the notebook

the notebook, originally uploaded by hoobiewan.

To avoid, at least in part, the creeping fictionalization of memory, I kept a journal of sorts while I was in the Netherlands recently. The idea was that I would record all sorts of interesting observations about Amsterdam (and the conference I attended), take lots of pictures with my new camera, and then post a slightly polished version here, on this blog. As usual, the practice is a bit more complicated, but this is mostly because I was having too much fun to be bothered with writing things down. This is the writer's lament; writing is a reflective activity, for me careful and slow. So despite my good intentions, the following is a reconstruction gleaned from skeletal fragments, scratchy notes in a slim leather-bound journal.