Jerry Floh ('flea' in German) is invited to a Southampton mansion by influential Buzzy Powers, a guy he knew growing up when his name was Buzzy Pulsky. Jerry has a bad memory of Buzzy and now, twenty-five years later, they have met by chance. Buzzy has risen to success in Hollywood while Jerry grinds out his life as a suburban teacher with a wife, Flo, and three kids. His stay at the mansion, which lasts much longer than the agreed-upon weekend, turns Jerry's world upsidedown from which he barely escapes.
The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks. We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did these indispensable implements come from? How did they revolutionize our lives? And how can using a notebook help change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James; shows how Darwin developed his theory of evolution in tiny pocket books and Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books; and introduces a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers, and mathematicians, all of whom used their notebooks as a space to think—and in doing so, shaped the modern world. In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper, he finds, can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive—and maybe even happier.
This final volume of Bollingen Series L covers the material Coleridge wrote in his notebooks between January 1827 and his death in 1834. In these years, Coleridge made use of the notebooks for his most sustained and far-reaching inquiries, very little of which resulted in publication in any form during his lifetime. Twenty-eight notebooks are here published in their entirety for the first time; entries dated 1827 or later from several more notebooks also appear in this volume. Following previous practice for the edition, notes appear in a companion volume. Coleridge's intellectual interests were wide, encompassing not only literature and philosophy but the political crises of his time, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and contemporary developments in psychology, archaeology, philology, biblical criticism, and the visual arts. In these years, he met and conversed with eminent writers, scholars, scientists, churchmen, politicians, physicians, and artists. He planned a major work on Logic (still unpublished at his death), and an outline of Christian doctrine, also unfinished, though his work toward this project contributed to On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) and the revised Aids to Reflection (1831). The reader of these notebooks has the opportunity to see what one of the most admired minds of the English-speaking world thought on several issues--such as race and empire, science and medicine, democracy (particularly in reaction to the Reform Bills introduced in 1831 and 1832), and the authority of the Bible--when he wrote without fear of public disapprobation or controversy.
