Iron Man 2 Lenticular Notebook

What It Is: Iron Man 2 notebook with 3-D lenticular cover

Where It Came From: Goodwill (50 cents)

What It Means:
This is a fairly recent Goodwill find, and I was taken in by its kind of offbeat charm.  Of course, a lenticular doesn't come through to best advantage in a photograph, and neither does the creative destruction it had gone through before falling into my hands.  The cover is festooned with scratches which I found to be an interesting effect and pencil graffiti that's downright amusing.  Looking closely, I notice that Mr. Stark has been given slit nostrils, a topknot, a flowing Fu Manchu mustache, and some sort of weapon in his right hand, but really, the anonymous artist had me at the thought balloon that reads "I'm moving backward!"  (And given the limits of lenticulars, it can be hard to tell.)  The string bookmark is something I added myself; I do that on all the notebooks I'm currently using.

I should probably confess, though, that I haven't seen either of the Iron Man movies.  I loved the first X-Men movie and the first Spider-Man movie, but their respective sequels --- to say nothing of the gruesome train wreck that was Daredevil --- burned me so badly that I swore off Marvel Comics movies.

But I did not swear off Marvel movie notebooks!  In fact, I've always been a sucker for notebooks and writing implements and such, to the point of getting some quite fancy things (someday I'll have to post a sample from my fountain pen collecting days) but lately I've come back around to the unpretentious utility of cheap notebooks and free advertising ballpoints, and been less compulsive even about those.  In general, I've gotten better about buying things that I won't use, but this, I knew I would use --- and currently am using --- for Morning Pages.

If you haven't heard of them, Morning Pages are the most basic exercise in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I've gone through a couple of times and still find very useful (although my experience with the various sequels has been much spottier; maybe she caught me in the wrong mood, but especially as time went on Cameron could at times let her privilege hang out in a very irritating manner).  The idea is simply three pages of stream-of-consciousness longhand writing every day, ideally first thing in the morning.  I'm doing well if I can keep it from being the last thing in the evening, but even so, I've managed to keep them up for about a year now.  I do recommend the practice; I won't promise huge transformations like Julia Cameron does, but for me, it does seem to put my thoughts in order in unexpected ways.  I can think something or say it and not see where it's going, then go to write it down and find that it either falls apart or falls into place and the answers are surprisingly obvious.  It's happened enough times that if I'm feeling muddled I will sometimes get out my notebook to "consult the writing oracle."

And if doing so comes with a bit of inexpensive guerrilla-art fun at a Marvel movie's expense?  Perk.

Where It's Going: Nowhere; I'm using it every day (until I fill it up).