953 through 1958, grades four to eight in Ontario Canada. Nothing, of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The oldest item from a 'notebook' that I possess comes from 1962.

:cool:

More on Notebooks: 26 Months Later:8/04-10/06
 

MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS

...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee.... -Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.

To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.

It was not all risk, though;
some of it was simply pure
surprise and wonder: like
the two exploding stars colliding
17 million light years from Earth
and taking, according to one astrophysicist,
1200 years to do their colliding;
shooting out gas in all directions
at 36 million kilometres per hour,
creating a supernova,
a brilliant light show, in a place,
a galaxy, where six supernovas
have been produced
since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His
Tablets of the Divine Plan.

And me, defining myself,
my sense of nothingness,
in the face of that immensity.

Ron Price
14 June 1997

320 Days later: An Addition On "Notebooks"
 

The material below, not originally part of the 5th edition of my autobiography, has been added as an appendix. This appendix may be useful for future autobiographical, biographical and historical work. Since such a substantial part of my life has been spent compiling and utilizing notebooks in my teaching, my personal study and my writing, it seemed relevant to include this commentary on my notebooks in this 5th edition of my autobiography.

Notebook is the general name I give to each file that I have in my study and an adjoining spare bedroom. One can spend much time defining precisely what constitutes a file, a notebook, but I do not intend to do that here.1 I do that in several places in my literary resource base and especially here in this Notebooks: Volume 5. This Volume 5 of my Notebooks focuses on the Notebooks of other writers and provides an overview of some 300 of my own Notebooks.

Insensibly, after I completed the first edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs in 1993, and as the last 13 years since 1993 have run their course, I became aware of the importance of the Notebooks of other writers as models for my own and of the genre Notebooks to my literary products, to my oeuvre in all its forms. It was my hope that I might learn a few things from these other writers and define as precisely as I needed to do the concept of Notebook. This Notebook, Volume 5, attempts, as I say above, to place the Notebooks of other writers into some overview, some overall statement and perspective. After more than fifty years of keeping Notebooks of various kinds I am beginning to get a feel for their role in my life. In about 1950 when I entered grade one I produced a Notebook, but it was another 12 years before anything substantial, anything was created, that could, that might, in time, become part of an archival Notebook.2 Now, like shards of memory distilled from the past they provide scenes to be contemplated, tasted, savoured when it serves my purpose. Now, after more than forty years, these Notebooks have become a type of memoir which contains a dialogue with the mixed legacies of my life: religious, cultural, historical. For the most part, though, these Notebooks are not poignant or provocative; they are, rather, workmanlike collections, general repositories, of other people’s ideas and words.

Those who wrote autobiographies and memoirs in the Bahá'í community were few and far between. Those who did were content, for the most part, to write a short exposition what might become a chapter of a book. The closest I’ve come to notebooks is pilgrims’ notes. What I have tried to do in my autobiography with its poetry, notes, journal and essays is to do what Samuel Beckett did with his plays. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots, and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of notebooks published by Faber and Faber. Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. In some ways my autobiography is an entire theatrical event. As this theatrical event approaches some 2500 pages, this comparison of my approach to Beckett’s is, I think, apt.

I now have some 300 files or Notebooks and it has become tiresome to try and keep count. In the 44 years, my pioneering years 1962 to 2006, of keeping material that has become part of a Notebook somewhere in this vast collection of material, I have also discarded literally hundreds of Notebooks. This Notebook:Volume 5 should be of value to anyone interested in general perspectives, overall pictures, of my Notebooks. I realize that future readers may find some ambiguity in my use of the term Notebook. I apologize here for placing any individuals who take a serious interest in all of this printed matter in these difficult positions with respect to my terminology and the resources in question. But I am confident that, should anyone really be interested in these Notebooks, I have done an ample job of organizing my printed matter for any future historical value it might have, if any.
FOOTNOTES
1 Generally, though, I define a Notebook as an arch-lever file, a 2-ring binder, an A-3 manilla folder or an easy-glide desk file. Of course, within most of these different collecting points there are sub-files or separate Notebooks. If I considered these sub or separate sections as Notebooks there would be several thousand Notebooks in my collection.
2 The oldest document I created is an essay I wrote in the early months of 1962 in English class.--February 12th-March 4th 2006 -End of Story---for now.-Ron Price, Southern Hemisphere, The Last Stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western Pacific-rim-route.