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bookstothesky. Read the entries here.

Congratulations, bookstothesky! Please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when you can pick up your Limited Edition Star Wars Moleskine notebook at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

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bookstothesky, you can pick up your Moleskine notebook at the Customer Service counter of National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell any day starting Friday the 21st. Enjoy!

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Speaking of notebooks, here’s Charles Simic on notebook-ing in the NYRB.

Writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity, even for those who were once taught the rigorous rules of penmanship in grade school and hardly saw a day go by without jotting down a telephone number or a list of food items to buy at the market on the way home, and for that purpose carried with them something to write with and something to write on. In an emergency, lacking pen or notebook, they might even approach a complete stranger to ask for assistance. For instance, on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil.

The kind of notebooks I’m describing are still available in stationery stores (the ones made by an outfit called Moleskine come in a variety of sizes and colors), so someone must still be scribbling in them—unless they are bought purely out of nostalgia for another time and remain unused now that they have so much competition. No question, one can use a smart phone as an aid to memory, and I do use one myself for that purpose. But I don’t find them a congenial repository for anything more complicated than reminding myself to pick up a pair of pants from the cleaners or make an appointment with the cat doctor. If one has the urge to write down a complete thought, a handsome notebook gives it more class. Even a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought…

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Long-overdue thanks to Rio for the Moleskine folio. No we don’t think it’s bonkers at all, but our sanity standards are a bit different.