113: Japanese woodcuts and a new 'four notebook' strategy
Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and thirteen, thank you for reading and very happy Hallowe’en to you, if you celebrate, obviously I’m writing this in full costume, this year I’m going as a sexy falafel.
I hope you’re keeping well and enjoying your autumn.
Today I wrote a daft thing about my ‘four notebook’ strategy and a mysterious nineteenth century Japanese woodcut artist.
If you’re interested in my writing about telly, over on Double Chorus I reacted to Sally Wainwright’s hit drama series Riot Women. I published it there — rather than here — because it focuses on how realistic I found the fictional rock band (though some folks disagreed in the comments) so it’s really a music-themed post. Also, last week over on The Quietus I reviewed the new album by trendy London art-pop trio Bar Italia, Some Like It Hot. Spoiler: I liked it not. It devolves into a slating, which I’ve had some pushback for.
Right, on we roll.
xx
gems
1
Julia Raeside’s analysis for The Nerve unpicks why Celebrity Traitors is working so well.
2
I rarely share cooking vids but here’s my fave for ages. Chef Jonathan Zaragoza in Chicago does his Mole Poblano from scratch. It’s an epic. Not easy to replicate food like this, I won’t be trying — even just accessing these ingredients here in the UK is a stretch — but I loved watching a proper Mexican mole come together.
3
I realised I’ve not plugged Vulture’s regular interview feature ‘The Maria Bamford Questionaire’, based on a set of twenty-five questions put together by peerless offbeat US comic Maria Bamford, designed to unearth unexpected truths from people. Here’s a link to all Vulture’s interviews using the questions but I’m more sharing it as a fun icebreaker-type game.
4
Personal essay by Lydia Catterall ‘Disabled-led spaces bring me closer to all I’ve ever wanted’ written on her own Connecting Conversations newsletter.
5
James Meek’s vast, essential read for London Review of Books on the search for general artificial intelligence, ‘Computers That Want Things’. It’s more than 8,000 words but it’s a belter.
6
Isaac Butler (who a couple of years ago wrote the excellent acting history book The Method) profiles Daniel Day-Lewis for Slate.
7
Over in NYC they’re in the final days of the mayoral race and, with Mamdani far ahead in the polls, his rivals are now leaning hard into disgusting racism. His response video this week — in part framed as a direct message to Muslim New Yorkers — is one of the finest political pieces-to-camera I’ve seen. Mamdani’s rhetorical gifts are sublime.
8
potato gem
• Check out this beast: Aldi has launched an autumn puffer-style jacket designed to look like... a jacket potato. For real. Probably, this should’ve been my Halloween costume.
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Japanese woodcuts and a new ‘four notebook’ strategy
My current notebook workhorse is a British Museum branded journal with a currently very popular Matsumoto Hōji woodblock print called ‘Toad’ on the cover. I was given it last year by my sister’s kid Iz, a proper lush, thoughtful gift for an uncle. I absolutely fell in love with this notebook. So much so that, having filled it up through the past year, (for the first time ever) I’ve just gone and purchased the exact same notebook again.
In many ways ‘Toad’ defies what I thought I required from a notebook.
It’s a bit smaller than A5 — roughly three centimetres shorter, half a centimetre thinner — so it has unusual, chunky dimensions that suit the ‘Toad’ image and contrast with standard A5 and A6 sizes. It has Moleskin-style curved corners and an elastic fabric band to hold it closed, yet it doesn’t have the second fabric bookmark. Before, I would have told you that was essential. And if you’d asked me at any time in the past decade, an absolute notebook dealbreaker for me has been narrow lined pages, again in the Moleskin style. Yet this ‘Toad’ book has wider lines, more akin to a standard A4 pad.
You’ll find whole cultures dedicated to the gaps between the ruled lines on writing stationary. Like, did you know that in France they have their own unique system of uneven gaps for lined paper, called ‘seyes paper’? It comes from French schooling where adults — teachers — write in the narrower lines and then pupils have more space to copy out their bit underneath. Or something like that. Generations of French schoolkids have grown up completely au fait with this weird irregular gapping (heh, sounds like something a Strictly judge would say) that none of the rest of us had a clue existed. Maybe that’s why French fries are so much thinner than chips. I digress.
It turns out I have no problem with my notebook demands getting broken. In fact I prefer my ‘Toad’ book and its wider line gaps for the on-the-hoof, casual sort of note-taking. I even briefly fretted this was a sign of ageing: that I’m becoming less comfortable writing small, a symptom of failing eyes and co-ordination. More probably though, it’s realism setting in, since I’ve never been especially tidy in those Moleskin notebooks, often leaving whole line spaces, even scrawling across the lines altogether, at the same time as I’d passionately claim to need the extra lines you get on a page when gaps are narrower.
Most of all though, it’s the physical dimensions that have won me over to ‘Toad’, more than gapping or the cute image. There’s something deeply, innately satisfying about the chunkiness, while at the same time it’s small enough to carry around comfortably. Without noticing, I’ve been using this notebook for absolutely everything.
Then last week, thinking about scoring a new journal, I realised that ‘Toad’ has long-term shifted my whole notebook strategy.
I’ve always stuck to a commonplace ‘two notebook’ strategy, being (obviously) one for roving and one desk-bound. But over the past year in cahoots with ‘Toad’, I’ve expanded to a ‘three notebook’ strategy. That is: one roving workhorse notebook, one ‘artistry’ notebook (a standard black A5 Moleskin with the narrow lines) and a thick A4 pad on the desk next to the laptop. So the ‘artistry’ notebook is only for direct creative expression — lines for poems or songs, ideas for fiction and non-fiction, paragraphs of workable prose, all that sort of shit. The workhorse, ‘Toad’ is for everything else and gets far more use. Sometimes it’s a coaster for coffee mugs. Separating out those ‘workhorse’ day-to-day notes, lists, reminders, and ‘artistic’ ideas and thinking has been a minor revelation for me.
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
— Philip Larkin, ‘Toads’
Really though, it’s rapidly devolved into a convoluted, unwieldy, perhaps deranged ‘four notebook’ strategy: because I’m also a heavy user of the Notes app on my phone, I’ll habitually (daily) transfer some of that nonsense into the physical realm and some of it directly into different folders on my hard-drive. So now, I’m moving digital and physical notes across five or six different paper and digital locations.
I’ll let you decide if that is okay workflow, or an over-florid expression of madness.
There’s also this question over the title of the original woodcut. In the back of my notebook, it is clearly titled ‘Toad’. Yet almost everywhere else online, including at the British Museum shop (where you can purchase it on a tempting mug among other things) it’s described as a frog. Usually without the formality of being a title. Mostly they call it something like: “one of Hoji’s characterful frogs”. They’re also constantly missing the ‘ō’ off the ‘o’ in his name.
“The image, often called the “Grumpy Toad” or “Angry Frog,” features a sad-faced amphibian rendered in black ink with red calligraphy…”
— Google AI
So is it a frog or a toad? For marketing and promotion purposes, a frog would seem to be more sellable than a toad. Biologically it appears more frog-like, though I’m no amphibian expert. Google AI is unequivocal. Despite what it says above about the titling, it also insists: Hōji’s woodcuts are frogs, not toads. Sorry, by the way, I didn’t deliberately search AI, it just appeared at the top of the results, as they do, because I forgot to use swearwords in my search request (a good way to disappear AI).
Pretty much everywhere online it is described as a frog. What’s going on?
A mis-translation? An error in the British Museum’s labelling of the woodcut? Or just a mistake on this particular notebook?
Almost nothing is known about the artist Matsumoto Hōji. We have his popular works featuring frogs (or toads) in his simple, classic ukiyo-e style, because fifteen years after he made them, his stuff got included in ‘Meika Gafu’, this important — and mass produced — late Edo period almanac of works by well-known woodcut artists. Today, we’re still not sure if Hōji was a celebrated superstar, or a lesser known artist included to make up numbers. The publisher, Eirakuya Tōshirō, was an important publishing house based in Nagoya, and the same team published prints by Hokusai (of ‘Great Wave’ fame). In its era, the ‘Maika Gafu’ was a big hit, an acclaimed bestseller, getting several reprints. It was the sort of thing regular working Japanese people of the day might own, so it wasn’t limited to the wealthiest upper class. Indeed, that was even its whole point: to collect together art usually only accessed by the elite and make it available to the masses. Big print runs and such.
Back to my ‘Toad’ (‘Frog’) notebook. To compound the mystery, turns out it’s suddenly oddly tricky to get hold of. Now, it becomes urgent to secure a stash of them, like Bruce Chatwin running around 1980s Paris trying to obtain as many of his precious original Moleskins as he could, before they vanished.
There are no ‘Toads’ (‘Frogs’) in Waterstones central mail-order system, and a last few copies floating around various UK bookshops, all too far away to travel to. I check out the British Museum’s web store (a poor UX experience with weak search functionality) imagining they’ll have a few copies, but they don’t sell it at all. Worse, they stock a different notebook (a bog standard A5) with the same print on, which even on the website looks shit by comparison. That one refers to a ‘frog’. Rifa finds the proper notebook over on Hatchards website but again they only let me order a single copy.
S’all good tho. I love this squat little notebook even more, with the layers of confusion and mystery attached, mirroring the original confusion and mystery surrounding artwork and artist. And I’ve managed to grab copies to last me a couple of years.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey.
always there
Check out my other newsletter Double Chorus about songwriting and the music industry.
Order two classic Chris T-T albums, on vinyl for the first time, out 14th November —
If you might benefit with a creativity/life balance reset, please check out my personal Creativity Consulting service.
Listen to series eight of Refigure podcast, the fun bitesize arts review show I make with Rifa.
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Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Chris
x
I sort of have a five notebook strategy. One for almost everything; an excercise book each for sewing ideas, for a specific project and for song lyrics; my paid-work notebook. And a notes app. I have a plan for 2026 that I think will be more efficient, but might mean more actual notebooks. Hmm.