Note Book

Jeff Nunokawa

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691166490
• eBook ISBN: 9781400865567
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Media digitali

A moving and original literary approach to self-understanding through social media

"The hunger for a feeling of connection that informs most everything I've written flows from a common break in a common heart, one I share with everyone I've ever really known."—Note Book

Every single morning since early 2007, Princeton English professor Jeff Nunokawa has posted a brief essay in the Notes section of his Facebook page. Often just a few sentences but never more than a few paragraphs, these compelling literary and personal meditations have raised the Facebook post to an art form, gained thousands of loyal readers, and been featured in the New Yorker. In Note Book, Nunokawa has selected some 250 of the most powerful and memorable of these essays, many accompanied by the snapshots originally posted alongside them. The result is a new kind of literary work for the age of digital and social media, one that reimagines the essay's efforts, at least since Montaigne, to understand our common condition by trying to understand ourselves.

Ranging widely, the essays often begin with a quotation from one of Nunokawa's favorite writers—George Eliot, Henry James, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, or James Merrill, to name a few. At other times, Nunokawa is just as likely to be discussing Joni Mitchell or Spanish soccer striker Fernando Torres.

Confessional and moving, enlightening and entertaining, Note Book is ultimately a profound reflection on loss and loneliness—and on the compensations that might be found through writing, literature, and connecting to others through social media.

CONTENTS

NOTE BOOK: INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING	xv
AUGUST 2007
195. “one of the people upon whom nothing is lost” (H. James)	1
OCTOBER 2007
256. Nora inu (Stray Dog) (Kurosawa)	2
NOVEMBER 2007
336. “the clear architecture / of the nerves” (O’Hara)	3
DECEMBER 2007
382. We Have to Be Careful about the Words We Use	4
JANUARY 2008
442. The Strength of Weak Gods	5
467. “the unconscious critical acumen of the reader” (Trollope)	5
MARCH 2008
595. “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote” (2)	7
APRIL 2008
711. Paradise Bereft: The Social Elegy of De Quincey	10
716. The Silent Correction Continues	12
MAY 2008
780. “so true” (Coleridge)	13
810. “Scars faded as flowers” (Crane)	14
OCTOBER 2008
1157. The Trouble with Aphorisms	16
NOVEMBER 2008
1187. “What is truth? said jesting Pilate” (Bacon)	18
1203. Ciceronian Suburbs	19
DECEMBER 2008
1229. “Cold!” (Gena Rowlands)	21
JANUARY 2009
1295. “Age does not improve us” (Forster)	24
FEBRUARY 2009
1340. The Afterlife of Moles	25
1341. “In the society of their common danger his innocence might serve to protect him” (Montaigne)	26
1349. “But I shall see it reanimated” (Walton)	27
MARCH 2009
1388. “The Unteachable Monkey,” “The Fables of Panchatantra,” “Indian Humor”	29
1389. “stippled Hopkins” (Nabokov)	30
APRIL 2009
1402. “And I am out on a limb, and it is the arm of God” (O’Hara)	32
1418. “They just l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note Book: Initial Public Offering
• August 2007
• October 2007
• November 2007
• December 2007
• January 2008
• March 2008
• April 2008
• May 2008
• October 2008
• November 2008
• December 2008
• January 2009
• February 2009
• March 2009
• April 2009
• May 2009
• July 2009
• August 2009
• September 2009
• October 2009
• December 2009
• July 2010
• July 2010
• December 2010
• July 2011
• August 2011
• September 2011
• October 2011
• November 2011
• December 2011
• January 2012
• February 2012
• March 2012
• April 2012
• May 2012
• June 2012
• July 2012
• August 2012
• September 2012
• October 2012
• November 2012
• December 2012
• January 2013
• February 2013
• March 2013
• April 2013
• June 2013
• July 2013
• August 2013
• September 2013
• October 2013
• November 2013
• December 2013
• January 2014
• February 2014
• March 2014
• April 2014
• May 2014
• June 2014
• July 2014
• Index