Fuck Yeah, Book Arts!

"Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years I’ve acquired stacks: One is leather, a rope of Rapunzel’s hair braids its spine. Another, tree-friendly, its pages reincarnated from diaries of poets who now sit in cubicles. One is small and black like a funeral dress, its pages lined like the hands of a widow. There’s even a furry blue one that looks like a shag rug or a monster that would hide under it— and I wonder why? For every blown out candle, every Mazel Tov, every turn of the tassel, you gift-wrap what a writer dreads most: blank pages. It’s never a notebook we need. If we have a story to tell, an idea carbonating past the brim of us, we will write it on our arms, thighs, any bare meadow of skin. In the absence of pens, we will repeat our lines deliriously like the telephone number of a parting stranger until we become the craziest one on the subway. If you really love a writer, fuck her on a coffee table. Find a gravestone of someone who shares her name and take her to it. When her door is plastered with an eviction notice, do not offer your home. Say I Love You, then call her the wrong name. If you really love a writer, bury her in all your awful and watch as she scrawls her way out."