As early as October 28 (New York, Hampshire House, room 503) I find the following plan penciled in my little book: "a novel, a life, a love--which is only the elaborate commentary to a gradually evolved short poem." The "short poem" started to become a rather long one soon after the Queen Elizabeth ("Buy dental floss, new pince-nez, Bonamine, check with baggage-master big black trunk on pier before embarcation, Deck A, Cabin 71") deposited at Cherbourg on November 7. Four days later, at the Principe e Savoia in Milan and then throughout the winter in Nice, in a rented flat (57 Promenade des Anglais) and after that in Tessin, Valais, and Vaud ("Oct. 1, 1961, moved to Montreux-Palace") I was absorbed in Pale Fire, which I finished on December 4, 1961.Today I'm starting a "little book" of my own. Though there are certainly Internet- or computer-based options for this sort of thing, I think the portability and simplicity of the small notebook wins out for now. Even if I had an iPhone (and I'm sure there are nice apps for this sort of thing, or ways to integrate it in a calendar), it's nice to not have to worry about an inability to transfer the data to some future gadget. You can't export from a notebook, but on the other hand you don't need to worry about it going haywire and refusing to let you read it.
I hope that this will pay off, and that years down the road I'll be able to follow Nabokov's example and bask in details that my brain has long since left in the fog.
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