Michael Dirda, a fine essayist, has a big plastic carton near his desk filled with supplies: notebooks, stationary and the usual tools for writers.
Talking about supplies is something writers do. In his essay “Paper,” Dirda gives us a tour of his plastic bin:
At one point I owned a few of those ubiquitous Moleskines — the kind supposedly used by travel writer Bruce Chatwin — but they tend to be so expensive that I found myself hesitating to mar their virgin whiteness with my doodles, to-do lists, and earth shaking, indeed paradigm-altering, observations about this and that. Instead I much prefer school composition books, generally those with austere, speckled black-and-white covers. …
Like Dirda, I use those composition books with the speckled covers. Like Dirda, I’ve tried other kinds, and that just didn’t work for me. Like Dirda, I often find these composition books on sale when kids and their parents are shopping for school supplies.
This, to me, is delicious reading.
• Michael Dirda, Browsings; New York: Pegasus Books, 2015, p. 18. The book collects 52 weekly essays Dirda wrote for The American Scholar in 2012-13.
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