Dear Me

Dear me.

Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has been in touch to pose a curious question about the situation described in my previous post. If, he asks, the Pelikan Blue that emerges from the nib is more than the colour that it will become over time (because of the fading I described), shouldn't we select our inks for their future properties, not their appearance in the present?

It's a good question, and I may have to rethink my entire relationship to ink. I'm used to focussing on what a colour is, not what it will be, and even less what it will have been. (Jean-François Lyotard notes somewhere that the future anterior -- what will have been -- is the tense of postmodernity; I hereby pronounce that it will also have been the tense of postmoderninkty.) Might there even be colour which I despise when it first settles upon the page, but which then slowly transforms into a shade to admire? Could I be forced to endure ugliness in the present for beauty in the future? I'm perfectly used to failure ('Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.'), but am I entering a stage where I have to aim wide of the mark deliberately? (I'm reminded at this point of something that I often see while playing with Baby Ink in the park. The children's area overlooks a small bowling green, where, in the summer months, I regularly catch sight of people in their smart white uniforms rolling black bowls gently across the grass. I'm fascinated by the way in which, because the bowls are not symmetrical, the players don't actually aim straight at the jack. The trick, as this handy YouTube video explains, is to master how the bowl curves as it travels.)

Writing, as I've noted in previous posts, always involves a complicated relationship between past and present. As soon as I make legible marks with my pen, I open a future for my inscription; it will be there for reading, for interpretation, at later moments, perhaps even when I no longer exist. (This is why Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida have all proposed that writing and death are inextricably linked.)

But I can now see, in the light of Ken's question, that matters are more complicated that I inkitially thought. Confronting my own mortality with each stroke of my pen is just the beginning (of the end); I also have to take into account the way in which the ink with which I am writing has a body that will decay, change, respond to the passage of time. I've been so caught up with my own dying that I've overlooked the dying of the dyeing agent. We're fading together.

The passage of time is on my mind for another reason, dear readers, for I received yesterday, out of the blue, an email from someone who taught me when I was an undergraduate a decade and a half ago. I haven't been in touch with him during the last fifteen years, so I was surprised when his email asked the following question: am I the author of Ink Quest? ('Is it you?', read the subject line of his messagel; I was tempted to reply with the phrase that George Costanza claims to have invented: 'It isn't you; it's me'.)

I have absolutely no idea how he put two and two together. (Memo to Anonymity Department of the Penquod: room for improvement.) My work email address is in the public domain, of course, as is my photograph, because I'm an employee of a public institution, so my professional, public self is no secret. But the subject who writes this blog has no name, no email address, and no identifying features. The two figures exist in different realms, different time zones (the Penquod switched to the decimal clock several years ago), different universes. They never talk -- or even write -- to each other. They don't even like each other.

This curious collision of past and present has, perhaps because it followed so closely the question raised by honorary Penquod crew member Ken, prompted me to consider the relationship between 2009 and my undergraduate years in the early-mid 1990s, when I was taught by the author of yesterday's unexpected email. Would he recognize me if I passed him in the street today? Am I the same now as I was then? And would I recognize him? I have a crystal-clear image in my mind of what he looks like, and I can hear his voice as if he were in the room now, but I have no way of taking the last fifteen years into account.

A regular feature in the Sunday Times sees public figures writing letters to their teenage selves ('Dear 16-year-old me'...); the younger self then gets chance to reply to the adult. (I don't know if I've explained that very well. Why don't you just click here to see the most recent example?) With yesterday's event in mind, I offer, dear readers, my own conversation with my selves:

Dear 19-year-old me:

- You have just arrived at university in the south of England. You are the first person anywhere in your family to go university. You have no idea what to expect. You were politely warned in your interview for the place that you would, because you attended a state comprehensive school on the wrong side of the Wye, perhaps stand out a little among the largely privately educated -- and largely English -- students. 'Do you think you can handle that?', you were asked. 'I can give as good as I get', you replied.

- You notice within the first week of teaching that everyone else seems to have been prepared for university by their secondary schools. They know what a 'bibliography' is, and they don't have to ask about the difference between a lecture and a seminar. This sense of not belonging where others 'naturally' will remain with you.

- You attend your first seminar. Your young tutor has also recently arrived at the university. He once taught in Poland. He quotes Marx; your teachers in school only ever quoted the rules. As the year passes, that seminar becomes the place where you first encounter some of the texts and ideas that changed who you are -- and that you now teach to the next generation of undergraduates. (You still have your copy of David Lodge's anthology of literary theory.) That same tutor will also, in time, introduce you to the world-altering fiction of, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Herman Melville. You will never forget an in-class discussion of the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. When Twin Peaks airs for the first time on television some weeks into the term, the series becomes a topic of conversation in seminars. At one point, your tutor invites the class to analyse the opening credits for clues relating to the identity of Laura Palmer's killer.

- You somehow discover that your tutor likes Van Morrison, whom you are pathetically trying to emulate on stages around the city. You discuss 'On Hyndford Street'; he tells you that there is an unreleased sung version to accompany the official spoken incarnation. You wonder why secondary school couldn't have been like this.

- Towards the end of your time as an undergraduate, your tutor gives you your first real break when he mentions an essay that you've written for his course to a colleague who is editing a book in a related area. The essay ends up in print, and you have no doubt that this persuades the state to fund your MA and PhD. Without that funding, you would not have been able to carry on.

- You pay no attention to the writing instrument used by your tutor, simply because you have yet to take an inkterest in such things. (Perversely, you have in your drawer the Parker 61 that your grandfather left to you when he died, on the understanding that you would take it to university, but you have not been able to figure out how to fill the pen, so you buy cheap rollerballs from the university stationery shop.) You will, in 2009, when your former tutor has miraculously identified you as the author of Ink Quest, conclude that he must have taught you for all those years with a fountain pen on the desk in front of him.

Dear adult Inkanthropist:

- Ink? Ink? Is that all I have to look forward to?

I don't know how long Blogger will exist; it's not made of real ink, so its permanence is open to doubt. But I have the handwritten version of this entry in one of my notebooks, dear readers, and I will now file it away and not revisit it until 4 November 2024, when I will, if I still exist, be in my mid-fifties. Dear me...

Ink in use today: Pelikan Blue; Omas Sepia.

A Spectre Calls

I have become a ghost-writer.

I noted some months ago that Pelikan Blue would appear to be the modern ink that comes closest to the charming blue used by Roland Barthes on his index cards. And I also recorded in that entry how it's only after fading over time that the colour becomes truly Barthesian; the shade that first comes out of the nib is a little too dark, too bright, and light is needed to make it lighter.

With this in mind, I have been quietly conducting an experiment: when I left the office for my summer holiday on 31 July, I placed an index card, on which I had simply written the words 'Pelikan Blue', upon my windowsill, which catches the sun at certain times of the day. I intended to leave the card there until 31 October, but, while moving a pile of papers yesterday afternoon, I accidentally knocked it to the floor. When I picked it up, my heart skipped a beat: Pelikan Blue had become, after nearly three months of exposure to sunlight, Barthes Blue.

Yes, dear readers, I believe that I have finally solved the mystery. I now put it to the world at large that the delicate colour found on R.B.'s precious index cards is Pelikan Blue that has, in the years since the death of the author (he was hit by a van while crossing rue des Écoles, Paris, in 1980), gradually faded to its present state. The ghostliness of the colour cannot be found in the bottle at the time of writing; in the beginning, the pale spectre lies beyond the pale.

Strangely, then, I have turned Pelikan Blue into a shade by refusing to keep it in the shade; what I was looking for was always a shade of a shade. I say this because, as I have recently discovered while reading Dante, 'shade' can mean 'ghost' in English. (I don't know how I'd never spotted this fact; I was spooked when it drifted like a revenant from the pages of the dictionary several days ago.)

Not long after Roland Barthes died, Jacques Derrida wrote a wonderful tribute entitled 'Les morts de Roland Barthes' ('The Deaths of Roland Barthes'). And, just over a decade later, he published a haunting book about ghosts, Spectres de Marx, which is known in English, because its translator is American, as Specters of Marx. (I have nothing against American English, but I'm not American, so will be using 'spectre' throughout today's seance.) When the volume first appeared, many commentators focussed upon its discussion of the legacy of Marxism in a world without the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Those elements of the book are certainly fascinating, but I've always -- probably because I would like to drift outside all political considerations -- been drawn more to Derrida's discussion of ghosts themselves.

Philosophers are supposed to be concerned with questions of ontology, but Specters of Marx quickly conjures up the name 'hauntology' to describe its project. A spectre, Derrida writes, is ‘never present as such’; if it were, it would be a being, would circulate without trouble among the alive. But it does not follow that a ghost is altogether absent; if it were, it would be unable to haunt, to disturb the present. A ghost, Derrida concludes, has a ‘paradoxical phenomenality’ that upsets the ‘sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being’. A shade is that which comes back in a form that is ‘undecidable’.

I found myself thinking of Specters of Marx while holding my index card yesterday afternoon. My perfect shade, it seems to me, is a perfect shade, for in the ghostly words 'Pelikan Blue', Pelikan Blue (the ink in the bottle that sits just behind me as I type) is not, in Derrida's phrase, 'present as such'. If it were, my heart would not have been skipping a beat at the sight of a colour that recalls the scribblings of Roland Barthes. But Pelikan Blue is not simply absent from the words 'Pelikan Blue', for the pale shade has its roots in the darker, fresher Pelikan Blue that emerged from my nib on 31 July. The conventional distinction between absence and presence cannot possibly do justice to the present (but not present) shade.

Ink, once again, turns out to be far from straightforward. An apparently simple ontological question, 'What colour is this on my index card?', is spooked by hauntological undecidability. Shade is a shady business.

I thought that I'd finished this post, dear readers, but then I was suddenly visited by the ghost of an entry from 2006, 'Powdering, Ghosting, Ink Fly', in which I reported that I had discovered many wonderful new technical terms in a 1961 book entitled Printing Ink Manual. I didn't explain the meaning of 'ghosting' at the time, but perhaps it would be appropriate to do so today. Here, then, is how pages 719-20 of the book put it:

The most prevalent type of ghosting is that of interference in the drying rate of one side of a print by the inks printed on the reverse; this is believed in the main to be due to the interaction of the volatile decomposition products of one drying ink film and the reverse side of the next sheet in the stack. [...] The defect may also appear as a loss of gloss in some areas which have been affected by inks on the reverse side, and also as a 'bloom'. Quick drying inks, especially gloss inks, seem most prone to give this trouble, but ghosting has been observed with normal linseed stand oil inks and problems have been investigated on many different types of paper from surface sized offset litho cartridges to coated boards.

I am now wondering, of course, what would happen if I wrote 'Pelikan Blue' on both sides of an index card and left the object in the sunlight for several months. Would a double ghosting occur? Would ghosting haunt the ghosting? (Can a spectre spook itself?)

I, a ghost-writer, clearly need to begin another experiment. Watch Ink Quest -- my haunt -- for news. Expect a spectre.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nakahama Whaleman's Sepia. (I quite like this colour, which reminds me a little of Herbin Terre de Feu, but I am finding it extremely dry. My Sailor Sapporo simply gave up the ghost when filled with the ink, in fact, so I am now trying it in the eternally reliable Pelikan M200.)

PS (9.00am): Like a spectre, I'm back again. It occured to me after posting earlier today that readers inkterested in hearing and seeing Jacques Derrida speak about ghosts can consult the following clip (of an impossibly stylish J.D.) from Ghost Dance:



Derrida may have been Algerian, and the director of the film may be British, but the clip strikes me as magnificently, deliciously, deliriously French. I genuinely believe that, while I am sitting in my office reading papers about how the university is going to 'manage' a flu pandemic, the universities of Paris are filled with people having conversations just like the one in the clip. Pastis envy, I suppose.

PPS (4.30pm): While I rarely use Moleskine notebooks, I couldn't help but recognize something of myself in a delightful little piece of satire published just over a week ago in The Onion. Thanks to eagle-eyed, fountain-pen-wielding 'Owain' for the link.

Penacea

Give us this day our daily ink.

Life at the office is still chaotic, dear readers, so I have not been able to enjoy communion with you as often as I'd like in recent months. But I have found a moment or two this evening to bake my latest thoughts into some kind of loafing loaf.

In a rare period of calm on the train several days ago, I finally managed to read a short essay which I'd been ambitiously carrying in my briefcase for at least a week. The piece, by Colin Bloy, has a wonderful title -- 'The Use of Bread in Early Ink Making' -- and is, it may surprise you to learn, all about the use of bread in early ink making.

In 1645, notes Bloy, Abraham Bosse described his special varnish for copperplate black ink: bread crusts and onions were key ingredients, apparently with a view to making the oil less greasy. This, Bloy states, is the first recorded use of bread in the production of ink. Bosse's practice soon spread: Fertel and Mueller mentioned -- in 1723 and 1740, respectively -- the importance of a piece of bread to the ink-making process. (Mueller believed that it made the varnish thicker.)

This, however, is just the beginning of Bloy's fascinating tale, for he goes on to describe how, when the printing ink industry really found its feet in the nineteenth century, 'the romance of ink-making [...] disappeared', for the production of ink had been a festive occasion in earlier times. He then quotes a truly odd passage from Goebl's Unsere Farbe of 1896:

Those were the days of ink-making when it was made on a still, sunny day before the city gate, far from the damp air of the printing house, when the fire crackled under the pot, which stood on the trivet in a hole in the ground, and threw fantastic lights on the old city wall, a pleasant interlude in the monotonous profession of the printer -- and the festive mood was heightened by the oil-scented warm rolls which had been fried in the varnish, with which that ever-thirsty race of men who wield the balls, downed a heart-warming shot of schnapps -- which they did, naturally, only to ameliorate the effects of the fatty oil on the stomach -- and then the stirring in of the black provided the prose on a day of festive poetry.

Yes, dear readers, over 250 years after Abraham Bosse first referred to using bread in the making of ink, German citizens were gorging themselves on bread rolls which had been fried in the varnish inkvolved in the production of ink. 'These rolls', Bloy also notes, 'were considered to be a great delicacy when eaten with salt', and were seen as beneficial for victims of tuberculosis ('as long as they could overcome their revulsion of the pungent odour of the oil to which they, as laymen, were not accustomed').

This belief that ink has medicinal qualities has been remarkably inkfectious. Writing in 1793 in Paris, Bloy records, Momoro declared that ink could be used to treat cuts, bruises, burns, and even -- make sure you're seated ... gently -- haemorrhoids. Meanwhile, a 1926 volume entitled Printing Ink! A History reported that the custom of daubing ink upon tumours, swellings, and wounds had been a common one within living memory.

I'm still trying to digest these remarkable slices of inkformation. (Perhaps I need a shot of schnapps.) And I'm also trying to come to terms with how far we've fallen. Our ancestors knew, it seems, that ink was good for us, that it could, when placed upon troubled bodies, heal and calm. We, however, live in a half-baked world where, as I've noted on countless occasions, ink is generally seen as a poison, an evil force, a demon to keep at a distance.

Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that I am not fond of any form of religion and that I know next to nothing about the major belief systems of the world. I believe, however, that I'm right to say that bread features quite centrally in the rites of at least one well-known religion. My sole visit to a Catholic Mass some six or seven years ago, to see the child of some former friends receiving his first communion, left me extremely puzzled when, after the jingling of some kind of bells, people started leaving their seats and coming back chewing snacks of some kind. When I discovered that bread was being dished out from some kind of makeshift bakery at the front, I told the Inkette that I was going up to the buffet for a nibble. She informed that I wasn't allowed because I hadn't been something-or-othered (confirmed? ordained? beatified?); I still don't see how the priest (is that the right term?) would have known that I wasn't the Right Kind of Person. Is there a password that has to be uttered before the baguettes are revealed? ('Crouton'?) And are you allowed to choose if you want bread without wine, or is a 'meal deal' system strictly enforced at all times? And what, while I'm wondering aloud, is the deal with strangers turning around, trying to shake my hand, and saying 'Peace be with you'? Are they not aware that peace will never be with me? Do I look like the kind of person in whom peace is interested? And are 'Have you got any of that tasty-looking bread left?' or 'Could you go back up and grab a crust for me; I'll pay you?' acceptable responses to 'Peace be with you'? It occurs to me now, in fact, that the build-up in Ink Towers to my first experience of Mass went a little something like this:



But I digress; my bafflement before religion has led me astray, my children. Let me come back from the wilderness and tell you about my latest Great Plan. Let me cast my bread upon the waters that surround the Penquod.

We all, as inkthusiasts, agree that the Gospel of Ink needs to be spread; there are heathens out there (note to self: stop calling them 'idiots' if in the pulpit) who know nothing but ballpoints and who fear the dark one who signs his name as 'Mephinkstopheles'.

My solution, my dream, inkvolves the resurrection of ink as both foodstuff and medicine. I'm far too misanthropic actually to break bread with anyone, but the engine-room of the Penquod will henceforth also serve as a bakery, from which inky rolls will be blessed and sent out into the lost world. The little-used social function room, moreover, will be transformed into a hospital where every disease will be treated with ink.

'Doctor! He's gone into cardiac arrest!'
'Pass me the Noodler's, nurse, and fill me a converter with 5ml of Herbin'.
'We're losing him, doctor!'
'There's one thing we haven't tried. Nurse, get the Parker Penman Sapphire from the secure storage area'.
'Is that the ink which is essentially the same colour as Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue, or possibly Diamine Majestic Blue, doctor?'
'There isn't time for that discussion now, nurse; we'd be here all night. Remember the Hippocratink oath and get back to work'.

This heretical blog has often hailed ink in ecstatic tones, turned inscription into some kind of new religion. And now, in my inky bread and my 'penacea', I have finally found the flesh of my faith. Let's roll.

Ink healing ailments today: Noodler's Bad Blue Heron. (More pleasurable to use, I think, than the Upper Ganges Blue. It's drier, certainly, and I know that some have found this problematic, but it transpired that the UGB was simply too wet in my Sailor Sapporo.)

Inkfluenza

The swines!

I have complained in many previous posts about how the makers of modern writing instruments (ballpoints, rollerballs, and so on) want to make the world a sterile place. By hiding ink away, by refusing to let the sacred fluid itself ever come near our hands, the companies responsible for these monstrosities push us ever closer towards a wholly prophylactic existence, in which we all become like the Bubble Boy ('Moops!'), deprived of physical contact.

My previous complaints have discussed this will-to-sterility (Nietzsche is so passé; the will-to-power has become the will-to-scour) in largely figurative terms; the Bic corporation does not, for instance, actually market its endemic biro as a germ-free object. But the time of the figurative has passed, dear readers, for we have entered the next phase of Project Prophylactic; the war of sterility against older forms of writing instruments -- fountain pens, for instance -- has taken a terrifyingly literal turn.

I became aware of this yesterday afternoon while reading the consistently inkformative Office Supply Geek, where a post from 9 October described the Ticonderoga antimicrobial pencil. This truly bizarre object is sterility raised to the level of DEFCON 1, for each pencil is coated with Microban, which, according to the official Microban website, is designed to 'provide continuous antimicrobial product protection'.

I have not yet seen a Ticonderoga Microban pencil in the (scrubbed, shrink-wrapped) flesh, but I suspect that the product will sell rather well in the coming months, for the threat of swine flu is, in the UK at least, being discussed in tones that increase in anxiety with each new day.

As official union troublemaker, for instance, I have seen detailed risk assessments and an 'escalation plan' drawn up by the university in order to 'manage' a pandemic. There's an absurd, perverse poetry in these documents; the late J.G. Ballard would surely have loved them. And there are also specific measures that will be put into place if the swine pushes its dripping snout into the ivory tower. Containers of specially purchased sterilizing handwash, for instance, will be placed alongside handbasins, and staff have already been informed, in a series of laminated documents affixed to walls, about the correct way to dispose of used tissues. (I must write to the Vice-Chancellor to thank him for enlightening me. Such knowledge is not to be sniffed at.) There is, I feel, something magnificently British about the belief that a serious global illness can be defeated by a little bit of soap.

I dread to think what will happen if the institution finds out about the Ticonderoga Microban pencil. I have reported in previous posts how serif typefaces have essentially become outlawed in the workplace, and I have also worried here that the risk-obsessed management will impose a ban upon fountain pens and real ink. The terrible partnership of swine flu and the Microban pencil has sent me into utter panic. This can only be the moment They have been waiting for, planning for. We've lived for years beneath the bloated banality of micromanagement (F.W. Taylor, how mild you now seem); microbemanagement is surely just around the corner.

Let them try to make us write with nothing but Microban pencils; let them ban ink and fountain pens as unhygienic carriers of swine flu. I will pigheadedly spread inkfluenza with my unclean writing instruments. They may shout 'Oi, ink!' and reach for their sanitizing handwash when I enter the building, but I will snort 'O, ink! Oink! Oink!' back at them. Before swine, pearls. Sterility has had its bacon.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Upper Ganges Blue; Noodler's Polar Brown. (I noted in my previous post that these two colours have recently arrived at Ink Towers in a package from honorary Penquod crew member Anna. A few words on each. The Polar Brown is certainly an improvement on Eternal Luxury Brown, but it's proving to be rather dry in my Aurora Talentum. I quite like the colour, but Noodler's Walnut remains Nathan Tardif's finest brown, in my opinion. Upper Ganges Blue has been rather pleasant so far: it flows much better than the Polar Brown, and it doesn't suffer from the 'chalkiness' of some of the other Noodler's eternal colours. And I think I prefer its shade to Eternal Luxury Blue.)

Eee! Ink!

'Eee! Ink!', I cried.

It was Tuesday evening, and I had just returned home from a long, deranged day at work (where the chaos continues and continues to keep me from blogging, as does Baby Ink's decision merrily to work his way through just about every illness known to humanity). Waiting for me when I crossed the moat around Ink Towers was a package from Seattle-based honorary Penquod crew member Anna. Inside, to my delight, I found an array of vials filled with delightful Noodler's ink. Seven vials, to be precise. I was filled with such joy that I whirled around the room in what will henceforth be known as the Dance of the Seven Vials. (Shallow? Me?) You can see the glorious little objects in all their glory in the photograph above, dear readers, but you may not, because I couldn't show all of the labels, be able to figure out the full, magnificent names of the inks within. Here, then, is the roll call:

TOP ROW (left > right): La Reine Mauve; Polar Brown; Mata Hari's Cordial (new style).
BOTTOM ROW (left > right): Borealis Black; Manjiro Nakahama Whaleman's Sepia; Bad Blue Heron; Upper Ganges Blue.

As I type these words, two of my favourite pens -- the Aurora Talentum and the Sailor Sapporo -- are drying and awaiting the ceremonial opening of the first of the seven magical vials. I haven't quite decided where I'll begin, but I'm drawn to Upper Ganges Blue and Polar Brown, partly because the former looks a little like the charming blue used by my beloved Roland Barthes on his index cards.

'Eee! Ink!', I shrieked, then, as I joyfully danced the Dance of the Seven Vials. But I had been shouting 'Eee! Ink!' in fury several days earlier.

Well, 'E ink!', to be precise. Allow me to explain. I was, in a rare moment of calm, reading the Sunday paper, in which I noticed an ecstatic review of some of the latest wireless electronic reading devices (the Amazon Kindle, and so on). While I like to fill my life with trinkets, I rarely take an interest in hi-tech gadgets. Yes, I have a mobile phone, but, as I may have reported in an earlier post, I made the assistant in the shop find me one without a camera, MP3 player, internet access, colour screen, and just about anything unrelated to the act of making a telephone call. I own an iPod, too, but it's one of the older models that's about as large as the twelve-inch record that the iPod apparently replaces. ('How old is that?', honorary Penquod crew member and colleague Daphne recently asked; she seems to acquire a new iPod as often as she acquires a new pair of shoes, which is weekly, as far as I can tell.) I don't, ink fact, count these technologically advanced objects among my precious trinkets; they're functional tools, rather, and they, as objects, give me no particular pleasure. For that, I have my archaic pens, my ink bottles, my silk pocket squares, my notebooks, and so on.

But I somehow found myself reading the review of the Kindle and Kindle-like devices in the newspaper, even though I have no desire to own one. And it wasn't long before I was on my well-worn soapbox, raging, raving, ranting.

What set me off, dear readers, was the discovery that what readers see on the screen of an electronic reading device is technically known as 'e ink'. (For a more detailed explanation, click here.) 'E ink!', I shrieked upon discovering this monstrous phrase. 'E ink! Where the hell is the ink?'

It all makes terrible, perfect sense, doesn't it, dear readers? It's another piece in the global conspiracy against us, against lovers and users of fountain pens, against inkthusiasts. I've known for years that manufacturers of ballpoint pens have been doing their best to keep ink away from us, to make it something that we never see or touch. And now the makers of the Kindle and their collaborators are taking the untouchability and immateriality of ink one step further.

Traditionally, ink has been something that spits and splashes, that gets on hands and cuffs. In short, it has been something that we touch and that, in turn, touches us. (Think of the narrator of Tolstoy's Boyhood covering the edge of his school desk with ink when he's bored; think of the monks in Eco's The Name of the Rose who lick their inky fingers ... and pay the price.) As I've noted in countless previous posts, one of the things I love most about ink is its physicality, its material quirks and winks.

And this is precisely what the makers of 'e ink' want to destroy. When I read a book, I want to smell the ink and the pages; I want to feel the object in my hands as it responds to my reading. (The spine gradually cracks and its colour changes, for instance; the photograph above shows precisely how the black spines of Paul Auster's novels became flecked with white in my hands.) In short, I want to be as seduced by the materiality of a book as I am by its plot or play of words. But that could never happen with 'e ink', with a 'book' (the term is no longer appropriate, really) read on a Kindle or some other modern monstrosity. 'E ink' has no body, no presence, no physicality. And that is why I will never touch it.

There is, of course, a certain irony here: you are reading this upon a screen. Ink Quest can offer no ink for your fingers to fondle. But that's immaterial in the end, I think, because every post begins its life upon a page of one of my notebooks, with pen and (real) ink. And I am saving those pages to fuel an almighty bonfire of the profanities. Yes, dear readers, I urge you to gather together the 'e ink' devices of the world -- the Kindles and the like -- and pile them up at the gates of Ink Towers. I will soak my back pages in paraffink (a potent mixture of ink and paraffin), and I will stuff them between the plastic monstrosities. And then 'e ink' will know the true meaning of the word 'kindle'.

Ink very likely to be in use today: Noodler's Ganges Blue; Noodler's Polar Brown.

Spoiler

******SPOILER ALERT******

My recent complaints about the ink on offer inside "Wales' largest department store" have generated furious complaints of their own: the author of Ravens March, a blog of which I am very fond, has taken me to task for being ungrateful about what's on my doorstep. The only department store near him, he notes, sells no ink whatever, so my whining about the handful of brands available in John Lewis was like a red rag to a bull.

I accept completely, dear readers, that I regularly behave like a spoilt child. Ink Quest is, ink fact, little more than four years of ungrateful complaints about the excessive numbers of consumer objects that I have amassed -- and quickly discarded -- in my search for the perfect ink. My life is so unfortunate -- the ninety-eight bottles of ink that I've purchased at great expense have brought me no happiness. And the leather case filled with twenty-three fountain pens is just salt in the wound. Feel my pain.

But here's the problem: if I had nothing to complain about, if everything were perfect, why on earth would I bother living? It's precisely because I'm such a spoilt brat that I have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. 'What can I complain about today?' is always one of my first thoughts on awaking. (Beckett's famous line is thus reworked: I can't go on ... Oh, there's something new to complain about. Good -- I'll go on.) Ink short, complaining is what I do. Complaint is my complaint.

By extension, if I were to find the perfect ink, the perfect pen, or the perfect notebook, I would have nothing to write about, no reason to keep drifting at the increasingly deserted helm of the Penquod. All of these words, these bitter complaints, exist because I cannot possibly be satisfied by my latest object of desire. I thought for a while that this simply made me a fickle aesthete, but then I read the following in one of Susan Sontag's essays: 'The aesthete's posture alternates between never being satisfied and always finding a way of being satisfied, being pleased with virtually everything.' I, of course, am pleased with nothing. (I once found myself in conversation at work with a member of The Management. He asked what it would take to stop me complaining, to please me professionally. I said that I simply didn't understand the question, and we moved on to another topic. It was inevitable that I would find my way into trade union activities, then, I suppose: our regular meetings are minuted marathons of complaint. When we formally declared ourselves 'in dispute' with the university over redundancies earlier in the year, I had to stop myself saying at a meeting, 'What, the dispute is only beginning now? What the hell do you call what I've been doing for the last decade?')

This, of course, generates problems. I cannot help noticing, for inkstance, that colleagues who come into my office filled with optimism always leave looking suicidal when they have heard my latest complaint. I am convinced, moreover, that my endless complaining has persuaded at least two people to leave academia permanently. ('Come back! If you resign, you won't be able to complain about how much you'd like to leave!', I have cried, but it's always been too late.)

In short, then, I am a spoiler. Spoilt for choice, I cannot help spoiling others' happy days with my spoilt behaviour. (I'm reminded of a lovely story that Maurice Blanchot tells somewhere; I can't remember where, and I may have spoilt the finer details. The Messiah has finally returned and is wandering around near the gates of the city, enjoying his hour of arrival. A man strides up to him and says, 'So, when are you going to come back?')

A 'spoiler', of course, is also a device attached to the back of a car in order to drag it down. And that is precisely what I, as a spoiler, will do to all of you, dear readers. Sooner or later, I will drag you down to my level of misery, indignation, despair, and fury. The spoils from the Penquod's sullen voyages will inkrease, yes, but so will the inkevitable spoiling of your moods.

I'm spoiling for your cooperation, then: stop reading Ink Quest. Delete it from your list of 'bookmarks' and never return to these pages. I will keep complaining, keep acting like a spoilt child, but this need not concern or upset you. *****END OF SPOILER ALERT*****

Ink causing reason for complaint today: Noodler's Walnut. (Why so dry, Walnut? You're a lovely colour, so why not show yourself more readily.)

Deadlines (part II)

What use is ink without a pen?

I was so tired -- dead tired -- when I wrote last night's entry, dear readers, that I completely forgot to say anything substantial about the fountain pens on sale in 'Wales' largest department store'. Ink is always my priority, of course, but I should perhaps have offered at least a few words about the shop's writing instruments.

As with the inks, I'm afraid, the selection is rather predictable: Cross, Waterman, Mont Blanc, Lamy, Sheaffer, and so on. The big brands. The ones you see everywhere. 'Same as it ever was ... Same as it ever was.' Once again, I can't help feeling that John Lewis has missed an opportunity. The store prides itself on being somewhat exclusive, somewhat above other shops, but its selection of fountain pens does absolutely nothing to mark it out as distinctive.

The shiny familiarity of the new pens in their glass cabinets, ink fact, depressed me a little. They all looked so new, so recently crafted. Why, I asked myself, couldn't a forward-thinking department store start selling vintage fountain pens, models that have matured over time and in the hands of previous owners?

And this is where things start to get curious: John Lewis sells, in the men's clothing section, vintage cufflinks. Yes, dear readers, buried deep within the four floors of pristine luxury objects is a small glass case in which previously owned cufflinks sit and face the shelves of shiny new cufflinks. (Do the vintage ones talk amongst themselves about what they can see? 'Look at those kids out there, all polished and ready for their first cuffs? So eager, so naive. What do they know about anything? A simple glance this way would be nice. Hey, kid! Yes, you. With all the shine. Are you a boy or a girl? I can't tell these days. I fought in a war so that you could sit out there and enjoy your freedom. Don't you scowl at me, kiddo -- I'll come over there and give you a cuff around the ear.')

Why is it that vintage cufflinks are acceptable in a luxury department store, but not vintage pens. Is it something to do with the fact that the latter would have spent a great deal of time in others' hands, and not suspended at a sterile distance in cuffs? Would a used fountain pen be seen by the general shopping public as an object too intimate to be passed on and used again, like a pair of shoes or an undergarment?

There is clearly market research to be done here, dear readers. We need to know why a major retailer has degrees of vintageness -- vintages of vintage, perhaps. I'll set aside my deadlines and get straight to work. I'm rolling up my sleeves...

Ink in use today: Rohrer and Klingner Sepia.

Deadlines

Dead lines in the wake of deadlines.

I announced in my last post, dear readers, that I was about to disappear for around a week into the annual whirlwind that is enrolment week at the university. The 'days of the station wagons' are always chaotic, but things were more crushing than ever this year, mainly because several major deadlines -- for a publisher, for the union, for an MA examining board -- also decided to impose themselves upon me, as did a nasty cough that looked as if it was turning into bronchitis. I still have a major deadline looming at the end of October, and I have no idea how I'm going to meet it, but there seem this evening, for the first time in far too long, to be a few spare minutes in which I can sit and update Ink Quest. The deadlines have left me extremely weary, so I can promise nothing but tired, dead lines tonight; my usual exuberant optimism, happiness, warmth, and love for the human race are nowhere to be found.

Actually, I should probably write nothing at all, for Sitemeter tells me that the blog has been more popular than ever while I've not been posting. People, it seems, just can't get enough of my absence; they've been falling over themselves to see me not here. (Cue the old Max Boyce line: 'I went outside to collect my bicycle, and there it was -- gone'.) Perhaps there's a special kind of RSS feed which updates inkthusiasts only when I've written nothing on any given day. ('Quick, he's been totally silent today -- let's read the blog'.) The less I write, the more you read; the less I'm here, the more I'm evidently adored. I can't possibly think why.

Anyway, the chaos of the last couple of weeks has left little time for inky pursuits. I've thought about ink, of course, and I've spoken about pens and stationery on the telephone to old friend and honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, who's recovering from major surgery on her spine (get well soon!), but my ongoing search for the perfect ink has been rather interrupted.

Ink fact, I have just one major inkident to report. While I've been off the air, Wales' largest department store, John Lewis, has opened its doors for the first time. To be more precise, the crowds were welcomed in on what was, for me, one of the busiest days of last week. Although I was barely awake by the time I left work, I still managed to break my train journey and call in on the way home, for I, dear readers, was on a mission.

As far as I'm concerned, any department store can be judged according to a few very simple criteria:

- Does it stock a decent range of fountain pens?
- Do its shelves also hold bottled ink? (Cartridges win no points in this test, I'm afraid.)
- Does the men's clothing section offer more than three colours of silk pocket squares? Are they, more importantly, on display? (Take ten points off if the shop keeps them 'behind the counter'. Take forty points off if the salesman says, 'It's normally only the older gentlemen who ask for these'.)
- Can a wandering dandy easily fill a basket with at least two of the following essential grooming items: shaving soap; shaving cream (nothing in a tube or can counts); a delicate aftershave balm that does not contain alcohol; Acqua di Parma Colonia; Floris No. 89; mainland-European-style gentleman's carryall (ordinary woman's handbag not allowed as substitute)?

Readers of Ink Quest lucky enough to live in major metropolitan areas will perhaps see this list as nothing special; anyone who lives in London, for instance, could probably find all of these items, and many more, within minutes in Selfridges or Harrod's. But out here in the wilderness, where prancing dandies are strung up on streetlamps on a daily basis, the luxuries of life -- nay, the bare essentials -- are harder to come by.

I was, then, filled with hope when I walked through the doors of John Lewis last week. No longer, I felt, would I need to order my trinkets online, or track them down in shops hidden down dark alleyways and behind unmarked doors. ('Can I help you?' 'I hear you have Floris.' 'Who sent you?' 'El Lavender'. 'What's the password?' 'Niven'.)

The disappointment did not take long to descend. The shop is extremely pleasant, and it's certainly a promising step in the direction marked 'foppery'. Pocket squares in several colours were on full display, as were some fairly interesting shaving products. And there was an entire table devoted to the delightful yellow Acqua di Parma boxes. Floris No. 89 was nowhere to be found, however. And then I arrived in the pen section.

Major retailers would probably go out of business in a matter of weeks if I were allowed to stock their pen departments. What we inkthusiasts love, what we prize, tends not to match what sells in huge numbers. Outside our little world, there can't be many people who would pay over £10 for a bottle of Noodler's ink when they could pick up Parker Quink for something like £3.50. We're a 'niche market', I suppose you could say, and we have many websites that attend to our expensive, erratic, insatiable whims.

However, I still find it rather disappointing that Wales' largest department store plays it quite so safe when it comes to ink. Yes, there are bottles on the shelves, but the overall selection is rather uninspiring: Cross Black; Parker Quink Blue; Waterman Florida Blue and Blue-Black; Sheaffer Blue and Black; Mont Blanc Blue and Black.

Please don't misunderstand me: some of these colours are perfectly pleasant -- I'm very fond of the Waterman inks -- but couldn't the company have pushed the boat out a little? (Does it really want its unofficial slogan to become, 'John Lewis: where the boring blue is'?) Wouldn't a few J. Herbin shades have added a charming Gallic twist? Or, thinking more ambitiously, couldn't the shop, which has opened to such fanfare, have made the radical decision to be the first brick-and-mortar outlet in the UK to sell Noodler's ink? Why the need to play it so safe?

I have been back to John Lewis on a couple of occasions since, just in case a selection of more exciting inks has been added. ('The regular crowds have died down a bit now; bring out those funny inks that always attract the lunatics. And get the camera -- we can put the footage on YouTube for people to laugh at'.) I think, ink fact, that one of the men who works at the pen counter has recognized me as an obsessive lingerer. But he will just have to put up with my daily visits and my disappointed sighing when I see the shelves. I'm waiting for ink that will light up my page, make more than dead lines.

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown; Sailor Grey.

On No Work of Words (encore)

In the bloody belly of the beginning of the academic year.

I realize that I stole 'On No Work of Words' for the title of an entry in July 2006, but I have been driven to purloin it again today because I am currently drowning in the utter insanity of the beginning of the semester.

It has been a week since my last confession, and it will probably be another week before I have time to put pen to paper and then fingers to keyboard, dear readers. This is something of a shame, as it is Ink Quest's fourth birthday tomorrow; I also have thrilling things to say about all sorts of inky matters. Still, there is nothing to be done but roll with the punches until the days (yes, days) of the station wagons are over. We shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness. (Well, just the usual level of gloom, hopelessness, and misanthropy.)

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.

A Friend Ink Deed

Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, inking doll.

As the parent of a two-year-old child, I have a detailed working knowledge of children's television that I simply did not possess before mid-2007. We don't allow Baby Ink to spend all day with the remote control in his hand, of course, but we're also not the kind of pious, hand-wringing middle-class parents who impose a complete ban on the medium. (What is wrong with these people? Do they really think that their actions are going to solve anything, or is it all just a performance for the benefit of the other worthy souls?) He has, therefore, a handful of programmes that he enjoys while winding down at the end of hard day, among them Dora the Explorer, Something Special, and the evergreen Tom and Jerry.

Between episodes of Dora on Friday, the usual parade of advertisements began. He pays no attention to the commercials, and I normally merely make an alarmed mental note of how much this season's coloured plastic is selling for. But something caught my eye that evening, dear readers: a range of dolls called BFC Ink.

The advert raced by too quickly for me to be able to figure out the precise nature of these objects ('Look! Dolls! Accessories! Play with them! Buy more accessories! Christmas is coming! Dolls! Accessories!'), so I had to wait until Baby Ink went to bed before I could do a little internet research. I was hoping, of course, that the BFC Ink dolls are a range of fountain-pen enthusiasts, each of which comes with a bottle of ink and an exquisite writing instrument:

New for Winter 2009! Collect them all! These girls say 'No' to biros! Meet Wendy: she's into calligraphy and italic nibs! This is Sally: she's a piston-filling girl at heart! Lucy mixes her own inks when she's not grinding nibs in her workshop! And don't forget our full range of inky accessories! Here's the Travelodge hotel -- host your very own pen show for all your friends on the outskirts of town! And how about this miniature bottle of Amodex -- even experienced inkthusiasts spill things from time to time!

The truth, however, is far less exciting: BFC Ink dolls have nothing at all to do with fountain pens and ink. As far as I can tell from the official website, the 'ink' in their name refers to the book that comes with each doll. (Oh, and 'BFC' stands for 'Best Friends Club', in case you were, like, totally wondering.) The website offers an excerpt from Addison's book (Addison 'isn’t into dressing up, cuz that’s just not her', remember?), which looks entertaining enough, but which lacks the punch of 'Call me Ishmael' or 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure' in its opening sentence, I feel.

With this double disappointment in mind, I have kidnapped Baby Ink's Dora doll, and, after a little weekend experimentation, I am proud to present the prototype of Best Friend Ink, which will be available exclusively from my grumpy, misanthropic emporium, Doll 'r' Us:



Could any child possibly resist a doll that comes with a bottle of Omas Sepia and a vintage Parker Duofold? 'You can never start kids on fountain pens too soon', inkthusiasts are fond of saying, and I think I have found a way to begin the inkdoctrination while they're still in the cradle. With Best Friend Ink, your child will come to love a bottle of ink as much as bottle of warm milk; the next generation of inkthusiasts is born. This is no joke, guys and dolls; I'm not toying with you.

Inks in the hand of Best Friend Ink today: Waterman Florida Blue; Private Reserve Tanzanite; Noodler's Walnut.

PS (1.00pm): If my new range of dolls makes me a small fortune, perhaps I'll be able to buy an ink cabinet like this.

PS (5.10pm): And if I have enough money left over, I'll be able to buy the entire contents of this.

Retirement

I should probably just retire, retreat from the world, fountain pen in hand.

A secretary with whom I've worked closely for more than a decade is due to retire in several weeks, so I called into one of the other administrative offices in the building this morning to sign her farewell card and to contribute to the collection for a gift. This act of philanthropy -- I use the term literally -- may surprise longtime followers of Ink Quest who have come to be familiar with my misanthropic ways and regular reluctance to celebrate anything except misery and bitterness. Yes, dear readers, I do sign the occasional leaving card and donate towards gifts ... but I have probably refused on more occasions than I have consented, and I did once try to persuade colleagues that a certain individual who was leaving to take up another position was simply too vile to deserve anything from us. I draw the line, too, at the faux friendliness that regularly arrives in my work email inbox: Jason bought a carton of orange juice at lunchtime. If you would like to sign the card to congratulate him, please call into the office before Friday ... Susan's name is Susan, and we're organizing a collection to celebrate this special fact. I have, moreover, left strict instructions with one of my colleagues that there should be no gift or card presented on the occasion of my resignation/dismissal/retirement/in-service death. 'I don't think it will be difficult persuading people not to give anything', she assured me.

The secretary whose retirement is just around the corner, by way of contrast, is a popular figure, so the card already contained a fair few signatures when it was passed to me for my contribution this morning. As I was choosing a spot to make my mark with my Aurora Talentum, I saw that another member of the department had written his message with a fountain pen. I know that he always uses Pelikan Brilliant Brown ink, and I immediately noticed that the glossy surface of the card had caused his words to turn a strange shade of green-ish brown. I have discussed this curious phenomenon in a previous post, so I fully expected that my ink of choice -- Noodler's Walnut -- would undergo a bizarre change when my nib moved across the card.

I didn't, however, anticipate utter disaster. As soon as I'd written my message of farewell, I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. The ink wasn't changing colour; it was spreading, pooling, turning into a large brown blob and rampaging across the rest of the surface towards others' cheery inscriptions. (The department's CCTV captured everything on film; click here to witness the full horror.)

'Finished?', asked the secretary who's been looking after the collection and gathering signatures.
'Um ... well ... something's gone wrong', I replied.
'Let's see', she said, taking the card from me. She looked at the disaster area, frowned, and then glanced over at me.
'What did you do to the card?', she asked.
'I signed it', I said.
'But it's just a mess. I can't even read what you've written'.
'It's still just about legible, isn't it?', I replied, hoping.
'Well, did you mean to say "Frjkiukl fffjuepl, loijkoijbrgds. With best wishes, jtcjuf"?', she asked.
'So it is still legible. What a relief', I responded, backing away towards the door.
'This is what happens when you use a fountain pen', I heard as I was retiring into the corridor in shame. 'And that's why they invented biros'.

Yes, dear readers, I tried to do something warm and friendly, and I managed to ruin a retirement card. I feel like Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David when he discovers that his generous attempt to place a notice in the newspaper to mark the death of Cheryl's 'beloved aunt' has gone horribly wrong. (Readers who dislike what my grandmother always called 'blue language' should stay away from the following clip.)



I have defaced a potentially precious memento, scarred it with a monstrous blob. Will an urgent email be sent around to all staff in the department tomorrow morning? (jtcjuf has mutilated the retirement card. Could everyone who has already signed it please come and sign the replacement. In biro.) Should my ink collection be forced into early retirement?

I have, of course, celebrated ink's unpredictable and unruly qualities in many of my missives. But perhaps the sacred liquid overstepped the mark this morning. I don't mind if it changes colour, shades in unforeseen ways, or even splashes a little; these inkidents, as I've noted in the past, are what makes writing with a fountain pen so pleasurable. But there's a difference between light splashing and rampant, blob-like destruction of all that exists.

It occurs to me that 'retirement' is linked, as a word, to the French 'retirer', which in turn contains 'tirer', 'to pull'. (I think it's possible, inkidentally, to say that 'retirer' tire son nom de 'tirer'.) Anyone who's ever been to France will surely have seen doors marked 'Tirez'; I always remember that 'Tirez' means pull by thinking that pulling a door open 'tirez' me out more than pushing one does.

But 'tirer' can also mean 'to draw' (as in 'to draw a line on a piece of paper'). I can only conclude, then, that my Noodler's ink, on finding itself called upon to form words relating to the retirement of secretary who just happens to have a French name, decided that it was going to withdraw (retirer) from its duty of legibility and retire into the wilder realm of abstract drawing, of mutant blobdom.

I could carry on with this inky tale, dear readers, but I shall now retire. When it comes to words at this hour, I sense my story tired.

Inks threatening the world as we know it today: Noodler's Walnut; Private Reserve Tanzanite.

'With your pencil in your hand...'

Something is happening here, but I do know what it is, Mr. Jones.

It seems that I'm not alone in needing a solid-ink pencil; Bob Dylan could also do with one. I'd like to say that I know this because he rang me for a chat last night ('Yeah, I've been reading Ink Quest while I've been on the road, and I think you should play guitar on my next album. Maybe you could help with the lyrics, too'), but the truth is rather more prosaic: I discovered to my surprise yesterday afternoon that a gallery in Cardiff Bay is currently showing several of his 'Drawn Blank' paintings, and it took me mere seconds to spot that my great hero's collection of writing instruments lacks something like the Sanford NOBLOT indelible ink pencil described in my previous post. (I say that I was surprised to see the art in the gallery because it's the kind of place that usually sells pictures of sports cars, tigers, and mundane tourist-or-homegrown-idiot-targeted watercolours of green valleys, coal mines, hillside terraces, and sheep.)

When I noticed that the gallery is asking nearly £1400 for prints of Dylan's art, I decided that I'd better look long and hard at the pieces, as there was no way that I would be walking out with one tucked beneath my arm. And so I stood and stared for a while. Before my eyes even reached the colourful pictures, though, they fell obsessively upon Dylan's signature. 'That's Bob Dylan's signature', I thought, awe-struck. 'But it's in pencil'.

Yes, dear readers, the eternally contrary Bob has chosen to authenticate the prints of his work with a signature that could be erased in an instant. The type of Dylan fan who likes to look for connections and conspiracies in his work would probably tie this fact to the opening line of 'Ballad of a Thin Man' ('You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand') or perhaps even to the pencil moustache that he's taken to sporting in recent years. Others might explain the use of pencil at the bottom of the paintings by pointing out that the term 'pencil' ultimately derives from penicillum, the Latin word for paintbrush. My immediate reaction, however, was: Why didn't he use ink? And is a signature still technically a signature if it's in pencil?

I can think of various situations in which the answer to that second question would be 'Absolutely not'. A passport application, for inkstance, needs (in the UK, at least) to be written in ink, as, I believe, do legal contracts. And I doubt very much that a bank would accept a cheque upon which the amount and signature were inscribed in pencil. But when it comes to art, of course, the usual rules no longer apply. A painting can be signed with anything.

I'm still somewhat disappointed, though, that Dylan didn't use ink and a fountain pen to sign his prints. I don't think I've ever seen a photograph of him with a writing instrument in his hand, but I now realize that I always assumed his weapon of choice to be a fountain pen. It's often said that you should never meet your heroes; perhaps it's now time to add that you should never learn about your heroes' choice of writing instruments. When it comes to Roland Barthes (one of my other heroes, as regular readers of this blog will know), we're on safe ground: as I've pointed out in many previous posts, the mighty R.B. often wrote about his love of fountain pens and ink. But what if other writers, artists, and musicians whom I admire have a penchant for pencils or, worse still, ballpoint pens? (Did Don DeLillo write White Noise in biro on cheap, low-quality paper? Does Philip Roth have a drawer full of rollerballs? Did Van Morrison jot down the lyrics of Veedon Fleece with a chewed Bic? Did Edward Hopper sketch the magnificent Gas in ballpoint before picking up his brush?) Should I be putting names on my list of heroes in pencil until I know for certain that each individual doesn't use a pencil?

Until I feel confident enough to answer these questions, until I know enough about my heroes' writing habits to master peace, I'll have to take comfort in twisting the lyrics to 'When I Paint My Masterpiece':

Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent
When Dylan inks his masterpiece.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray.

PS (2 September): The solid senders keep on sending fascinating references to solid-ink pencils. Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan has just discovered a tantalizing appearance of my latest object of desire in an 1866 volume entitled A Handbook for Readers at the British Museum. You can consult this fascinating title on Google Book by clicking here, dear readers.

Solid Senders

It's been a day of solid support.

I can always rely on the readers of Ink Quest to help me out when my quest for the perfect ink or some related object of desire encounters a hitch. I suspected, then, that it wouldn't take long for yesterday's wonderings about a 'solid-ink pencil' to bring in responses from other inkthusiasts.

Within hours, honorary Penquod crew member Ken had been in touch to say that 'ink pencil', when entered into Google, led to (if I may quote his words) 'a few exemplars of a solid basis indelible ink, roughly diameter 1.5 mm. Not quite a grease or china marker, but solid ink'. And when I woke up this morning, I found an email from another honorary Penquod crew member in my inbox. I don't think that I've ever given him a pseudonym, so let's call him Guido, shall we, dear readers? Guido's email contained a link to an object called the Sanford NOBLOT indelible ink pencil.

'Inkreka!', I cried as I studied the webpage, for it seems to me that this must be what W.G. Sebald's character means by a 'solid-ink pencil'. Even if it isn't, the NOBLOT is an inktriguing object, and I will be tracking one down at the earliest possible opportunity.

Or will I? I'm sure that many inkthusiasts will already have noted that the NOBLOT is made by the giant company that is responsible for filling the world with countless monstrous rollerballs and ballpoint pens. Yes, Sanford also now owns Parker and Waterman, two long-established makers of fountain pens, but is there a single inkthusiast out there who believes that the quality of Parker and Waterman pens is higher now than it was in the pre-Sanford days?

Ink other words, I will need to tread carefully, for the NOBLOT could all too easily -- no! -- blot my copybook. Indelibly.

All that remains today, then, in this brief postscript, is for me to thank the generous and inkquisitive readers of this blog who sprang into action as soon as I wrote the words 'solid-ink pen'. For sending in solidarity news of solidity, you're solid senders. I don't know exactly what a 'solid sender' is, but it seems to be a positive thing in songs by Little Richard, John Lee Hooker, and Van Morrison. 'Solid sender' rhymes with 'surrender' in Little Richard's "Slippin' and a Slidin'", moreover, and 'surrender' ultimately has its roots in giving. Solid senders, then, are solid givers. Indelibly.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Eternal Brown; Pelikan Blue; Noodler's Nightshade.

Solid, Us?

Ink Quest: now in stereo.

I'm not referring to some bizarre modern attempt to turn this blog into a podcast, dear readers; Ink Quest will always be written words about the written word. I am, rather, alluding to the roots of the term 'stereo' in the Greek 'stereos', which means 'solid', for I find myself today in pursuit of a new object of desire, a solid object of desire.

My latest inkthusiasm emerged out of the blue last night when I was reading W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. Not too far from the beginning of the book, the mysterious Jacques Austerlitz begins to tell the narrator the story of his life. As he recounts a period spent in my native Wales, he describes how a Calvinist preacher named Emyr Elias kept a written record of his sermons in a grey notebook. At the back of the book, we're told, Elias stored a 'thin solid-ink pencil', which he would moisten with his tongue before beginning to write.

I stopped reading at this point, and not just because Austerlitz's account of the sanctimonious Emyr Elias reminded me of everything that I hate about the land of my birth, everything that led me to run to the other side of the Wye and then to the other side of the world as soon as I could. (I thought for a while that Calvinism might be of interest, but then I discovered that when Calvinists speak of total depravity, they're not describing a goal.) What on earth, I asked myself with racing heart, is a solid-ink pencil?

I'm afraid that I don't yet have an answer to this truly burning question, dear readers. Google gives just six results when the phrase 'solid-ink pencil' is entered, and none of these offers a clear description of the writing instrument used by Jacques Austerlitz. One of the webpages suggested by the search engine, however, does at least provide a hint, for it outlines a patent dating from the year 1918:

Document Number: GB Patent 120120
Publication Date: 1918-10-31
Inventors: BURGE HENRY (GB)
Abstract: Abstract of GB120120 120,120. Burge, H. Nov. 15, 1917. Reservoir nibs. -A nib d is supported in struckup portions c of a barrel a at an angle to a solid-ink pencil b so as to overlie the pointed end e of the pencil. In use, the pen is dipped into water. The pencil b is sharpened in the usual way. In place of the pencil b, a stick of solid ink covered with paper may be employed.

The timing is a little out -- Austerlitz is describing events from the mid-1940s -- but the reference in the abstract to the need to dip the writing instrument into water suggests a vague connection. I am, however, puzzled by the slippage between 'pen' and 'pencil' in the patent, and the mention of 'a stick of solid ink' still leaves me baffled.

Baffled, but curious. Yes, dear readers, I am now on the lookout for a 'solid-ink pencil'. If I have to slum it and make my own by wrapping some paper around 'a stick of solid ink', so(lid) be it.

I have set my sights on this obscure object of desire for one principal reason. I have written about my fondness for my Smythson Panama notebook in previous entries, and I even provided a photograph of the item in one of my missives about the term 'pocket book'. But, while I cherish my jotter and carry it with me whenever possible, there's one thing about it that always troubles me: like Emyr Elias' grey notebook, the Smythson Panama comes with its own special pencil, as you can see from the image posted above. It's a special special pencil, yes -- this is Smythson merchandise, dahlings -- but it's still a pencil. And a pencil is not a pen.

I've often wished, then, for a very slender, short fountain pen which could take the place of the gold Smythson pencil in my notebook, but it's simply not possible to find a model that's thin enough. I now realize, however, that I have been looking in the wrong place: what I need is a 'solid-ink pencil'.

Or do I? Could I really live with solid ink? As I noted in a recent post, and as the author of Pennington-on-the-Paper has also pointed out, one of the pleasures of ink is its feral fluidity, its unpredictable and unmasterable nature. As soon as it's out of the bottle, it can go anywhere, strike any shape, shade and smudge in any way it decides. As soon as I pick up my fountain pen and start to write, I am not in control. I, in fact, become inked over, scribbled out.

But would it be the same with a solid-ink pencil? Wouldn't part -- perhaps all -- of the pleasure be lost? I'd have to try writing with one of these enigmatic objects to be sure, of course, but I have a feeling that the solidity of the instrument and the ink would frustrate me. Where would the flow and splatter be? And what about the risk, the sense of stepping into the unknown with each stroke of the nib? Could I ever be in solidarity with solidity?

I doubt it, dear readers, but I'm still curious at least to experiment with an example of the strange writing instrument mentioned in W.G. Sebald's book. Until I get my hands on one, though, I am, to misquote Bob Dylan's 'Solid Rock', 'hangin' on to a fluid rock/Made before the foundation of the world'. I'm just not the stereo type.

Ink in fluid use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Pelikan Blue.

PS (7.30pm): While one quest begins, another finally comes to an end. Alongside the endless search for the perfect ink, Ink Quest has regularly charted my search for the perfect notebook. And now, thanks to a review at Pennington-on-the-Paper, I have discovered what I believe to be the finest notebook ever created. (For another glowing write-up, click here.) It looks like a Moleskine, but the paper is infinitely better (and, moreover, is not covered with that horrible waxy substance that makes Moleskine sketchbooks so difficult to use). And here's the best bit: the A5-sized version is available from Asda supermarkets for just £3. I have just used my new acquisition for the first time with Pelikan Blue ink and a Sailor Music nib, and the results were magnificent. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm going to be stockpiling Asda notebooks in the coming weeks. I know that several honorary Penquod crew members based in Britain -- Hugh and Eileen, for instance -- are always on the hunt for the perfect notebook, so I urge them to rush to the nearest Asda at the earliest opportunity. As long as it's not the branch near Ink Towers.

The Land of Might Be

I've a novel 'o'.

I have to suspend my carefree holiday for the rest of the week, dear readers, as the nation's 'A' level results are about to be announced, which means that the university's admissions process is poised to go into overdrive. As I am responsible for the intake of a particular degree scheme in my department, I have ahead of me several joy-filled days of number-crunching and talking to distraught parents on the telephone.

Part of this evening, therefore, has been spent choosing the inks and writing instruments for tomorrow. As usual, I have written a few sample lines with each pen, just to make sure that the nib is smooth and that the ink is flowing correctly. When I picked up my Aurora Talentum, however, something felt wrong. It wasn't the nib, and it wasn't the ink. After some inkvestigation, I realized that the problem lay in my hand. Because I have not used any of my pens very much in the last couple of weeks, my muscles -- barely existent in the first place, I should add -- have evidently wasted away, leaving me virtually incapable of writing with a heavy fountain pen such as an Aurora Talentum. My usually impeccable letters sloped and slopped across the page of my notebook. The letter 'o', above all, was suffering: it looked squashed, then stretched, then simply defeated. 'Oh, "o"!', I cried. 'Haut "o" o' ago, where did you go?' And as I stared at the chaotic page with its overload of unrecognizable o's , a phrase came to me: I've a novel 'o'.

The line, it transpires, could be my salvation, for it seems to me that I could avoid future troubles with the novel 'o' if I became Ivor Novello. Well, a certain inkarnation of Ivor Novello. Allow me to explain.

While chasing Baby Ink and three of his rampaging friends around Cardiff Bay on Sunday afternoon, I glimpsed for the first time the recently erected monument to Ivor Novello, who was born in the city in 1893. (If you ever find yourself walking along Cowbridge Road East, look out for the blue plaque on the wall of Llwyn yr Eos, where Ivor made his entrance into the world.) The marauding toddlers prevented me from taking a closer look, but the Inkette's parents and younger sister were visiting yesterday, and we found ourselves once again in the Bay. As Baby Ink was outnumbered five-to-one on this occasion, I was able to inspect the bronze monument and to take photographs, two of which are displayed at the top of this post.

I'm not usually a fan of statues, but this one is rather appealing. To begin with, its position in the Bay is somewhat curious. Ivor finds himself caught between the old Cardiff and the new Cardiff, for his makers have positioned him between the ultra-modern Millennium Centre and the nineteenth-century Pierhead building. The following picture shows the former on the left, and the red-bricked Pierhead on the right:



As Novello is usually associated with the early years of the twentieth century -- I, for instance, always think of him as the star of Downhill and The Lodger, two of Alfred Hitchcock's silent films from the 1920s -- I would have expected to see him facing the older of the two buildings between which he perches. But he's actually turning his back on the Pierhead so that he can gaze at the contemporary architecture of the Millennium Centre, which didn't open until over fifty years after his death.

At first, I found this a little unsettling. Why would Novello ogle the novel? But as I walked around the statue with my camera, I suddenly noticed something reassuring: Ivor is writing with a fountain pen.



In other words, he may be turning his back on the magnificent stylings of the past, but what he holds in his hand eternally holds him back, holds him to the days of authentic writing instruments and ink. 'There a silver lining through the dark clouds shining', as one of his most famous songs has it.

As I was admiring the monument, the Inkette's father came over to take a closer look. 'Now there was a talent', he said. 'Such a shame he went off the rails'. (This judgement reminded me of my own father's assessment of my beloved Jack Jones: 'He could have been as famous as Tom, but he couldn't stop taking liberties with the songs.')

It seems to me, however, that Ivor Novello could stop my handwriting going off the rails in the future. What I clearly need is hands made out of bronze -- hands that would never weaken and struggle to form letters with a weighty fountain pen. In the land of might be (to twist the title of another Novello composition), I might more usefully be a statue, a monument to the manyment and manumission of manual submission.

Ink in (non-bronze) hand today: Mont Blanc Racing Green; Pelikan Blue.

Hölderlink

Ink: perfectly imperfect.

I am officially on holiday, dear readers, so my days are currently spent playing in the garden or on the beach with Baby Ink, and, when he has his mid-day nap, reading for pleasure. As my job involves a great deal of reading, it's sometimes hard for me to remember that it acceptable to indulge in a book that I am neither teaching nor planning to write about. When the summer comes, when my university email account has its automatic reply activated ('The supermarket is closed. Customers are advised to shop elsewhere'), I can finally pick up a book without simultaneously picking up a Faber Castell 9000 pencil to make notes in the margins.

So far, then, I have used my holiday to read for no purpose at all:

- Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist. The Inkette recently enjoyed this, largely, I suspect, because she finds me uncannily similar to Macon Leary, the perpetually grumpy writer who refuses to lend his fountain pen to strangers on planes, who likes routine and order, who prefers isolation to company, and who hates travelling.

- Thomas Bernhard's The World-Fixer. Honorary Penquod crew member Arty (happy birthday tomorrow!) recently introduced me to Bernhard's relentlessly misanthropic ranting, and I laughed out loud on numerous occasions while reading this bitter, brutal play. (George Steiner was right, I feel, to describe Bernhard as one of the great 'virtuosos of loathing'.)

- André Gide's La Symphonie pastorale. I've had a copy of Gide's journals on my shelf for about twenty years, but I've always felt that I should read some of the author's fiction before dipping into his diaries. (In a strange twist of fate, the shop from which I now regularly buy ink and paper stands on the site of the long-deceased bookshop from where I purchased the volume.) And so, while the sun shone above me last week, I enjoyed this short tale of sin, blindness, and misery. I did worry for a moment that all of the religious elements in the tale were anticipating a miraculous redemption on the final page, but the hopelessness, I'm pleased to report, endured.

- W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. A former PhD student lent me a copy of Sebald's magnificently meandering The Rings of Saturn several years ago, and I've been planning ever since to read more by the author. Austerlitz has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for about a year, but I picked up a secondhand copy of The Emigrants for £1.25 last week, and it's rather effortlessly defeated Austerlitz and jumped the queue.

I have also been catching up with recent issues of the Times Literary Supplement, which I buy every week, but often have to file away 'for future reference'. A review in last week's paper caught my eye when it turned its attention to the ink of a mighty German poet. The piece, 'The Method in Madness', was penned by Charlie Louth, and its focus was the publication of three new volumes of the work of Friedrich Hölderlin.

I don't know a great deal about Hölderlin's writing. I own a selection of his poetry and fragments in English, into which I dipped some years ago when I was teaching and planning to write about the poems of Paul Celan, who quoted one of Hölderlin's works ('The Rhine', if I remember correctly) in his cryptic 'Tübingen, January'. Having read last week's TLS, however, I feel compelled to learn more about Hölderlin -- and, above all, to scrutinize his manuscripts. This is because Charlie Louth's article discussed in passing the editorial practices of D.E. Sattler, who is responsible for the Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, the twentieth volume of which was one of the three publications under review.

Sattler, it seems, has been paying extremely close attention to the ink with which Hölderlin prepared his manuscripts. So much so, ink fact, that 'The Archipelago' -- a poem reworked by Hölderlin some time after its original composition -- has been refashioned in the light of the way in which the ink fell onto the page:

In its new shape, the late form of the poem has twenty-four sections and 288 lines (i.e. two more sections but sixteen fewer lines) [...] In order to engineer this, Sattler makes very free with the manuscripts, reading tiny flecks and spatterings of ink, the natural concomitants of writing with a quill, as licences to insert stanza-breaks and make cuts wherever it suits him. His premiss is that no mark however slight is insignificant and that Hölderlin has in effect scrambled his manuscripts so that their true meaning will emerge only when the time is right (i.e. when Sattler appears), but, as the facsimiles show, there are in fact many blots and spots he pays no attention to.

I have not seen Hölderlin's manuscripts. Even though I cannot read a word of German (Jack Gladney, er, c'est moi!), I will be ordering a copy of volume 20 of the Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe for the university library so that I can consult the inky marks of which Louth writes, and of which Sattler makes so much. (Should a librarian comment on my apparent fluency in German when I take the book to the issue desk, I will simply reply, 'Oh, I'm not interested in the poetry; I'm just curious about the ink blots'.)

Louth's article has led me to give some thought to the way in which writing with a fountain pen often leads to slight imperfections upon the page. Word-processing software produces perfect letters upon the screen and the paper; writing with a ballpoint is a hideous experience, yes, but biros very rarely spit ink. Even the most tame fountain pen, however, occasionally conjures up a stray speck; the wild spray of Hölderlin's quill still flaps its wings faintly in the modern moment. Perhaps the nib catches and, as it comes free, flings forth a droplet. Perhaps the paper is prone to feathering and lets the inky marks spread further than their creator intended. Or perhaps the eager scribbler simply failed to let the words dry before turning the page. (The handwritten version of the entry that you are currently reading was marred in precisely this way, ink fact.)

Is it odd that none of these side-effects bothers me? Is it even stranger that I, a man obsessed by the finer points (usually at the expense of the bigger picture), actually find these little moments of imperfection pleasurable?

Perhaps not. Ink, for me, is perfectly imperfect. Its unpredictable failings are actually its successes. In a world ruled by principles of homogenization, efficient uniformity, and safe sterility, ink is the mark -- the unexpected mark -- of an alternative. I don't want my handwritten pages to resemble justified, crisp, spotless sheets of Times New Roman; that's precisely why I cling so stubbornly to my fountain pen and my splattering ink. I need to know that when I write, I don't know what will happen. The blank page sits patiently in front of me, and it will never be blank again as soon as the writing begins. (Have I stolen this from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude?) This much is certain, predictable. But what's unknown when real ink is involved is precisely how the blankness will recede, how its white challenge will come to colour. And that's the force of writing.

Walter Benjamin, whose love of stationery and fountain pens has been discussed in a previous post, famously noted that works of art lose their 'aura' in an age when they can be mechanically reproduced. Isn't the same thing happening to the word in the time of Word, when novels and poems are regularly produced without pen ever touching paper? Hölderlin's quill cast drops of ink across his poetry -- and that, for me, is its unique aura. But a twenty-first century poet who works only with a blank screen and a keyboard -- who never struggles against pen and paper -- is doomed to generate bland babble without character.





We who breathe ink know that it is aura.

Ink creating aura today: Pelikan Blue; Noodler's Nightshade.

PS (20 August): Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has proposed the following as an alternative translation of the final part of the Paul Celan poem quoted above:

Suppose
Suppose a man came,
Suppose a man came into the world today, with
the "Shiny Beard of the
Patriarchs": he would,
if he spoke at all about this
time (in history), he
would
only babble and babble
on and on.

PPS (21 August): A nice response to this post at Pennington-on-the-Paper has just come to my attention.

PPPS (2 September): My plan to obtain a copy of volume 20 of Hölderlin's Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe for the university library has been placed on höld, dear readers, for Carlos -- my eternally sceptical colleague who occasionally raises his eyebrows at these ramblings -- has vowed that he, as departmental library representative, will not, in these times of cutbacks, be approving the purchase of, as he put it, 'a book that you can't even read'.

To Be, Or Knot To Be

Ink v. tie: it's a tie.

As longtime readers of Ink Quest know, I spend a considerable amount of time every evening choosing my three inks for use in work on the following day. I don't think that I've ever reported at length, however, just how much time is also spent selecting the suit, tie, and pocket square. (All in all, it's probably fair to say that I start preparing for the next day the moment I arrive home.) I don't own as many ties and pocket squares as I do bottles of ink, but I have recently been forced to invest in a special storage box for my neck- and pocket-wear. It's not as big as the ink box, however, as you can see:



I'm fortunate, I suppose, to be part of a profession where there is no dress code. British academics can wear whatever they like to work, and it's been my experience that most men choose to dress down. (A long way down, in some cases.) In other words, I'm not required to turn up for work in a suit and tie ... which is probably why I happily turn up for work in a suit and tie.

There are several reasons why I choose to dress in this way. First, I like to have entirely separate work and non-work costumes (and I do think of them as costumes); the two worlds should never collide. Second, I am conscious of the fact that wearing a suit and tie, especially if the former is pin-striped, to work at the university is, for some, simply not the done thing. I have, for instance, been at several union meetings where the latest disgraceful behaviour by The Management has been discussed. The bosses, in such heated exchanges, are frequently denounced as 'The Suits', and I always quietly enjoy my sartorial status at such moments, even though I am not (and will never be) one of The Management, and even though I am actually an active member of the union who is constantly horrified by the workplace practices of the institution. The contrarian in me, I think, is amused by the fact that my dress code probably leads some of the other activists to think that I am a spy for The Other Side. (Whoever said that we Welsh are good at only two things -- being contrary and being melancholy -- was onto something.)

Third, I like to think that my formal approach to clothing in the workplace does not instantly mark me out as an academic to strangers. I have, in fact, been addressed as 'Mr Businessman' by 'chuggers' on several occasions, and even 'banker' once or twice. (That's what it sounded like, at least.) I have no desire to be either a businessman or a banker, but I also have no desire to be identifiable as an academic from twenty paces. Never let them know what you really are. I go to work, then, imagining that I am a member of the cast of Mad Men. Sartorially, I mean: I don't want to give you the impression that I set off for the office and call female colleagues 'Sugar', smoke a pack of filterless before 10am, neck six martinis over lunch, indulge in a spot of casual anti-Semitism, and then expect to find my food on the table when I get home. It's all about the clothes, dear readers, and I have taken the liberty, as you can see if you look at the picture at the top of this entry, of turning myself into a Mad Men character with AMC's handy new 'Mad Men Yourself' website. The second image displayed above is the Inkette's own version of herself.

Above all, though, as I have noted in previous posts, I like wearing suits and ties because I have had enough of the sloppy informality that has overtaken Western dress in recent decades. (The author of Ravens March wrote a wonderful post on this topic recently, and I've been led by a more recent entry of his to the blog of a truly stylish gent.) If taking a stance against sportswear and elasticated waists means being seen as 'a suit', that suits me just fine.

In fact, suits, ties, and pocket squares are only the beginning of my war against scruffiness: I have decided that I need a silver-handled walking cane to complete the look. There is nothing wrong with my legs, dear readers; I was simply struck by a scene in last week's Ugly Betty in which Mark effortlessly carried off a glorious jacket-tie-waistcoat-hat-buttonhole-and-cane combination:



Sadly, I fear that I will always be devoid of cane (cane unable?), for the Inkette has threatened -- no, promised, she reminds me -- divorce if I tip-tap my way down that particular route.

I was distraught, then, when I managed to ruin (or so I thought) a red silk tie last Thursday morning. I was nearly ready to leave for work. The day's three pens were safely packed in my case. My reading material for the train had been chosen. The pocket square had been selected to work in perfect harmony with the suit, the shirt, and the tie. I had shaved with my new Truefitt and Hill luxury soap and delicately sprinkled my frail wrists with Floris No. 89. (Des Esseintes -- mon sembable -- mon frère!) Things were looking good.

And then I noticed a small dark mark on my red silk tie. Instinctively, I touched it with my finger ... at which point it became apparent that the spot was actually a drop of blue ink, which instantly spread across the tie. I had about two minutes until I was due to leave the house to catch the train to work. Ignoring all advice about silk and water, I soaked up as much of the blot as I could with tissue paper, and then rubbed the affected area with a dampened cloth. The tie looked terrible, but time was against me, so I undid the knot and made my way to the station with an open-necked shirt. I felt cheap, scruffy, depraved, worthless, but there simply wasn't time to select another tie to accompany the clothing that had been chosen with such care the previous night.

Less than halfway through the journey to work, I had decided that I simply couldn't spend a day in the office without a tie, so I hatched a clever plan. Getting off the train one stop earlier than usual, I walked slowly through the city, waiting for the shops to open at 9am. I then purchased a new red silk tie, told the assistant that I wanted to wear it immediately, and used the mirror on one of the pillars in the store to check that I had tied the knot satisfactorily. (Curious aside: I have always believed that I use the Windsor knot, but recent research into alternative knots suggests otherwise. In fact, I can find no record of my preferred knot, which was taught to me by my father many years ago. The next time I am in London, I think that I will march into a shop on Jermyn Street, point to my tie, and shout, 'What the hell is this?')

When I got home that evening, I returned to the ink-stained tie, ready to throw it into the bin. I picked it up and prepared to say my farewells. But the stain was nowhere to be seen. Neither was water damage of any kind; the garment had dried and looked as good as new. My tie, dyed, had died and dried, and had been reborn.

I'm still not sure exactly what happened; as soon as the reports are back from forensics, I will let you know. But here's my theory: I've been using Waterman Florida Blue quite a lot recently, and I think I may have been wearing the red tie in question when, approximately a week earlier, I carried my vintage Parker Duofold home from work in the pocket of one of my suits. The pen in question, which is now over half a century old, does sometimes leak a little from its nib, so I suspect that a tiny drop of ink fell from the Duofold and landed upon my tie, where it somehow lay untouched for a week. Waterman Florida Blue is, of course, a fairly unsaturated and easily washable ink -- honorary Penquod crew member Eileen recently inkformed me that she'd switched to it while marking hundreds of students' essays, as more saturated colours were leaving her fingers excessively stained -- so my mopping and washing must have erased all traces of blue from the tie.

That's my theory, at least. I've tied myself in knots trying to think of another explanation for the tie that got it in the neck but refused to perish. I am now up to my neck in red silk ties, of course, but I like to think that my little inkident, my unnecessary spending of money, has helped to boost the floundering British economy a little. The Penquod: saving the world at a rate of knots.

Ink in use today: Pelikan Blue.

Converter

Call me the Great Converter.

Yes, 'Call me Ishmael' probably has the edge, but I have reasons for raising the issue of conversion today, dear readers.

I spent a good part of my morning in a meeting with a group of colleagues. At one point, we were asked by the chair of the group to divide into clusters of three for a 'breakout session'. I gritted my teeth and bit my tongue at the mention of the term 'breakout session', for it's an example of the management-speak that makes me want to break out in apocalyptic rage. As is 'sandpit' (when used to describe, as far as I can tell, some kind of collaborative workshop); I have heard this word used with great vigour in university meetings in recent times, and I always have to restrain myself from pointing out that my cats have the right idea: if Baby Ink's sandpit is left uncovered, they'll use it as a litter tray. I have yet to meet anyone who is able convincingly to explain to me what is to be gained from using such inane language in the workplace. George Orwell was wrong to imagine a future filled with monstrous 'doublethink'; 'halfthink' is closer to the mark.

For our 'breakout session', the three of us retired to the Senior Common Room, where we began to work on our allocated task. One of the two colleagues unfortunate enough to be grouped with me was the eternally sceptical Carlos, who has made appearances in Ink Quest over the years, usually sighing and raising his eyes in response to my latest fad. 'You'd better do the writing, I suppose', he said, looking with his customary raised eyebrow at the Sailor Sapporo clutched eagerly in my hand.

And write I did, dear readers. By the time we'd finished our mini-project, I'd filled two sides of A4 paper with rich Noodler's Violet ink. I placed the notepad on the table, sat back, and waited for Carlos to begin.

'What colour is it today?', he asked. 'Nibbler's Purple?'

'Noodler's, Carlos', I replied. 'Noodler's. And it's violet, not purple.'

'Looks like a funny violet to me', he said.

'Well, that might be because I didn't flush out the converter before switching from Noodler's Eternal Brown to Noodler's Violet this morning', I responded.

'The converter?', he laughed. 'What's the converter?'

By this time, I could see that my other colleague was taking an interest, so I unscrewed the barrel of the pen to show them both what a converter is.

'Oh', said Carlos. 'That's a converter. I didn't know that that is what it's called. Why is it called a converter?'

'Yes', said my other colleague. 'Why is it called a converter? What's it converting?'

'It's converting the pen', I explained.

'But from what?', asked Carlos. 'And into what?'

'Well', I continued, 'from a pen that uses cartridges to a pen that takes, er, a converter.'

'But why should cartridge be the default?', said Carlos. 'Why does the pen have to be converted from that into something else. When did cartridge become the default? And why does the converter convert the pen into a pen with a converter?'

'I don't know!', I shouted. 'Stop asking me questions! I have had enough of this sandpit!'

It was at this point that Carlos -- my colleague of ten years who has spent as long as I can remember making fun of my obsession with ink -- let something slip. He had, he said, been looking at pens in a shop recently, but hadn't been able to work out which ones were fountain pens because he'd seen the term 'converter' used, but didn't know what it meant.

Yes, dear readers, I sense that a conversion is just around the corner: Carlos has taken his first steps towards our inky faith. And I will, if he comes over to our side, be hailed as his converter.

I know very little about the phenomenon of conversion. I'm aware that it happens, but nearly forty years of stubbornly secular existence have given me very little practical information about the experience of a convert (or a converter, for that matter). Are there forms to be filled in? Does one simply knock on the door of a Catholic church, for example, and say, 'Hello, Father. I'd like to convert'? Are there exams that have to be passed? Are badges or certificates issued at the point of successful conversion? Is it possible to fail at converting? (I bet I could manage this.)

Ink fact, everything I know about conversion I know from Seinfeld. Two particular events spring to mind. In one of my very favourite episodes, Jerry takes offence when Tim Whatley converts from Catholicism to Judaism and immediately starts telling Jewish jokes. Enraged, he visits a Catholic priest in his confessional booth (is that what they're called?). 'I have a suspicion that he's converted to Judaism purely for the jokes', he fumes through the grill. 'And this offends you as a Jewish person?', asks the priest. 'No', says Jerry, 'it offends me as a comedian.' (You can watch the best bits of the episode, including Jerry's baffled engagement with Catholic rituals, by clicking here.)

And then, of course, there's the episode in which George considers converting to Latvian Orthodox to please his current girlfriend:

But these two episodes of the finest television show ever created don't really help me in my new role as converter. What is a converter supposed to do when he or she sees a victim (yes, let's be honest and use the correct language) who's ready to fall? Should I invite Carlos to a gathering of inkthusiasts in an isolated retreat, present him with a copy of Fountain Pens of the World, ask him to join in a collective reading of key passages, and refuse to let him leave until he pledges fifty per cent of his salary to the Penquod and agrees to be submerged in a symbolic bath of ink for a moment or two?

Luckily, help is at hand. I have just discovered a website entitled, quite simply, 'How to Convert People to a New Religion'. It seems to have all sorts of remarkably helpful tips to offer, so I will clearly have to study it closely before deciding how best to proceed.

But there is no time for that tonight: my new bottle of Pelikan Blue was waiting for me when I got home from work, and I would like to try it out tomorrow in my Sailor Sapporo. I am, then, about to sign off, stand up from the computer, turn around (convertere), make my way downstairs, and rinse out today's Noodler's Violet from the converter. The Great Converter's converter.

Ink in converter today: Noodler's Violet.

PS (29 July, 9.20am): I completely forgot to report in yesterday's post about my Ravens-March-inspired experiment with Parker Quink. I used it for several days in my Aurora Talentum, and I think that it's close in some ways to the colour used by Roland Barthes on his index cards, but it's a little too bright. Perhaps it needs to sit in the fierce sunlight of the south of France, where Barthes had his summer home, and fade for a while. Pelikan Blue, meanwhile, is also close (and rather appealing), but perhaps a bit too dark. (Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan has inkformed me that the formulation was changed a few years ago, so perhaps the old inkarnation would have been The One.) The search continues...

After posting yesterday's ramble, I remembered that my knowledge of conversion extends a little further than Seinfeld, but still no further than Jewish examples, for Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus contains a mischievous tale entitled 'The Conversion of the Jews', in which Ozzie, a Jewish-American schoolboy, gets into trouble for asking Rabbi Binder risky questions. The story ends with Ozzie threatening to jump from the roof of the synagogue unless the concerned Jews assembled below get down on their knees and say that they believe in Christ. I have also, since yesterday evening, received from honorary Penquod crew member Anna a link to a website that explains the process of conversion to Catholicism. I had no idea that the procedure is so complicated; it's a wonder than anyone makes it across to the other side.

PPS (30 July, 9.35am): I may have judged Pelikan Blue too quickly, for the lines that I wrote with it yesterday have faded slightly overnight, and the new colour is several steps closer to the magical blue used by Roland Barthes on his index cards. Perhaps the cards that I've seen, which must now be around thirty years old, have simply become paler as their distance from their author's hand has increased. (Barthes was hit by a van while crossing Rue des Ecoles in 1980, and died some weeks later. Is dying the key to undyeing ink, then?) Stay tuned, dear readers, for the next fascinating inkstalment of Ink Quest, in which I will report on how I have this morning ruined a silk tie with a drop of ink...

(S)hallowed

Shalom, shallowness.

A brief postscript to my last entry about superficiality, dear readers. After I typed up the ramble, I made one final attempt to become profound, but, as usual, I found only failure. Here is what happened.

Having accepted my lack of depth, I was once again on the verge of ordering a bottle of Pelikan Blue, but I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to check one of the Cross stockists in the city. And so it came to pass that I called into one of the town's well-known, long-established department stores on the way home from work this afternoon. The shop has been there since the middle of nineteenth century, so it's one of the city's true institutions. I have memories of it that stretch back as far as any of my memories: I remember getting lost in the food-hall and visiting Father Christmas in his grotto as a small child; I remember staring open-mouthed at a display of personal computers in 1982; I remember buying my first Bialetti Moka pot from the basement; I remember a tiny Baby Ink screaming for his bottle in the café upstairs while the waitress accidentally heated it to the temperature of molten lava; I remember, in the hot summer of 1990 (when my hair tumbled way down beyond my collar), busking outside the store with a friend and then putting some of our earnings towards an exotic ice cream from the food-hall; I remember smelling the heavenly Aqua di Parma Colonia for the first time in the perfume department; I remember seeking out my first silk pocket square in the vast clothing section.

And I remember the halcyon days when the pen counter was in a prominent position on the ground floor, not too far from the main entrance. Today, sadly, it's hidden away in a dark corner of the basement, next to the luggage. But I could see plenty of Cross pens in the cabinet when I arrived this afternoon, so I began to feel optimistic.

'Do you have Cross Blue ink in bottles?', I asked the man behind the counter. He looked puzzled.

'No, sir, they only ever send us the cartridges.'

'Okay, thanks', I replied, and started to walk away.

'But', the man called after me, 'I think we have a bottle of Parker ink stuffed away somewhere in the storeroom.'

'Thanks, but it's the Cross that I want', I said.

'Well, the Parker is basically the same thing', he replied. I bit my tongue and faked a smile.

'Thanks, but it's the Cross that I want', I repeated.

'But it's the same thing!', he insisted, clearly eager to make a sale.

Now, I do my best to be polite, even when faced with halfwits, and my record of the exchange with the salesman proves, your honour, that I made every effort to be civil and to walk away without causing a fuss. But the salesman's second insistence that there is no difference between Cross and Parker inks was like a red (well, washable blue) rag to a bull. I could hold back no longer.

'No', I said firmly. 'They are not the same thing at all. Cross and Pelikan are the same, but not Cross and Parker. They're totally different. I don't want Parker; I want Cross.' I very nearly added, 'Here, let me peel your name off your badge and write '"Idiot" on there. It's the same thing!', but I decided that I had said enough. I left in a huff, and I have added the shop to my list of local boycotted businesses. (It's already quite a long list. The Inkette tells me that I will have nowhere left to go before too long.)

I have had no choice, then, dear readers, but to place an online order for Pelikan Blue. I deeply regret to inkform you that my attempt at depth ran aground in shallow waters. The Penquod will continue to celebrate the inkconsequential, to hallow all that is shallow.

Ink in use today: Waterman Florida Blue.

--

PS (23 July, 9.25am): I have received a sign from an unholy book to confirm that all attempts to embrace the laudable ideology of depth should be abandoned. I've been rereading Philip Roth's furious Sabbath's Theater this week, and I stumbled across the following sentences late last night: 'Fuck the laudable ideologies. Shallow, shallow, shallow!' These, of course, are the words of Mickey Sabbath, perhaps the most monstrous creation in Western literature. And I'm making them my mantra. Sounds about right.

PPS (23 July, 8.50pm): It has come to my attention that the author of Ravens March has suggested that I try Parker Quink Blue and Herbin Bleu Myosotis in my quest to find a colour that matches the ink found on Roland Barthes' index cards. I'm touched that he's given my deranged obsession such careful thought, and his post has reminded me that I actually have some Quink cartridges that will fit my Aurora Talentum. (I have tried the Herbin ink mentioned, but it's not, sadly, quite right.) I will, therefore, be à la recherche de Roland perdu tomorrow, Quink in hand.

Shallow Ends?

I'm a sick man ... I'm a malicious man. An unattractive man, I am. Above all, though, I'm a superficial man.

But this is hardly news for regular readers of Ink Quest, a blog which has rambled and ranted for nearly four years about only the most trivial, shallow, and superficial matters. War rages in the Middle East -- and I'm worrying about my choice of ink for the day. Swine flu sweeps across the globe -- and I'm wondering if I can possibly cut my usual selection of three pens for my briefcase down to two. The world's economies are on the verge of collapse -- and I'm trying to decide if I want to shave with Truefitt and Hill or Aqua di Parma cream. A scandal about expenses claimed by British MPs erupts and threatens to bring down the government -- and I'm busy comparing Smythson paper to Clairefontaine. The fortieth anniversary of the Moon landing is being celebrated -- and I'm experimenting with new folds for pocket squares. A line from Jean Baudrillard's Cool Memories has always struck a chord with me:

The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking on cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature.

Yes, dear readers, I am almost certainly the most fickle, superficial person on the planet. I am, that is to say, superfickle. Being deep is deeply overrated, I feel. I'm interested only in shallow matters, and I become bored very easily. What seems like the perfect blue ink on Monday is forgotten about by Tuesday. The pen to end all pens slips out of circulation and goes into storage moments after my initial cries of 'This is The One' have finished echoing around Ink Towers. I fill my life with objects ... and then feel the need to fill the growing emptiness with yet more acquisitions.

But I have today taken the first steps towards recovery, towards depth, towards an emergence from the shallow end of the pool. Allow me to offer an in-depth explanation. I have been eyeing up a bottle of Pelikan Blue ink for several weeks, partly because I think that it might be fairly close in colour to the delightful blue used by Roland Barthes on his index cards. The only problem has been that nowhere near Ink Towers stocks Pelikan products, so an internet purchase has been hovering in the wings. I have nothing against buying ink online -- it's the only option in the UK where brands such as Noodler's and Private Reserve are concerned, ink fact -- but I do like to obtain my objects of desire from real-world shops whenever possible. This isn't because I like the human interaction (I don't); it's merely because I prefer to be able to select a precise bottle from the shelf, to feel its box or label before I make my way to the till, and so on.

I was, then, on the verge of placing an online order for Pelikan Blue when I discovered that Cross Blue is actually Pelikan Blue in different packaging. While Pelikan products are fairly rare in British shops, Cross pens and inks are easy to find. I could, I suddenly realized, abandon the internet order for Pelikan Blue and simply pick up a bottle of Cross ink on my way home from work one afternoon. But this glimmer of hope soon faded, for my very next thought was that I find Cross packaging ugly. I only have to glance at it, ink fact, to feel rather cross.

This, of course, was a perfect example of my superficiality. Pelikan ink and Cross ink are, it seems, exactly the same, but I found myself repelled by the latter purely because of the design of the label and the box. By way of contrast, I find the Pelikan packaging deeply attractive (but not, perhaps, quite as delicious as the old design). And there's something to be said for the superiority of the 'k' of 'Pelikan' to the 'C' of 'Cross'. They sound the same, yes, but I find the appearance of the 'k' much more endearing. (See what I mean about the endless depths of my shallowness?) Maybe it's a matter of un-Celtic novelty: Welsh has no 'k' (but it does have an 'f' that sounds like the English 'v', a 'u' that sounds like 'ee', and a 'll' that sounds like nothing that exists in English).

Yesterday afternoon, then, I was poised to place an online order for Pelikan Blue; Cross had apparently been crossed off my list. But just I was about to complete the transaction, I experienced what I believe is known as 'a moment of clarity'. Why, I suddenly asked myself, was I being so superficial? Why was I letting the appearance of a bottle determine my choice of ink? Why couldn't I simply buy a bottle of Cross Blue and focus on what really matters: the colour of the ink itself?

The clouds had parted. I had seen the light. My days of shallowness had come to an end. I switched off my computer and left work with one thing on my mind: Cross Blue. I marched into the nearest Cross stockist and asked for a bottle. 'I'm sorry, sir, but we only sell the cartridges', I was informed. Undeterred, I made my way to another stationery outlet, where I was told the same thing. I came out from a further shop with empty hands. By this point, having travelled the three ways (trivium), I could think of nowhere else to try in the city. I drifted home in defeat, and I am about to place an online order for Pelikan Blue.

I take this inkident as confirmation of two things. First, the universe is persecuting me. I have suspected this on many occasions in the past, but the sudden mysterious unavailability of bottled Cross ink in a major British city can only mean that the world really is set against me. It won't even let me buy something that I always said I didn't want. Second, and more important, it's clear that I am not meant to be a profound, well-rounded, rational individual. The universe that is conspiring against me has also decided that I am destined to be superficial and thoroughly irrational. My dramatic attempt to abandon my life of surfaces fell at the first hurdle; I have no choice but to embrace my fate, my trivial essence.

I tried my best, dear readers, to steer the Penquod into deeper waters, but it's clear that the shallow bay is what forever I shall obey.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray; Herbin Café des Îles.

Deskatology

Have desk, will travel.

I have noted in previous posts how much I hate travelling. Some in my profession like nothing better than jetting around the world to an endless series of academic conferences, but I keep that particular side of the job to a bare minimum. (My decision about whether or not to accept an invitation to speak somewhere depends very much upon the number of pen shops in the city in question. I have recently turned down three offers because there appeared to be no stockists of ink in the area.) In fact, my passport expired in January, and I have yet to renew it. Perhaps I never will, for I have been quietly enjoying life without the ability to engage in tourism (or what Don DeLillo has accurately called 'the march of stupidity').

And it's good to know that I'm not alone. Honorary Penquod crew member Arty recently reminded me about Joris-Karl Huysmans' À Rebours (usually known in English as Against Nature). I read the book as an undergraduate nearly twenty years ago, but I'd somehow forgotten all about it until Arty commented upon the relentless misanthropy of its protagonist, Des Esseintes. I revisited the tale a couple of days ago, then, and I was stunned to find that À Rebours, which I read and paid little attention to as an optimistic youth, is essentially (Esseintes-ially?) the biography of the thirty-something moi. Here's what I mean: the feeble, neurotic, degenerate Des Esseintes decides that he has had enough of human society (or, as he puts it, 'the incessant deluge of human stupidity'), and his 'contempt for humanity' leads him to abandon Paris for the isolation of a villa above Fontenay-aux-Roses. Once installed in his retreat, he devotes himself to what can only be called a series of decadent aesthetic potterings. One chapter, for instance, describes how he sits at his dressing-room table and experiments with different perfumes, while we're told at another point that his residence contains 'a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks was displayed in the form of a fan'. He likes ink, too, for his garden features an 'ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink', and one of his luxurious books has been 'printed for him in bishop's-purple ink'. As I reread Huysmans' words, I felt as if I were looking in a mirror (handcrafted in the East and carried by servants in a mink-lined case across the world to Ink Towers, of course).

But it was the hilarious chapter on tourism that really appealed to me. Not long after he has nearly killed himself with his perfumes, Des Esseintes decides that he will come out of isolation and travel to London. His servants pack his bags, and he sets off in 'a mottled check [suit] in mouse grey and lava grey, a pair of laced ankle-boots, a little bowler hat and a faux-blue Inverness cape'. (No pocket square, monsieur? You disappoint me.) By the time he gets to Paris, it is pouring: 'The appalling weather struck him as an instalment of English life paid to him on account in Paris'. He decides to have something to eat before continuing with his voyage, but he then finds that his stomach is too full to allow him to move. He tries to rouse himself with a brandy, but his desire to travel begins to wane. 'After all', we're told, 'what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair?' He still has time to catch his train, however, and he makes one last effort to drive himself onwards. He fails. '"If I went now", he said to himself, "I should have to dash up to the barriers and hustle the porters along with my luggage. What a tiresome business it would be!"' Defeated, he returns to his retreat, 'feeling all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous journey'.

But perhaps my hatred of travel is on the verge of disappearing. Perhaps I am about to become a vibrant, enthusiastic, sociable globe-trotter. I say this because I noticed something rather intriguing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement. In the corner of one of the classified pages, I spotted an advertisement for something called 'The Travelling-Desk'. (Don't ask me why it's hyphenated. Is the idea that the object allows its owner to keep everything under one -- hupo hen -- lid?) This delightful creation is a little difficult to deskribe, so I will simply direct readers to the company's website, where many photographs may be deskried. Go and have a look; I'll wait here at my desk...

Rather attractive, don't you think? I am drawn to the Travelling-Desk for a couple of reasons. First, it reminds me of the desks with which the classrooms of my junior school were equipped. Even though it was the late 1970s/early 1980s, and even though we were taught to write with ballpoint pens, we sat at old-fashioned desks with sloped lids and inkwells. (Well, I say 'inkwells', but the reality was that most of the plastic containers had been stolen, leaving gaping holes in the corners of the desks. Those lucky enough to have an original inkwell still in place often found that the object in question was caught up in a game of 'How High Can You Go?', in which the lid was lifted and a hand placed in the small gap beneath the base of the inkwell. The trick was then to slam your palm upwards to see how high the inkwell would fly.) A day did not pass without someone finding his or her fingers slammed beneath a lid. On one infamous occasion, the teacher spotted smoke emerging from the hole in the corner of one boy's desk. (His name was Royston, I think.) We were about to flee for our lives when it was discovered that he had secreted a plastic 'smoking monkey' among his books.

Beyond this nostalgia, though, I am drawn to the Travelling-Desk because it would, I feel, allow me to counter the trauma of travel with a properly equipped set of writing materials. I can imagine the scene:

'Would passengers please note that mobile telephones and other electronic devices are not to be used during the flight, as they may interfere with the plane's navigation system. Sir?'
'How about inkwells and dip pens?'
'Excuse me?'
'How about inkwells and dip pens? Am I allowed to get my Travelling-Desk out of the overhead locker, uncork the ink, and catch up on some correspondence?'
'Were you the passenger who was detained for an hour by security after an argument over whether or not a quill could be used to hijack a plane?'
'Yes. You could say that feathers were ruffled.' [Riotous laughter from other passengers.]
'And do I take it from your stained mouth that you were required to drink some of your ink at the checkpoint to prove that it wasn't an explosive substance?'
'No, that wasn't me. I just got a bit thirsty while we were waiting to leave the terminal.'
'Won't your Travelling-Desk get in the way when we serve you your in-flight meal?'
'Not at all. It's sushi today, isn't it?'
'Indeed.'
'Excellent. I have a spare inkwell with me for the soy. And these two dip pens convert into chopsticks.'
'But what about the sloped lid? Won't your food slide off it?'
'Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Do you think you could ask the captain to dip the nose of the plane by about 45 degrees during lunch? That ought to level things out.'

The word 'desk' apparently has its roots in 'discus', the Latin word for 'disc'. I don't know the reason for this, though. Did the Romans only write at round desks? Is a desk with corners a modern phenomenon? Or did the modern sport of discus-throwing emerge from an ancient ritual in which centurions proved their strength by hurling desks across a field? I will have to look into matters, dear readers. Ink fact, I hereby announce the creation of the new academic discipline (deskipline?) of deskatology. It will be the discipline to end all disciplines, no doubt.

It seems, then, that my desklike of travelling might have reached the end of the road. The Travelling-Desk has the potential to close the lid on a difficult chapter of my life. Je serai libéré d'esklavage. Future generations of students studying deskatology will find the following question upon their examination papers:

Disgust is disguised by a discus. Discuss.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray; Waterman Florida Blue.

PS: I still haven't been able to find time to get to the university library to run the nineteenth-century history of ink mentioned in my last couple of posts through the microfilm machine. I am now aiming to do this on Friday.

PPS (2.30pm): More information about the Travelling-Desk has just landed upon my, er, desk. Thanks to the Paris-based honorary Penquod member without a pseudonym -- as I have said in previous posts, elle n'est pas Trisha -- I can report that the object of desire is also available from Pen and Co. I applaud a particular line in the company's publicity: 'A l'heure du Blackberry et de l'iPhone ... voici un retour dans le temps agréable'. (I suppose that a rough translation of that could be: 'In the era of the Blackberry and the iPhone ... here is a pleasant trip down memory lane').

Hunting Done

Quest over. Hunting done.

I'm not referring to the search for the perfect ink, dear readers; that, no doubt, will continue until I breathe my last and go to the great inkwell in the sky. I am, rather, speaking of my search for a new career. Yes, dear readers, I have finally discovered my calling.

While doing some research on ink a few weeks ago, I came across a reference to a short piece by Charles A. Owen, Jr., published in the Chaucer Newsletter in 1980. It was the title that caught my eye: 'A Note on the Ink in Some Chaucer Manuscripts'. Inktrigued, I requested a copy of the article, and it arrived in an envelope from the University of Liverpool a couple of days ago.

Owen's account is no longer than half a page, but it describes in fascinating detail his scrutiny of the ink used in various manuscripts of Chaucer's work. Here's his magnificent inkipit:

One of the surprises I experienced working on the Ellesmere manuscript at the Huntington Library this past January was the color of the ink. The description in Manly-Rickert, "Uniform dark brown" (I, 148), hardly does justice to the actuality.

The author proceeds to describe how Chaucer manuscripts are characterised by 'constant variation in the color of the ink', how this variation might have been a deliberate strategy on the part of the scribes, and then concludes by calling for 'a more accurate descriptive set of terms' to which scholars could turn when discussing fluctuations in the colour of ink used in manuscripts.

Ink Towers is a long way from the Huntington Library (which lies in San Marino, California). And, although some of my colleagues have devoted decades of their lives to Chaucer, I have not read a single word of his work. (I went to the house of sceptical colleague Carlos for lunch yesterday, in fact, and another colleague who was there pointed at an elegant edition of Chaucer's work on the bookshelf while Carlos was in the kitchen and said, 'I bet that's not in your bookcase'.) But it's clear to me that I need to reinvent myself as a Chaucerian and take up residence in the Huntington, where I will, nearly thirty years after Charles A. Owen called for the development of a special inky vocabulary, be in charge of creating the new lexinkon.

The only problem is that I simply don't know where to begin. As I have noted in previous posts, I don't actually know anything about anything, and my entire career in academia has been an act of deception. But I'm particularly helpless when it comes to fourteenth-century English literature. Yes, there are modern translations of Chaucer's work, but contemporary English won't be of much help if I'm going to be working with texts such as the fifteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript.

But perhaps there's a solution. Perhaps my role at the Huntington would simply be to describe in detail the ink used in the texts. Perhaps, that is to say, I would need to pay no attention whatever to the meaning of the words upon the page; I'd simply be developing a lexinkon to describe how they look. This would be literature not as the expression of the human spirit, of eternal truths, but literature as a series of pretty colours upon the page.

All surface and no depth, in other words. A complete lack of content. Shallow aestheticism. Mindless superficiality. I was born for this job. ('I can do this [...] I've been preparing for this moment my entire life.') Ink Quest: putting the cant back in the Canterbury Tales.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray.

PS: I have not yet had chance to consult the nineteenth-century history of ink to which I referred in my previous post. I will take it with me to the Huntington and, I hope, report back in detail next week.

PPS (3.50pm): I can't let the day pass without praising the author of Ravens March for his bold decision to purchase a pocket protector for his fountain pens (and for his pockets, moreover). 'I have joined the ranks of the most risible sort of geek', he writes. I can't think of a better place to be.

PPPS (3.55pm): I also feel compelled to direct readers of Ink Quest to a delightful tribute to Michael Jackson penned by ink-loving West Highland Terrier Grover J. Askins on his blog, Hudographies. I can't claim to have been a fan of Michael Jackson, but Grover's words are a joy to read.

1776 and All That

Ink Quest will return with a full-length missive at some point next week, dear readers, partly because I will by then have had time to read the history of ink written in the 1880s and sent to me on microfilm by the British Library. (What secrets wait within? Will the narrative be as thrilling as that of David N. Carvalho's Forty Centuries of Ink? Will I embarrass myself yet again in the university library when I try to use the microfilm reader?)

I have put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard this evening, though, because it occurred to me at about 6pm that today, 4 July, is a rather significant date for Ink Quest's many American readers. I have always been a lover of the United States, partly because I spent a year of my life in Northern California, and partly because I am constantly campaigning for independence from the United Kingdom. (I still want to live here; I just don't want to be a citizen or, worse still, a subject.)

With angle of palm duly adjusted, I salute you all, then, dear American readers, whether you are (like, say, honorary Penquod crew members Stefan, Gerry, and Anna) currently in your homeland or (like Susie and Noelle, for example) exiled on this side of the Atlantic. And I urge all of Ink Quest's readers to purchase a new bottle of ink today. (I'm about to order some Pelikan Blue, hoping that it will look similar to the ink used by Roland Barthes on his index cards.) Together we can turn Independence Day into Ink-Dependence Day:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dismiss the disposable ballpoints which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We inkthusiasts hold these truths to be self-evident, that all users of fountain pens are created equal, that they are endowed by the Mighty Ink with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of the Perfect Colour.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to celebrate Independence Day and the first ever Inkdependence Day with a thoroughly American bowl of Linguine al limone. (Actually, the recipe does have an American influence, for I have stolen a little trick from Silvano Marchetto, who runs New York's Da Silvano: dropping the lemon halves into the water with the pasta while it cooks.) Maybe I'll add a drop or two of Omas Sepia and turn into Linkuine al limone ... or should I use penne?

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.

What's the Use?

This blog is useless.

I say this partly because I have apparently managed to reduce its number of readers by around 30 per cent in the last week or so. (Only another 70 per cent to go! Encore un effort!) What seems like a fall in readership may simply be Sitemeter's inability to detect those who read Ink Quest via one of the new feeds that I recently added to the very bottom of the page. Alternatively, the slump might have occurred because I have, in my endless drive towards invisibility, deleted my Blogger profile, which used to list various fascinating facts about me. I understand from my puzzled reading of anthropological textbooks that many human beings like to know things about each other in order that they may develop connections and form social groups, so perhaps my removing the personal details has alienated certain readers. (As a colleague recently said to me, shortly after I had burned several professional bridges in the course of an ordinary afternoon at the office, 'There won't be anyone left for you to alienate before long'.) Or perhaps people have simply started to lose inkterest in the voyages of the Penquod. They're a touch repetitive, after all. (Man is still looking for the perfect ink. Man complains about something. Man claims that the universe is persecuting him. Man toys with some inane puns.)

But I also note the uselessness of Ink Quest for another reason. Ink fact, I want defiantly to celebrate its useless existence.

One particular incident has led me to this point. Yesterday morning, in the blazing sunshine, I stood with Baby Ink on the beach near Ink Towers and spent about half an hour throwing stones into the water. He may be small, but he's an unstoppable machine when it comes to the casting of pebbles into the waves. After about twenty minutes, it occurred to me that what we were doing was, while amusing, utterly devoid of purpose. Our throwing of stones had no aim (a bit like my throwing of stones, come to think of it), no planned outcome, no use. We were throwing stones ... for the sake of throwing stones. ('It ain't why ... it just is', as Van Morrison once sang.)

Contemporary English uses 'useless' in an almost exclusively negative sense. If something is 'useless', it's a failure to be ignored and rejected. And we live in a world, of course, that's dominated by principles of efficiency and measurability. In British higher education, for instance, it's perfectly common to find that every course (or 'module', as they're usually now called) has a set of 'learning outcomes'. For every module that I teach, in other words, I have to give an account of the outcome before the course has even begun. Students, if I may lapse into the future anterior, must know what will have happened and what they will have learned before the meeting of the first class. I am simply not allowed to say 'Well, we will read some books, think, talk, write, and see where we end up'. There is no space for such cavalier experimentation, for not knowing the outcome in advance would risk inefficiency. Everything must be predicted, predictable, measurable, measured. I have to know in advance what use my teaching will be, what it will add to students' 'transferable skills'; I can't risk being useless by aiming to read for the sake of reading, for the sake of seeing where, if anywhere, the words take us.

When I started teaching in higher education a decade ago, I tried to preserve traces of experimentation, of unpredictability, in my courses. I would, for instance, regularly devise learning outcomes to which I then paid no attention. No one seemed to notice, and the students produced some wonderfully original work. But now, ten years on, I have given up on ever seeing British higher education rise above the level of bland mediocracy. The culture of efficiency and measurability is at work on every possible level, and it's become impossible to see a light on the horizon. The idiots have won. What once seemed like a vocation has become a job to me -- I go in at 9am, do the act, whinge, gossip, and go home at 5pm -- and I'm just counting down the days to retirement in 2030-something. I teach my courses and I write my books like I stacked apples as a sixteen-year-old weekend employee of Safeway: efficiently, consistently, and with my mind somewhere else.

In all of this, ink -- and, by extension, Ink Quest -- stands out as something majestically useless. The endless hours I spend -- no, waste -- choosing a colour with which to write, looking at samples online, or wandering around cities in search of the perfect shade are a defiant antidote to the daily demands of efficiency and predictability. Yes, ink has a use -- it allows us to write -- but when it's taken to the level found here or at a forum such as the Fountain Pen Network, it enters the realm of the wholly unnecessary, the staggeringly useless. An inkthusiast doesn't need that forty-fifth blue or every single colour made by a particular manufacturer; the bottles become increasingly useless as they amass, ink fact, and it's not common for a lover of ink to use a colour just once before moving on to something new, thus rendering the bottle quite literally useless.

But I don't see this as anything to worry about. Ink fact, I think that it's time to reclaim the word 'useless' from those who wield it only as an insult. (I caused a minor controversy when I argued some months ago that lovers of fountain pens should embrace all charges of pretentiousness; I dread to think, then, what readers will make of my suggestion that they celebrate the uselessness of their ink.) In a world where bland efficiency rules and where maximizing the input-output ratio is the name of the game, ink stands -- nay, casually leans -- as a magnificent sign of resistance. Our messing around with colours, our idle mixing of shades in the hope that the perfect tint will emerge, our sending of letters that say nothing but 'This is Omas Sepia. One of the nicest browns around, I think', our pausing at the end of a page to let the ink dry for a precious few seconds -- all of these things are a stubborn blot on the landscape over which efficiency and measurability loom. When we write or perhaps simply doodle, our pens are spokes in the wheels of mediocracy. That minute spent refilling a pen while a tedious form from the university bureaucrats awaits completion is a minute reclaimed from banality. A minor victory in a war that we've always already lost.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, whose La Condition postmoderne foresaw in 1979 what principles of efficiency would do to higher education, once remarked that 'In a world where success means gaining time, thinking has a single, but irredeemable, fault: it is a waste of time'. (He's describing, not endorsing, that opinion, of course, and much of his work passionately defends experimentation and uselessness in the face of a creeping banality.) I could waste hours of your time celebrating the marvels of Lyotard's work, but you have ink to play with, dear readers. I will, then, simply say this: in a world where success means gaining time, inking has a single, but irredeemable fault: it is a waste of time. And that's why it matters. Ink for all you are worth. Waste your time and others'.

Don't use less; use more, useless.

Inks in useless use today: Noodler's Walnut; Waterman Florida Blue.

Cuff Inks

An off-the-cuff post on the cuff.

I left you in a state of suspense earlier this week, dear readers, as I reported that I was about to leave for my annual external examining trip to an unidentified university in the north of England. More specifinkally, I reported that I was trying to choose the ink that I would take with me for the signing of the forms that announce students' degree results.

I have now returned to Ink Towers, and I can reveal that I ended up selecting Noodler's Walnut. For the reasons outlined in my previous missive, I gave serious thought to Omas Sepia -- the Great Brown Whale -- but I eventually settled upon Walnut because it seemed wrong to break the Noodler's run. (Students graduating in 2007 saw their results endorsed by me in Noodler's Eternal Brown, while last year's group were treated to Noodler's Sequoia. 'Mum, dad, I got the result I wanted ... but forget about that. You should have seen the ink that the external examiner used to sign the sheets!')

Yesterday morning, then, after an evening in which my host department drank so much wine with dinner that one member of staff fell down -- or possibly up; no reliable witness could be found -- some stairs and was last seen on his way to hospital (my teetotalism seems to baffle and amuse them), we assembled for the annual ritual of determining degree classifications and, more importantly, signing the paperwork. At the end of the meeting, the departmental secretary presented me with the various pieces of paper needing my signature. I uncapped my Sailor Sapporo and unleashed the lovely dark brown ink. 'Ah', she said, 'now I remember. You use those funny inks'. She looked down at my scrawl. 'It doesn't seem to be drying', she noted.

She was right. The university in question is clearly equipped with the paper least receptive to Noodler's Walnut. It didn't look particularly shiny, but something about it was refusing to allow the ink to dry properly. 'Have you got any blotting paper with you?', asked the secretary. 'I'm afraid not', I replied, making a mental note to spend some of my examining fee on an Herbin rocker blotter for use at next year's meeting.

At this point, one of the professors in the department, who's a good friend of mine, came over to see what was happening and how I had managed to bring the entire end-of-year examining process to a halt. 'Oh, of course', he sighed. 'You and your bloody ink fetish.' 'You knew all about it when you appointed me', I replied. 'I have always been open and honest about my perverse practices. Besides, what kind of shambolic department are you running here? Where's your supply of blotting paper?'

'I think that we stopped using it in about 1964', he said. 'But I have an idea', he then added, looking sceptically at my French cuffs. (He had told me when I arrived that I was overdressed for the occasion.) 'Why don't you just use your flashy cuffs to soak up the excess ink?'

In the end, the secretary managed to dry the ink by waving the sheets in the air for a minute or two. My cuffs, that is to say, escaped unscathed. But my friend's remark started me thinking, and I spent the four-hour train journey home yesterday afternoon plotting -- nay, blotting -- the launch of a range of shirts for users of real ink, for inkthusiasts. These garments will still have double cuffs, which are one of life's absolute essentials, but, while most of each shirt will be made of luxurious cotton, the cuffs themselves will be formed from multiple layers of blotting paper. When the wearer has, say, signed his or her name (yes, dear readers, my clothing range will be available for both sexes), a cuff may be gently pressed against the ink. The marked layer of blotting paper can then be peeled away and discarded, leaving the inkthusiast with an immaculate cuff.

I must leave you now, dear readers, for I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work on the finer points of my design for the cuff blotter. There are, after all, complicated matters of chemise-try to consider. I only hope that my great scheme does not end in disaster and blot my cuffybook. I must be sure not to lose my inkvestors' money; I don't need even more people getting shirty with me.

Ink awaiting cuff today: Noodler's Walnut.

Ponderink

I lift a mode of title from Raven's March; I hope its crew will take it as an homage rather than a liberty.

Today's post will be brief, dear readers, and it is mainly intended to signal that Ink Quest will fall silent until at least the end of the week, as the Penquod is about to make its annual journey to an unnamed university in the north of England for external examining duties.

As the final part of this ritual involves my signing certificates that confirm students' final degree results, I always spend the days before my departure wondering about -- ponderink -- the colour of ink with which I will make my official mark. Two years ago it was Noodler's Eternal Brown; last year it was Noodler's Sequoia. What will it be this time around?

It would be a shame to break the Noodler's run and to ruin an inky trinity, but I'm currently considering Omas Sepia. I haven't written with this particular colour for a while, but longtime readers of this blog will know that it was the Great Brown Whale after which I chased for many months in the early days of Ink Quest. I still think it's one of the most elegant browns available, but I seem to have drifted away from it in recent times. Perhaps it's time for a renaissance.

I say that partly because I found my faith in another love restored last night. I have noted in many previous posts how Van Morrison is, along with Bob Dylan, one of my musical heroes. If I had to take just one album with me to a desert island, it would be Veedon Fleece. I've seen Morrison play live on probably something like 25 occasions, but I stopped going to his concerts in 2003. The recent albums were uninteresting, and the live performances had lost their magic. I decided to call it a day, rely upon the memories, and take refuge in the earlier recorded work.

After a break of six years, however, I went to see him play in Cardiff's Millennium Centre last night. Old friend Nixon, with whom I've seen Morrison on several glorious occasions, came over from London for the event, and, after some waterfront snacking, we took our seats and hoped for the best. I was expecting to be disappointed, but I soon found my breath taken away. The magic was back. Songs rarely performed live were unfurled. I think I'm right in saying that 'Fair Play' was played for only the second time since it was first recorded for Veedon Fleece. And I had barely recovered from the shock of hearing that song when we were treated to a sublime verson of 'In the Garden', during which Van faded the band out until all we could really hear was his acoustic guitar. He then whispered 'And your holy guardian angel' for what seemed like several minutes. That alone would have been enough to keep me happy for a lifetime, but then 'Streets of Arklow', also from Veedon Fleece, began. I've been waiting to hear this performed live for about eighteen years. Nixon, who knew this, glanced over and smiled. I nodded in shivered awe.

Before this becomes an issue of Rolling Stone, let's get back to ink, to ponderink. It seems only appropriate that, having refound my faith in Van Morrison, I should allow the Great Brown Whale back into my life and my pen. No guru, no method, no teacher; just Omas Sepia and a sense of wonder. Ink the garden.

Ink in use today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Reflections

What do you see in ink?

I mean that literally, dear readers. What do you see when you gaze into a bottle or a pool of ink?

In 'The Mirror of Ink', one of the tales in Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, it is told that Yakub the Afflicted, a tyrannical governor of the Sudan in the mid-nineteenth century, was shown miraculous visions by a sorcerer named Abderramen al-Masmudi. More specifically, those visions appeared in a pool of ink poured into Yakub's right palm, which had first been adorned with 'a magic square'. Initially, what Yakub sees is fairly untroubling: horses run through green fields, for instance. But soon a mysterious figure known as the Masked One begins to haunt the visions. Because his face is hidden behind a veil, his precise identity remains unknown.

On the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmajat, however, something rather dramatic happens. As usual, Abderramen pours the ink into Yakub's palm. Yakub asks the sorcerer to show him 'a just and irrevocable punishment'. In the ink, a condemned man is brought forward for execution. It is the Masked One. The tyrant demands that the veil be removed, and 'the horrified eyes of Yakub at last saw the visage -- which was his own face'. He watches as, in the scene played out in the pool of ink, the sword falls upon his own neck. At this very moment, reports the narrator, the real Yakub 'moaned and cried out in a voice that inspired no pity in me, and fell to the floor, dead'.

Borges' brief narrative is attributed to Richard Burton's The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, but you will not find it there. Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which dates from 1837, has something that loosely resembles the tale, but it's far from a perfect fit. I'd always assumed, then, that Borges was, as he so often does, inkventing bibliographical sources and passing off fantastic fiction for fact. But a chance discovery has led me to believe that ink-gazing is more than imaginary.

For reasons that are now lost in mystery, I stumbled this week across an article published in 1916 in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Its author is William H. Worrell -- the two syllables of the surname and the golden 'or' after the initial consonant curiously conjure up 'Borges' -- and the title of the piece is 'Ink, Oil and Mirror Gazing Ceremonies in Modern Egypt'. This fascinating text explains at length how the practice of seeing visions in ink (or some other suitable liquid, such as olive oil) was well known in Egypt across many centuries. (Worrell's article is nearly a century old now, of course; does the ritual still exist?)

At one point, he describes witnessing an inky seance in Cairo in March 1913. A magician sits with a young boy in front of him. Verses from the Qur'ân are written upon a piece of paper and placed beneath the boy's cap. The smell of burning coriander and resin fills the room, and sections of the holy book are read aloud. The magician knocks on the floor numerous times. A seal is drawn upon the boy's palm, and his hand is held over the smoke until the ink is dry. A pool of fresh ink is created in the child's palm. Smoke is fanned into his face, and the following conversation takes place:

Magician: See the ocean! Do you see a ship?
Boy: Yes.
After questions about the appearance of the ship.
Boy: I see a man sitting upon a chair.
Magician: Salute him.
Boy: Salâm 'alêkum!
After a pause.
Boy: I see a white appearance.
Magician: Say 'Bring coffee, O king!'
Magician: Has he drunk?
Boy: Yes.

Numerous readers of Ink Quest have collections of ink so vast that no bottle will ever be drained. Some, I know, have so many shades that they are unable to remember, when asked, if they own a particular colour. In short, inkthusiasts often have more ink than they can shake a magician's stick at. It sits there in bottles, pooling, reflecting, signifying nothing.

On reflection, then, it seems to me that we should take a leaf out of Borges' book and start looking for visions in our ink. The practice, I learnt from Worrell's article, actually has a name: scrying. The essay also reproduces the magic seal drawn in the palm of the boy who saw the ship, so we have all that we need.



Hold out your hand. Draw the magic symbol. Create a pool of ink in your palm. Gaze deeply into it.

- Do you see a ship?
- Yes. It has Penquod written on the side.
- What else do you see?
- I see a solitary figure on the deck. He looks grumpy.
- Salute him.
- I would, but he's shouting 'Go away and leave me alone'.
- Say 'Bring coffee, O king!' ... Has he drunk?
- No, he's spat it out and said that he doesn't drink instant. I think he's now shouting 'It's French Roast or nothing!'.
- We've conjured up a monster, a vile demon. Let the ink fall from your palm at once, child. Look away.

Yes, dear readers, ink-gazing has its risks. You have been warned. If you see visions that disturb you, don't come scrying to me.

Inks in palm today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil; Herbin Bleu Nuit.

Cover Story

Is there a secular way to say 'Hallelujah!'?

I ask because I've just heard a fascinating programme all about the word 'Hallelujah' on BBC Radio 4. Being devoutly secular, I usually piously switch off anything with a religious theme, but this particular broadcast was billed as a purely historical/cultural analysis of the word in question, so I decided to stick with it. I nearly lost faith when various hymns were played, but salvation came when the dicussion turned to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Jeff Buckley's famous cover version of the song.

I know that what I'm about to confess is sacrilegious, but what the hell: I really don't care much for Leonard Cohen's work. Actually, that's not quite accurate. I think that he's written some wonderful songs, but I simply don't like the way that he arranges and performs them. His voice, above all, does absolutely nothing for me. (This is probably a little bizarre coming from someone who believes Bob Dylan to be one of the finest singers of all time, I know.) 'Hallelujah' is a perfect case in point. The lyrics and the melody are, in my opinion, exquisite, but I find Cohen's version of his own song virtually unlistenable.

It's become something of a cliché to note that Jeff Buckley recorded the definitive interpretation of Cohen's 'Hallelujah', but sometimes clichés are clichés because they clinch the truth. The Radio 4 programme discussed Buckley's take on the song, and someone -- the presenter, I think -- remarked that she could remember exactly where she was when she heard the track for the first time. So can I. It was the summer of 1994, and I had just finished my undergraduate studies. I had moved back to my parents' house, and I'd been eagerly awaiting the release of Buckley's first album. I bought it on a day trip to Cardiff, and I sat down to listen to it that evening. When I got to 'Hallelujah', I don't think I breathed for the seven minutes that follow Buckley's dramatic breathing out. See if it has the same effect upon you:



Almost fifteen years on, the song stops me in my tracks whenever I hear it. A colleague of mine -- let's call him Morty, shall we, dear readers? -- used to play it to a lecture theatre of around 175 first-year undergraduates to make a point about postmodern culture. I sat in on the event once or twice, and I have never heard a group of students sit so quietly.

But why am I telling you this? What has 'Hallelujah' got to do with ink? Well, dear readers, the programme's discussion of Buckley's rendition of Leonard Cohen's song started me thinking about the entire business of cover versions. I'm endlessly fascinated by the ways in which a song can change as it leaves the hands of its creator and finds itself interpreted by another musician. Bob Dylan must surely be one of the most covered modern artists of all, and some strange things have happened to his songs when others have recorded them. Jimi Hendrix's take on 'All Along the Watchtower' is perhaps the most famous example. What was a fairly quiet acoustic song on Dylan's John Wesley Harding album became, on Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, a fierce electric howl:





Less famous, perhaps, and certainly more strange, is the Neville Brothers' take on Dylan's 'With God on Our Side', in which what was originally a caustic attack upon American religious-fuelled war-mongering apparently found itself turned into something of a hymn. (That's how I've always heard it, anyway.) I can't find the studio version of the Neville Brothers' interpretation online, but I have managed to track down a live version, which you can compare at your leisure to Dylan's original 1963 recording. The crucial twist comes at the very end of the cover, when Aaron Neville throws in a line not present in the source: 'Jesus loves me, this I know':





But I still haven't told you what this has to do with ink, have I, dear readers? Worry not: the core of my sermon is coming...

It seems to me that we inkthusiasts are, when we fill our beloved pens with the latest colour to capture our attention, actually engaged in an act of interpretation -- inkterpretation, if you will -- that's a little like the act of covering another musician's song. You don't have to spend long browsing The Fountain Pen Network to see that lovers of ink often disagree about the properties of a particular shade. What one person finds slow to dry will prove immune to smudging after two seconds for another. What shades elegantly for inkthusiast X will come out a solid colour for inkthusiast Y. What flows freely for me may wither up inside your favourite pen.

It's clear, then, that we're actively shaping the outcome when we switch nibs, filling methods, brand of pen, or when we write with a different pressure. We're interpreting the ink, in other words, just as a singer might phrase a line differently when covering someone else's song. When we cover a sheet of paper with ink, we're actually covering that ink. (I don't quite know who's the original artist in this rambling analogy. Maybe ink is a cover version without an original, a simulacrink.)

All of this means, of course, that ink is constantly reinvented, reborn, reshaped, rewritten. Each new nib marks a genesis, a revelation. The soul of ink will never die. Take these words out into the world, my children, and shout them from highest mountain. Better still, use your sturdiest nibs to carve them into tablets of stone. Ink, that inkmortal substance, has survival covered. Here ends my covering letter.

Inks being interpreted today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Inkarceration

Someone must have been telling lies about me. These may be the last words that I write as a free man.

Well, I say 'free', but it's all relative. Let's not forget that I am constantly persecuted by the world and that everyone is out to get me. Including my own family, ink fact, and it is here that my terrifying tale begins.

The Inkette looks after Baby Ink at home on Mondays, so I asked her if, while I was in work, she could take to the post office a package containing a vial of ink destined for Seattle-based honorary Penquod crew member Anna. 'When they ask what's in the envelope so that they can fill in the custom slip', I said, 'just tell them that it's ink and that it's worth less than a pound.'

'I'm not embarrassing myself by saying that there's ink in the package', snorted the Inkette. 'They'll think I'm a freak, an inkoid. No, I'll lie and say that it's something else altogether.'

I became rather alarmed at this point, for I know that the authorities are constantly watching my every move, waiting for an excuse to take me in 'for questioning'. And because the ink-filled envelope contained a letter signed by me, I would, I realized, inkevitably be held responsible for the Inkette's crime against Royal Mail and the customs service.

But my troubles did not stop there. Later that day, the Inkette took Baby Ink to her parents' house, where he happily played for several hours. At one point, he trotted into the living room with the cordless telephone in his hand. It was taken from him and replaced in its cradle, but it rang some moments later. It was the police. A '999' emergency call had, it seemed, been just received from the telephone, but all that the anxious operator could hear was a small child babbling away to himself.

Yes, dear readers, my own son was clearly attempting to shop me to the authorities. Although he is barely two years of age, he has clearly figured out that 999 is the number for the emergency services, and he evidently thinks nothing of naming names ... even when the surname is the same as his. All that saved me is the fact that his sentences are still relatively inkhoate. I have no doubt that he genuinely wanted to say 'My father is an inkthusiast who has committed international mail fraud', but this probably came out as 'Car ... Digger ... Clarkson ... Teddy ... Bottle ... Mummy help?' (Yes, I regret to inform you, dear readers, that he is still obsessed by Jeremy Clarkson.)

But maybe the call itself was enough to set the red lights flashing in the bunker. ('Baby Ink has called it in. Lock and load, people.') Maybe the raid is about to take place. Maybe they're just watching for a little longer in an attempt to gather more evidence to use against me. (I will inkevitably, in the light of the well-known model of Esterbrook fountain pen, be addressed as 'J.' throughout the trial.)

I will do my best to continue writing Ink Quest from behind bars, dear readers, and possibly under the name 'Antonio Gramscink', but life will be difficult. The Marquis de Sade was famously denied 'any use of pencil, ink, pen, and paper' during his time in the Bastille, and I am sure that the biro-enslaved authorities have a similar prohibition lined up for me. I call on you, then, to throw vials of ink up to me in my cell. And not merely so that I can continue to write about the quest for the perfect ink. No, dear readers, ink will also be my means of escape. As I have noted in previous posts, the word 'ink' has its roots in what is caustic, in what burns. I will, therefore, place a few drops of our sacred liquid on the bars of my cell when the guards are not looking. The caustic fluid will gradually eat through the metal, and I will be able to leap to freedom.

Who needs a nail file or a saw when ink is at hand? Because inks are serrated, I will cease to be incarcerated.

Inks in use today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Bumazhnink

The Russian has been rushing in.

Not long after I posted yesterday's ramblings about my desire for a pocket book, honorary Penquod crew member Stefan informed me that Tolstoy's original text has Anatole removing a 'bumazhnik' from his pocket. 'Bumazhnik', Stefan explained, literally means 'paper holder'. Perhaps, he continued, 'billfold' would be a suitable translation, and he added that Anthony Briggs had clearly avoided 'pocket book' in his recent translation of War and Peace because the term has distinctly feminine connotations not present in 'bumazhnik'.

I'm fascinated by how complicated this apparently trivial issue has become, and I have no doubt that Ink Quest's readers will feel the same. The OED definition and Stefan's email have made me realize that 'pocket book' has shades of meaning in the United States that it does not on this side of the Atlantic. As far as I know, the term doesn't have specifically feminine connotations in Britain, but that's probably because it's hardly used at all. I've never heard of a woman carrying a 'pocket book' here. A 'handbag' or a 'purse', yes, but the latter word doesn't mean here what it means in, say, Stefan's native New York, of course. (Are 'purse' and 'pocket book' interchangeable, though?)

But back to the real question: where am I going to find a 'bumazhnik', a 'paper holder'? Once again, Stefan's email has suggested a way forward. In addition to giving me information about Tolstoy's Russian, he happened to mention that he has a special wallet that he uses when travelling by air. 'It's one of my favorite possessions', he wrote, 'with pockets, marked in gold lettering, for Passport, Currency, Landing Card, and Baggage Checks.'

When I read these words, I experienced a moment of revelation. I own a Smythson travel wallet that fits this description to an elegant gold 'T'. It's an absurdly decadent object, but longtime readers of Ink Quest will hardly be surprised by its extravagance, I'm sure. As I have noted in previous posts, I don't really like travelling, but I do get excited whenever it's time to prepare my travel wallet for a journey. I've often considered using it for the 15-minute train ride to work, ink fact.

It seems to me that the object in question would make a wonderful 'bumazhnik', for its various compartments offer plenty of space for storing letters and other ink-covered sheets of paper. The only problem is that it could never fit in a pocket -- it's 15cm x 25cm -- so its future as a 'pocket book' is a little doubtful. Will I have to carry it around in my hand, as if it were a handbag or one of those marvellous little bags that men are permitted to carry in their hands certain parts of mainland Europe? (That trend has never caught on in Britain, sadly, and I believe that the practice is technically illegal in South Wales. Viewers of Seinfeld will be familiar, of course, with what happens to Jerry when he dares to step out onto the streets of New York sporting a 'European carry-all'.)



Or could my travel wallet become a pocket book? I've often felt that men's modern jackets and coats (cue the old Welsh question, 'Whose coat is that jacket?') aren't made with sufficient attention to pockets. I am, for instance, currently looking for a new summer jacket, and I've found myself putting countless offerings back on the rail because the pockets are too small or, worse still, non-existent. There is, inkidentally, a lovely moment in Roland Barthes' Incidents where he complains about a new windbreaker that he's purchased while in New York. '[I]t fits badly', he complains, 'the sleeves are too long and there is no inside pocket, so I feel crammed with objects, at risk of losing them -- the way I lost my cigar case from this same jacket; already I am not comfortable this Evening.' (Don't ask me why he chose to capitalize the final word.) Like my great hero, I am not comfortable in a jacket if it lacks suitable pockets, and the inside pockets, I feel, are the most important of all.

I have begun to think that I will never find a suitable jacket for the summer; I am, for this reason, already eagerly anticipating the death of the leaves and the onset of winter, when I can once again dress happily (I use the term loosely) in my long coat. But perhaps I can kill two birds with one sartorial stone. I have always dreamed of having my clothes tailor-made on Savile Row, so maybe I should take my first step into the world of bespoke luxury by having a summer jacket made to measure. When the tailor asks me what kind of pockets I would like inside the garment, I will say that I need something big enough to hold a 15cm x 25cm travel wallet. ('Oh, and while you're at it, could you make space for three fountain pens, a travelling inkwell, some blotting paper, a bag of French Roast coffee beans, a bottle of Floris No. 89, and six volumes of Proust?')

Yes, dear readers, my travel wallet will, thanks to an excessively large pocket, become a pocket book, and I will be able to carry my sheets of ink-filled paper close to my heart at all times. The bumazhnink is born.

Inks in use today: Waterman Blue-Black; Noodler's Nightshade.

PS (4 June, 10.30am): Following a recent promotion at work, I have just received an invitation to a celebratory reception with the Vice-Chancellor. While I have no intention of attending, I couldn't help being intrigued by the dress code for men signalled at the bottom of the invitation: lounge suit. I'm not quite sure what a lounge suit is -- a colleague who also received the invitation has proposed that I wear a smoking jacket and slippers -- but it sounds like something that would go rather well with a pocket book. Everything's coming together very nicely, I'd say.

PPS (4 June, 12.40pm): A little internet browsing has revealed that a lounge suit is not as exotic as I initially thought. According to several websites, 'lounge suit' is essentially a synonym for 'business suit', so I suppose that it's used on invitations to make it clear that evening wear is not required. As I wear a 'business suit' to work every day, I could clearly make a seamless transition from office to reception with the V-C. Or could I? I'm a little alarmed by what Dresscodeguide.com has to say about the conventions of the lounge suit. Under 'Accessories', it declares 'Avoid novelty items'. My entire life is novelty items -- pens, inks, luxury notebooks, and so on -- and I regularly have at least one of these items in the inner pocket of the jacket of my suit. Beyond that, I find the suggestion that a watch is optional rather scandalous: a fine watch is, like a fine pen, absolutely essential (de wrist-geur, perhaps). And then there's the commandment about fastening the top button of the shirt. I'm all for crisp elegance, but I feel positively strangled if I don't have my top button undone. (I can't, incidentally, wait to hear what honorary Penquod crew member and bow-tie-defender Stefan has to say about the declaration that bow ties are 'acceptable but are very unusual and should be avoided'.) Lounging is clearly not for me, although I have to say that the term 'lounge' has a certain aptness. I have just checked the OED, and the term is possibly derived from 'lungis', which the dictionary explains in the following manner:


[a. OF. longis:L. Longnus apocryphal name of the centurion who pierced our Lord with a spear, by popular etymology associated with L. longus long.]

a. A long, slim, awkward fellow; a lout. b. One who is long in doing anything; a laggard, a lingerer.

I may no longer be slim, but I am quite tall, and I have been told on many occasions that I am awkward. I hope that there is nothing loutish about me, but I do my best to be a laggard and linger behind the ways of the modern world. Maybe, then, 'lounge' suits.

Out of Pocket

Is it possible to covet something without knowing precisely what that thing is?

I ask this question because I have decided that I want -- no, urgently need -- a pocket book. I'm not quite sure, though, what a pocket book is.

My attraction to this enigmatic object began when I read with racing heart the dramatic moment in War and Peace at which Pierre confronts Anatole about the latter's relationship with Natasha. 'Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?', asks Pierre, who has just threatened Kuragin the cad with a paperweight. We're told at this point that 'Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his pocket and took out his pocket book', from which an incriminating letter is retrieved.

Ink is mentioned nowhere in this scene, but I have come to believe that I, a defender of fountain pens and authentic ink, should be equipped with a pocket book from this day forward.

But what is a pocket book? To complicate matters, Anthony Briggs' recent translation of Tolstoy's novel has Anatole removing the letter from a wallet. (I don't know what the original Russian edition of War and Peace states; I will need to consult honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who has a background in the field -- and who has been teaching me how to say rude things in Russian.) Is 'pocket book' merely an old-fashioned term for the rather prosaic 'wallet'? (The English edition of War and Peace in which I found the phrase was first published in the 1920s.)

In an attempt to find out more, I have consulted the Oxford English Dictionary. And what I have found (under 'pocketbook', rather than 'pocket book') is deeply intriguing:

A. n.

1. a. Chiefly in form pocket book. A small book, adapted so as to be conveniently carried in a person's pocket. In later use chiefly N. Amer.: a paperback or other small or inexpensive edition of a book.
Use of the word to denote a printed book does not seem to have been common before the 20th cent. The N. Amer. use dates from 1939, when ten titles were published in the U.S. in inexpensive paperback editions by Pocket Books, Inc., a company founded by Robert F. de Graff (1895-1981), subsequently an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

b. Brit. A book for memoranda, notes, etc., intended to be carried in a pocket; a notebook.

2. a. A pocket-sized folding case for holding banknotes, papers, etc.; a wallet. Now chiefly U.S.
In early use not always distinguishable from sense A. 1b.

b. A handbag or purse for banknotes or coins, esp. one belonging to a woman; (also) a woman's handbag for carrying everyday personal items. Now chiefly U.S.

c. fig. Chiefly N. Amer. A person's financial resources; funds.

3. U.S. slang (esp. regional (south.)) (euphem.). The female external genitals; the vagina.

B. adj. (attrib.). Chiefly N. Amer. Relating to considerations of personal finance, esp. as a factor in politics (see sense A. 2b).

Complicated, isn't it? And sense 3 does perhaps make my claim to want a pocket book rather intriguing to readers in certain parts of the United States.

I'm ruling out definitions 1a and 1b. I don't think that that is what Anatole retrieves from his pocket, partly because such an object probably wouldn't be large enough to hold a letter. Besides, I already have a Smythson Panama jotter which fits those particular decriptions:



(N.B.: The placement of my Aurora Talentum might look a little odd, but it is, in the name of anonymity, hiding my initials, which are stamped in the corner of the cover.)

Definitions 2b and 2c can also be discarded, I think. It seems to me that Anatole's pocket book is probably the kind of object described in 2a, but I'd like to believe that it's more glamorous than what we'd call a wallet in the present moment. If it's going comfortably to hold letters, like Anatole's, it will need to be larger than the standard wallet of the early twenty-first century, I think. Perhaps what I'm looking for is more like the object in which Tony Wendice, the plotting husband in Hitchcock's Dial 'M' for Murder, secretes a letter used to incriminate Swann:



But why, ultimately, have I fallen in love with the idea of owning a pocket book? Why has Cupid led me to covet such an obscure object of desire? ('Cupid' and 'covet', I have just learnt, are etymologically linked. Feverishly entwined, perhaps.) What would I do with such a thing? (I can already hear the Inkette wearily asking this last question.)

First of all, I like the fact that the object in question sounds archaic -- a pocket of the past with barely a hold on the present. I don't think that men are supposed to carry pocket books around these days, and this makes me determined to arm myself with such an item. If we start here, the theory runs, soon we'll all be wearing fedoras and cufflinks again. (And, if War and Peace is anything to go by, not long after that we'll be shooting rivals in duels and waving sabres at French soldiers.)

Beyond that, though, it seems to me that the pocket book has a role to play in the preservation of ink. Tolstoy's Anatole carries letters in his, so I see no reason why we modern wielders of the pocket book could not use ours to ferry around sheets of decadent paper covered with samples of our favourite inks. We and inky lines, that is to say, could go everywhere together, could live in each other's pockets. Ink would never be out of pocket (if I may use what the OED informs me is an American way of saying 'out of reach, absent, unavailable').

We could, of course, also carry actual letters, rather than mere scribblings, in our pocket books. And it is on these grounds that a pocket book becomes all the more necessary, for, while clearing out a filing cabinet in my office several days ago, I found a letter sent to me by honorary Penquod crew member Eileen in 1994. (We were graduate students together in those days, and we spent a great deal of time together, mainly gossiping, discussing the merits of Jack Jones' voice, and plotting a radical overhaul of British academia.)

I had forgotten all about this letter, and the events to which it refers are lost in the mists of time. It identifies an 'agenda' for a talk that Eileen was about to give in front of someone inspecting our research centre, but I have no idea what this speech was about, as the agenda itself was not with the letter when I rediscovered it. It's also impossible to date the document precisely, as Eileen has simply written the following at the top:



However, while much about the letter remains enigmatic, a certain key detail struck me as soon as I unfolded the forgotten sheet: Eileen had used a fountain pen and real ink. We spend most of our time these days discussing nibs and new colours (well, Eileen also manages frequently to change the topic to her lust for Britney Spears, Sarah Palin, and Charlotte Church), but I don't think that we ever discussed writing instruments in the early days of our friendship in the mid-1990s. I had not yet fallen under the spell of ink, for one thing; Eileen clearly had, but I think that this side of her character was still secret. She did, moreover, as she informed me a day or two ago, drift away from fountain pens into the dubious arms of rollerballs shortly after our time as students together came to an end.

In other words, the letter belongs to a time when we were not fully fledged inkthusiasts. It's strange to look at it today and to think that I would have paid no attention whatever to the ink fifteen years ago. Eileen has, of course, now asked me what shade she used a decade and a half ago, and I've reported that it's black. I can't be any more specific than that, as I find one black ink difficult to distinguish from another. Whatever it is, it's looking decidedly fresh fifteen years after being committed to paper.

But why is this historical document related to my need for a pocket book? It seems to me, dear readers, that I could carry this letter around with me at all times if I possessed an object in which to store it. I'd like to keep the sheet with me as more than just the mark of a special friendship. (Ye gods, the Penquod is sailing worryingly out of the waters of misanthropy and isolation. Must. Correct. Course. 'All hands to deck!' Oh, wait: there's no one here but me, as I've alienated everyone.) The letter is a reminder of the Days Before Ink, of my pre-obsession years. It's hard to imagine that I will ever be uninkterested in writing instruments, but Eileen's note is proof of my former inkdifference. When I first read it in 1994, my eyes paid no attention to ink; it's only now that I see form, colour, and shading alongside content.

And I feel that I need to keep the letter close in order to vaccinkate me against the easy lure of inkdifference. It's a souvenir from the dark days before I saw the light, and it marks a state to which I must never return. That way lie ballpoints...

Some wear a religious symbol or carry a holy book to protect them from the forces of evil. I, by way of contrast, am in ink's pocket, and it, if I can just find a pocket book, shall always be in mine.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Nightshade; Diamine Grey.

Drop-Ink Centre

Drop everything: let's talk droplets.

I happened to be reminded this week of the opening of George Eliot's Adam Bede:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

I can't claim to have read any further than this, dear readers, for I only have to see the name 'George Eliot' and I drop off to sleep. This antipathy goes back to my time as a student of 'A' level English Literature, when we were forced to read Silas Marner. Our teacher insisted that it was one of the finest novels ever written, and spent many interminable lessons discussing the eponymous hero's tendency to experience cataleptic seizures. This was, he insisted, symbolic of what capitalism did to the human spirit in the nineteenth century. My suggestion that perhaps Silas Marner had just been made to read Silas Marner was not well received. More recently, I decided to renew my dislike for Eliot's work when a now-retired colleague for whom I had remarkably little respect announced, in the week that Don DeLillo's Underworld was published, that Middlemarch was, and would always be, The Greatest Novel Ever Written. 'DeLillo's just a pretender', he sneered.

But back to Adam Bede. A colleague for whom I have huge amounts of respect drew my attention to this wonderful opening passage a couple of years ago, but, perhaps because of my longstanding feud with George Eliot, I managed to repress its existence until I saw the inky lines in print again several days ago. I know that I will never read Adam Bede, but I do think that there's something special about its 'inkipit'. What it recognizes so well, I think, is the possibility embodied in every drop of ink. With ink, we can go anywhere.

One of the things I like most about writing with real ink is the transformation of every drop of coloured fluid into sentences that didn't exist until I put pen to paper. Yes, users of ballpoint or rollerball pens can also turn a blank page into one teeming with meaning, but there's a crucial difference when a fountain pen is involved: the writer was responsible for filling the pen, either from a bottle or with a cartridge. In other words, he or she has come into close (sometimes very close) contact with the shapeless liquid, has placed it tenderly inside a writing instrument, and can then watch as the formless substance miraculously emerges drop by drop from the nib to find a form recognizable to all those who can read the language in question. To put matters differently, a user of a fountain pen has made the writing instrument capable of forming drops of ink, and is then intimately present as those drops drop into place, into shapes, into meaning.

The narrator of Adam Bede appears to recognize this: from that single drop of ink at the end of the pen can come a description of 'the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799'. From the fluid, a vision. From the drop, a universe. And all of this where there was previously nothing. The blank page receives the drops and starts to signify.

I am typing these words less than a metre from a box containing dozens of bottles of ink. (When did I last count or catalogue them? Will my urge to collect ever show signs of dropping off?) It's a little dizzying to think about how many drops lie within, how many words and worlds I could create at the drop of a hat, but that sense of inkfinite possibility is part of what drives the Penquod and prevents it from ever dropping anchor.

It's late; I'm fit to drop. Thanks for dropping by.

Inks in use today: Sailor Grey; Diamine Chocolate Brown.

Obviously Five (x10,000) Believers

Fifty thousand satisfied customers.

I haven't had chance to update Ink Quest this week, dear readers, as I've been buried beneath mountains of work. A full post about the glory of a drop of ink dangling from the end of a pen will follow, I hope, within the next few days.

But while I've been neglecting my duties at the helm of the good ship Penquod, the pages of this blog have received visitor number 50,000. A small drop in the ocean that is the internet, of course, but I like to think that each person whose eyes have found their way to Ink Quest has gone away filled with the spirit of ink. And misanthropy.

While you're waiting for the next thrilling inkstalment, you may wish to consider the two following items:

1. A fascinating response to my recent post about the writing instruments used by Roland Barthes in his Carnets du voyage en Chine.

2. A truly bizarre piece of plagiarism, in which a post from this very blog has somehow been merged with dubious adverts for bizarre items.

Perhaps I should ask the thief responsible for the second item if s/he could keep Ink Quest going while I'm busy. The list of blogs mentioned in his/her profile suggests that there is no end to his/her talent.

To the next fifty thousand! Enc(o)re un effort!

Ink in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown.

-caust and Effect

Is ink etymologically aware?

Colleague and honorary Penquod crew member Daphne called me into her office yesterday afternoon to relay some urgent news: she had been happily writing with her Sheaffer-Turquoise-filled fountain pen, admiring the delicate blue colour of her words, when the ink suddenly took on a life of its own. As she wrote the word 'Holocaust', she related, the ink changed from blue to brown ... and then back to blue again as soon as she began to form the next word in the sentence. She showed me the evidence. 'Holocaust' stood out on the page, the only non-turquoise mark in sight. Could I, she asked, explain the inkident?

I have known inks to change colour slightly if the pen is left uncapped and unused for several minutes. Waterman Havana Brown, for instance, often becomes a curious shade of green if the dormant nib is exposed to the air for a period of time. But I have never known a pale turquoise to become a burnt brown. Besides, Daphne had not put her pen to one side before the inkident occurred; she had, she said, stopped writing for no more than two or three seconds.

I have been thinking about this mystery all night; I have not slept a wink. I have weighed up numerous explanations for the dramatic eruption of the colour brown.

At first, I wondered if Daphne's pen was somehow connected across time to the Holocaust. Had its original owner perished in one of the camps, and was the nib performing an act of remembrance by highlighting the word? (Was it a Shoah show-er in certain words, in other words?) I quickly rejected this explanation when I remembered that Daphne's Sheaffer was purchased as new by her within the last couple of years.

I then moved on to a more prosaic hypothesis. Had traces of a previous colour of ink suddenly surfaced from within the pen and mixed with the turquoise to produce the brown? It's true that Daphne had been using a red cartridge before she switched to the blue, and it's also true that fountain pens are fond, if not thoroughly rinsed between colours, of producing some interesting new shades all by themselves. But I'm not sure that this explains yesterday's inkident. When Daphne showed me the sheet of notes, it was clear that 'Holocaust' had erupted in brown without the slightest warning or waning. The words on either side of the highlighted term were pure turquoise in colour; there was not even the tiniest hint of brown before or after 'Holocaust'. The emphasis was emphatic.



[NOTE: Dramatic reconstruction. Every effort has been made to preserve factual accuracy, but Penquod Productions Ink. has reimagined certain details.]

After hours of rigorous scientific contemplation, I finally discovered the root of the inkident: the root itself. 'Holocaust' and 'ink' are etymologically linked, cast together as words by '-caust', for 'Holocaust' -- which literally means the burning of all -- goes back to 'kaustos', the Greek for 'burnt', and 'ink' gets its name from 'encaustum', the caustic writing fluid used by Roman emperors, which in turn goes back to the Greek 'egkauston'.

My theory, then, is this: Daphne's turquoise ink (encaustum) became brown when she wrote the word 'Holocaust' (holo + kaustos) because of a sudden etymological collision. And the ink chose to register this fact performatively by making itself appear burnt (kaustos) upon the page. The inkident was caused, in other words, by -caust.

Now that I have solved the mystery, I can finally sleep. I am burnt out; I can burn the midnight oil no longer. These, dear readers, are the lengths to which I go to bring you the burning issues of our times. Thus ends today's burnt offering.

Encaustum in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown.

PS (4.15pm): As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Sitemeter tracker attached to Ink Quest gives me regular updates on who is reading the blog. I never know precise identities, of course, but I do get information about geographical location, ISP, length of visit, and so on. I am alarmed to discover that someone at the institution where I work appears to be making his or her way systematically through the Ink Quest archive, sometimes spending up to forty minutes lost in my deathless prose. This can only mean one thing: my cover is blown, and I am no longer anonymous. I have little doubt that The Management is watching, taking notes, assembling the case against me, and plotting my sudden disappearance in an unfortunate 'accident'. If you never hear from me again, dear readers, I would like Chief Justice Earl Warren to lead the inkquest into the Ink Quest inkident.

Which Side Are You On?

'Are we the baddies?'

I take this line from a sketch by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which two German SS officers suddenly experience a moment of enlightenment. 'Hans, I've just noticed something', says the one. 'Have you looked at our caps recently? [...] They've got skulls on them [...] Hans, are we the baddies?' Readers of Ink Quest not familiar with the routine can watch the whole thing here:



This sketch has been on my mind for the last couple of days, dear readers, because I have started to wonder if Ink Quest has spent nearly four years fighting on the side of evil, not against it.

My troubles began on Friday afternoon. My entire department had been sent to a conference room in a hotel for an 'Away Day'. (I won't bother to parody this event, as it managed to leap beyond parody all by itself.)



During one of the coffee breaks, I found myself in conversation with a colleague who grew up in Soviet-era Poland. We somehow got around to discussing ink (he brought the topic up, honestly), and he asked if my love of fountain pens went back to my school days. Was I, he asked, required to use an inkwell and dip pen while learning to write? I reported that I wasn't, and he then related how his schooling in Poland had been one filled with ink. (I don't know precisely when this was, but it must have been at some point in the 1960s, I think.) Each child's desk, he reported, sported an inkwell, and the caretaker would come around every day with a giant bottle of ink to replenish the containers. Learning to write, he added, was all about learning to dip a stylus-like pen into the inky depths.

I told him that this sounded like utopia, and I related how I'd been forced to use a ballpoint pen when learning to write in school. 'When I'm in charge', I said, 'those hideous creations will be banned.' What my colleague said next came as something of a shock.

Fountain pens, he announced in response to my desire to ban ballpoints, were prohibited in his Polish school. Not because, as I immediately suspected, they were the sign of capitalist, bourgeois decadence, but because they were believed to spoil children's handwriting. Only the dip pen, ran the rule, could produce proper writing. All hell broke loose, he continued, when his parents bought him a fountain pen and sent him to school with it. (I don't know my colleague well enough to know why and when he moved from Poland to the UK, but I wonder if his entire family was forced to seek political refuge here following the inkident in question. Were they sent into exile because he chose not to dip?)

I have always maintained that the ballpoint pen kills elegant handwriting. (Has anything but a simian scrawl ever been produced with a biro? The great Roland Barthes had it right when he remarked that a Bic was good for nothing but churning out 'pisse copie'.) But what if I've been wrong all along? What if the fountain pen -- the sacred instrument upon which Ink Quest relies -- is just as damaging? What if the only instrument capable of preserving the art of handwriting is the stylus-like dip pen?

In other words, I have been plunged into an exinkstential crisis. Perhaps I am one of 'the baddies'. Perhaps I have devoted nearly 350 posts to evil. Perhaps I've been on the wrong side from day one. Perhaps the Penquod should be sunk, the blog deleted without a trace, and all of my fountain pens thrown onto a bonfire. Perhaps we should let only the stylus style us. Which side am I on? I feel side-swiped.

Inks in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown; Diamine Majestic Blue. (These two new acquisitions are delightful. With the Chocolate Brown, Diamine has finally come up with a proper dark brown. It's not quite as dark as, say, Noodler's Walnut, but it's getting there. It's similar to Private Reserve Chocolat, but I think it's slightly darker. The Majestic Blue, meanwhile, is a lovely saturated colour that reminds me very much of the mythical Parker Penman Sapphire. Both inks flow magnificently and offer some wonderful shading.)

Scrap Age

Scrap everything.

Ink Quest has very little interest in political debate and current affairs, but an item in the budget recently unveiled by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has caught my eye. In an attempt to boost the ailing car industry, Mr Darling announced that motorists trading in a car of more than ten years of age will receive £2000 towards a new vehicle. Similar schemes have already worked wonders elsewhere in Europe, it seems, so the British economy will be back in the fast lane within weeks, I'm sure.

But why stop there? Why not extend the scrappage scheme to other commodities? What's so special about cars? (I ask this last question as the exasperated father of a toddler who spends every waking moment playing with, and talking about, cars. He has even taken to grabbing the 'In Gear' supplement as soon as I sit down with the Sunday Times, pointing jubilantly at the ill-dressed figure on the front, and shouting 'Clarkson! Clarkson!') Why not give the economy a further boost by offering cash incentives to people who trade in their biros for fountain pens?

This brilliant idea came to me yesterday morning as we were wandering around the open-air National History Museum in St. Fagans. (Don't get me started on the monstrous lack of apostrophe. This can only be the fault of the colonizers, for the original Welsh name was simply Sain Ffagan.) One of the most striking features in the hundred-acre site is the sixteenth-century manor house (known, for some reason, as the 'castle'). I was too busy chasing Baby Ink to read the explanatory text in detail, but I believe that the house has been set out as it would have been in the nineteenth century, so visitors step back in time as soon as they cross the threshold.

I, of course, immediately started to look for vintage writing instruments and related objects. I didn't have to look far, for several of the rooms contained rather elegant writing desks, inkwells, and dip pens. Before I could take detailed notes, however, Baby Ink's friend toddled a little too close to one of the security barriers, and the warning alarm sounded throughout the house. We weren't actually asked to leave by the guard who came rushing up the stairs, but we thought it wise to make our way out before one of the marauding pair destroyed a priceless piece of the past.

Seeing the inkwells in so many of the rooms of the manor house brought home once again just how much our relationship to ink and writing instruments has changed over the years. These days, whether a fountain pen or a ballpoint is involved, we tend to take our writing instruments with us as we move around our domestic spaces. When ink, at a certain point in time, made its way inside the barrel -- when the dip pen dipped out of sight, in other words -- it suddenly became portable. Before that, by way of contrast, carrying a pen around would have made little sense, as it would, generally speaking, not have contained ink; the magical fluid would have sat in an inkwell, and the solid writing instrument would have been repeatedly dipped. Who, under such circumstances, would have wanted to risk calamitous spillages by carrying a precarious, open inkwell from room to room? Keeping a supply of ink in various places around the house would have been much more sensible.

But what does any of this have to do with my scheme for rewarding people who trade in ballpoints for fountain pens? Well, dear readers, it's perfectly simple: my idea is that every house in the land has a fountain pen in each room. And each room, moreover, will have a space set aside for inky activities. I have looked back to the nineteenth century, in other words, and I can see a way forward through the stormy waters. If every household in this green, unpleasant land is strongly encouraged to buy, say, eight fountain pens -- with financial support from the state, of course -- the economy will be thriving in no time. And if the deal is that every ballpoint pen in Britain be traded in at the same time, then we'll rid the nation of biros before the year is out. (I realize that this is starting to sound a bit like something inkvented by Mao Zedong, but I have, in my defence, just finished reading Roland Barthes' account of his bizarre trip to China in 1974.)

Yes, dear readers, the Great Ballpoint Scrappage Scheme is hereby officially inkaugurated. From the credit crunch comes the triumphant crunching of biros into a million tiny pieces. The salvation of the economy begins at home (oikos).

There is just one problem: as far as I know, Mr Darling is not a reader of this blog. I will, then, need to take a trip to Downing Street to inkform him of my plans. I will write this entry out by hand on my finest sheets and with exquisite ink, and I will gather up every ballpoint pen currently lurking beneath the roof of Ink Towers. (The Inkette likes to annoy me by buying packs of ten.) When the Chancellor answers the door of No. 11 , I will proudly hand over my obsolete biros and the text of my historic Scrap Paper.

Ink in use today: Diamine Sepia.

Ah, non!

Happiness in all but name.

As I noted in last Thursday's post, Roland Barthes' notebooks from his trip to China in 1974 have recently appeared in French (as Carnets du voyage en Chine). It may well be many years before an English translation is produced, so I decided to order a copy from Paris and struggle through the text in the original language. The book arrived on Monday, and I opened it with great excitement on the train to work yesterday morning.

I was delighted to discover that the editor, Anne Herschberg Pierrot, has devoted part of her introduction to a description of the writing instruments and materials used by my great hero. It turns out that matters are slightly more complex than I initially thought. The biro-filled notebook that I have once seen is, it transpires, merely the first of four: Carnets 1 and 2 are blue spiral-bound Crown notebooks; Carnet 3 is a smaller, black, Chinese moleskine, complete with a quotation from Mao printed on the first page; and Carnet 4 consists solely of an index to its predecessors. (No information is given about its origin or make.) And the ballpoint scribbling in the parts of Carnet 1 that I have seen does not continue throughout: the editor reports that the books also contain passages written in felt pen. (Pourquoi, Roland?)

Not long after I had pored over these crucial details, I started to flick casually through the book. My eye fell upon a certain paragraph. Time suddenly stood still. My own surname was staring back at me. Barthes had written my surname. As its own sentence.

It's at this point that today's Ink Quest post encounters something of a problem. I have always chosen to keep this blog anonymous, and I am not about to out myself. (I have, in fact, recently deleted all of the information that used to lie on the right-hand side of the page -- interests, favourite films, and so on -- because it suddenly struck me as too revealing.) I can't, therefore, show you the moment in the Carnets where Barthes, thanks to what I believe to be a spelling mistake (I need to check this with my French colleague when I next see him), turns an ordinary French word into my (somewhat unusual) last name.

He's not actually referring to me, of course. It would be flattering to think that my hero, at the height of his intellectual powers, thought it necessary to drop the surname of a Welsh toddler (which is all that I was in 1974) into his Chinese notebooks, but even I know my place. Why, then, am I telling you this story?

Well, dear readers, I have been thinking about the heart-stopping page of the Carnets all day. And I had, until about ten minutes ago, been wondering if the apparent error of spelling is not cher Roland's, but a slip made by the editor or the typesetter. Could R. B., that most elegant of writers, really have been guilty of a spelling mistake?

Apparently so. As I was walking upstairs to the attic at around 9.30pm, I suddenly remembered that I have a book containing colour reproductions of some of the original handwritten pages from what I now know to be Carnet 1. I raced to the bookshelf and found the corresponding page ... where once again I found my surname. This time, however, it was in Barthes' own hand. And in blue ballpoint.

I take this as further proof that the universe is there solely to persecute me; that is the name of the game. On the one occasion that my hero writes my name, he does so because he's made a mistake and he does so in ballpoint pen. All I can find left to say is 'Ah, non!' Anon.

Ink in use today: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo.

Inkvaluable

How much do you value ink?

I've always thought that 'invaluable' is a strange and dangerous English word. If I tell someone, for instance, that his or her help has been 'invaluable', I'm saying that the assistance has been so crucial that it's beyond words, beyond a nameable value. So far, so good. But aren't I also suggesting that it has no value, that it's worthless ('in-' = without, lacking)?

And my longstanding worry about 'invaluable' raised its head over the weekend when an envelope containing two vials of ink arrived at Ink Towers. It had been sent from New York by honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who had, when asked to specify the value of the contents of the package on the United States Postal Service Customs Declaration slip (PS Form 2976), written '$0'. In ballpoint, as you can see in the image displayed above.

I must admit that I always find it difficult, when sending ink overseas, to come up with a value to scribble on the British equivalent of PS Form 2976. Does Royal Mail expect a mathematically accurate figure, arrived at by dividing this by this and that by that, or am I supposed simply to guess? Does anyone actually check these things? (I usually suggest something like £2 for a couple of vials, but I'm worried that there will eventually be a knock upon the door in the dead of night.) I have, therefore, been wondering about Stefan's specified value for the last couple of days, and I have found myself coming back to, zeroing in on, a series of crucial questions:

- Did he choose $0 because the ink contained within (Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo, which is a lovely blue, and his own magnificent Black Tulip mixture) is, as real ink, simply beyond value. Would no price, in other words, be high enough to match its majesty?

- Did he choose $0 because the clerk at the post office handed him a ballpoint pen with which to complete the declaration slip, thus negating entirely the glory of the genuine inks contained within the parcel?

- Did he choose $0 because that's roughly what one million pounds sterling (my local currency) is worth in the present financial crisis?

- Did he choose $0 as a form of protest against the ballpoint-dominated world, in which fountain pens and real ink count for nothing. (I am zero, hear me roar, in other words?)

We inkthusiasts know that ink is invaluable, but what do we mean by this? I've managed to come up with nothing for an answer, so I must have entered into a zero-sum game. The Penquod sails on towards nought, but nought tickles when you're all at sea.

Inks in use today: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo; Diamine Indigo.

PS: As zero is in the air, and as honorary Penquod crew member Arty and I are going to see Bob Dylan tomorrow night, the following seems like a fitting Song of the Day:

All the Tea ink China

I've been peeking towards Peking.

While I was walking through the centre of the city on my way home from work one day last week, I was seized by the sudden desire to buy a bottle of Diamine China Blue ink. Luckily, my local pen shop was still open, and I found the colour in question upon the shelf. As I sat on the train with the ink held eagerly in my hands, I started to wonder why I had, out of the blue, been drawn to this particular ink, which turns out to be a rather attractive shade. (The punster in me, though, can't help feeling that China Blue ought to be a beige ink.) And I soon realized that Roland Barthes was to blame.

As I have noted in previous posts, the index cards upon which Barthes used to work reveal that the author filled his fountain pens with a delightful shade of blue.



Even though Barthes discusses his love of writing instruments in detail in his writings, I have never been able to determine precisely which blue he preferred; the colour on the card displayed above remains an obscure object of desire for me.

On the day in which I was driven by forces beyond my control to purchase a bottle of Diamine China Blue, I had been looking through facsimiles of some of Barthes' unpublished manuscripts and index cards, and I had, of course, been admiring the ink. Several days earlier, I had discovered, thanks to a brief piece in the Guardian newspaper, that yet more books bearing Barthes' name have been published posthumously in Paris. One is Journal de deuil, a diary of mourning kept by Barthes following the death of his mother, and the other is Carnets du voyage en Chine.

I will, of course, be devouring both of these texts, but it was news of the second that really caught my attention (and not just because, according to the piece in the Guardian, it records R. B.'s complaints about staining a new pair of trousers and failing to catch a glimpse of the genitals of Chinese men during his trip to China in 1974). I have seen one of the original Crown notebooks in which Barthes took notes during his Chinese travels, and I assume that the new book is a transcription of these scribblings. The pages of the blue spiral-bound pad are striking for two reasons. First, Barthes' usually elegant handwriting is decidedly unkempt -- often to the point of illegibility, in fact. But second, and more important, the notes are written in ballpoint pen. Yes, dear readers, that's right: petit R. B., defender of the fountain pen and hater of the biro, made notes in ballpoint pen while travelling in China. Something of a Chinese puzzle, n'est-ce pas?

Well, perhaps not. Maybe R. B. didn't want to take one of his precious fountain pens abroad with him. I, for one, never pack my favourite writing instruments when travelling; my Visconti Van Gogh is reserved almost exclusively for foreign trips these days, simply because I cannot bear the thought of my Aurora Talentum or my Stipula I Castoni being confiscated by a security guard at the airport. (I'd still be upset if the Visconti were impounded, of course, but I do think of it as my 'lesser Italian'.) Or perhaps Barthes was worried about a real pen leaking at high altitude. (Come to think of it, is that how he stained his new trousers? Did the Esterbrook 'J' that he mentions in one of his interviews leak and find itself thrown away en route? I will have to check these crucial details as soon as my copy of Carnets du voyage en Chine arrives from France.)

It was, of course, not long after I first learnt about the publication of Barthes' Carnets du voyage en Chine that I was drawn uncontrollably to Diamine China Blue. And even closer to the moment of purchase, I had been admiring the blue ink used by Barthes on his index cards. I can only conclude, then, that I had unconsciously decided that Diamine China Blue is the colour -- the perfect Barthesian blue -- for which I have been searching.

It isn't, of course. It's pleasant enough, but it's not The One. If my time on the Penquod has taught me one thing, it's this: the quest is unending. Or, as the handwritten notice at the end of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes puts it, 'One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.' The perfect bottle of ink arrives ... and always breaks into a thousand useless pieces. Like china.

Inks staining neither trousers nor the genitals of Chinese men today: Diamine China Blue; Noodler's Eternal Brown; Noodler's Violet.

PS: P's

P's appease.

I usually add postscripts at the bottom of existing entries, but today my PS, which is all about P's, has its very own Private Space. Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has been in touch to say that, having reread my previous missive about pretension, he has a Pretty Special idea: users of fountain pens should, to show their willingness to be branded as pretentious by the ink-loathing world, take a leaf out of Hester Prynne's book. Yes, dear readers, Hester's 'A' has become the 'P' displayed above, and the plan is that we parade around with the scarlet letter defiantly affixed to our clothing.

The 'A' stood for 'Adultery' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale, of course, but our 'P' has the advantage of signifying in several ways. It could stand for 'Pretension', obviously, but also 'Pen' (or 'Plume', for those inkthusiasts based in French-speaking countries), 'Pig-headed' (in that we refuse to give in to the rule of the biro), 'Pedant' (in that we often like obsessively to have everything in its right place, much to the annoyance of the casual and carefree majority), 'Pest', and even 'Pervert'. (I mean the latter in a strictly etymological sense; I'm cutting the word off at its root, as Roland Barthes puts it in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. What you get up to in your bedrooms -- or elsewhere -- is up to you; I'm simply interested in inkthusiasts as perverts in the way that they turn away -- vertere -- from the dominant approach to writing instruments, turn it on its head, turn it bad (per-vertere). 'If writing with a fountain pen is wrong, I don't want to be right', as Ken put it in his message to me.)

(Scar)Let us wear our letters. Let us peel off from the crowd. Let the pealing of 'P' initialize the revolution. PDQ.

Ink in use today: Diamine China Blue. (The full story of my thrilling acquisition of this rather appealing colour will follow in my next post.)

The Great Pretender

Let’s pretend.

Tony Gilroy’s new film, Duplicity, revolves around the theme of corporate espionage. In a nutshell, Richard Garsik, played magnificently by Paul Giamatti, believes that a business rival, Howard Tully, is about to unveil a world-changing new product, so he employs a team of specialists to steal information from Tully. One of the purloined items is a sheet of paper upon which Howard has prepared a draft of a speech. It is handwritten. The script is elegant; the ink is rich. The fountain pen (a Mont Blanc?) used to produce the lines is big, silver, striking.

Garsik, however, is not impressed when he sees the sheet. ‘Who the hell writes with a fountain pen these days?’, he shrieks. ‘How freaking pretentious is that?’ (I’m quoting from memory, so the words may not be entirely accurate.)

I have, you may be surprised to learn, dear readers, spent much of my life being called pretentious. I have, it’s probably fair to say, hardly made it difficult for the mud-slingers. For instance, I once refused to take part in a sports ‘lesson’ (what’s to learn? or did they mean ‘lessen’?) in secondary school, declaring, as I have probably recalled here in an earlier post, that I was instead ‘going to the library to read Cocteau’. At roughly the same time, and for a period of around twelve months, I refused to wear clothing that was not black. (One of my colleagues who is just a few months younger than I am once said, ‘I bet you were one of those pretentious bastards who spent the 1980s wearing black, being miserable, refusing to go to parties, and listening to Joy Division albums, even though most of us were dancing to Wham!, drinking Bacardi, and having a good time.’ There are several grains of truth in this.) And then, in my final year at school, I formed, with a couple of like-minded souls, The League Against Dance Music. We wore the ‘smiley’ badges that were sported by the ravers (this was 1988 or 1989, when rave was king), but we had drawn a large black cross through the face. While our dance-crazed contemporaries listened to their repetitive beats in the corner of the sixth-form common room, we sulked self-importantly at the opposite end of the room and discussed surrealism, Camus, Wim Wenders, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, communism, French cigarettes, the Situationists, the nouvelle vague, and the quickest way out of small-town South Wales (by sedan chair, presumably). Pretentious? Moi?

Those moments are, I’m relieved to note, two decades behind me. But I have no doubt that the term 'pretentious' is still used to refer to me behind my back. (When does the teenage practice of face-to-face name-calling disappear? When did I start denouncing people only in their absence?) The moment in Duplicity described above does rather neatly put its finger on a widely held belief: users of fountain pens are oddballs, misfits, pretentious. (The same colleague who spent her teenage years living it up to the sounds of 'Club Tropicana' has regularly sighed 'Just get a bloody ballpoint!' when I have interrupted meetings by splattering ink and then having to leave the room to wash my hands.) If you take an interest in writing instruments, if you care about ink, if you refuse to use a ballpoint pen, you are inevitably seen by most people as affected, vain, pretentious. (Again, I have probably not helped myself by amassing a collection of silk pocket squares and luxury shaving creams, and by using a silver pocket watch to keep track of time while lecturing. In my defence, the latter was a thirtieth-birthday gift, and I cringe whenever I see colleagues pushing back their sleeves to glance at their wristwatches in the middle of a class. A subtle glance down at a pocket watch on the desk or the lectern is far more dignified, I feel. I could simply undo my wristwatch and place it in front of me, I suppose, and I have seen signal-conscious colleagues do precisely this, but I like the weight of my watch on my wrist, and I feel unbalanced without it.)

I suspect that most people dislike being called pretentious. But I have decided, dear readers, that it is time for us to embrace the term. And it's all the fault of Greil Marcus.

In Mystery Train's brilliant essay on the music of Sly and the Family Stone, Marcus suggests that something can only be pretentious if it's false. I can remember being struck by that statement when I read it for the first time in the early 1990s (when I was, no doubt, up to something pretentious). I was so struck by the whole essay on Sly Stone, ink fact, that I fell in love with the bleak There's a Riot Goin' On before I'd heard a note of it. Marcus describes beautifully, for instance, how the band took one of its songs from just a year earlier, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)', and turned it from a happy, optimistic number into the bitter, lost, insular 'Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa', which is, in short, the sound of a once-uplifting band and a musical genius imploding. Curious readers may wish to compare Riot's savage reworking alongside the original (and sit in stunned awe at the solidity of Larry Graham's bass playing on the later version):

'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)' (1970)


'Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa' (1971)


But back to the pretension, to the crime of being false. I think that it's time to stand up for falseness in life. If it's true that the ballpoint pen rules over the world of writing instruments, and if it's true that real ink is on the verge of being forgotten by the general population, then perhaps the only alternative lies in being as false as possible. Yes, dear inkthusiasts, every time we remove a gleaming fountain pen from a pocket and find ourselves accused of being pretentious, we're actually negating the bland truth of Western culture with a flicker of falseness.

Long live falseness! Don't be tense about your pretence. Enough of the false prophets; it's time for the prophet of falseness. This is not a false alarm; it is a defiant step towards the false, a faux pas. Let our many pretences be false pretences. I am happy, with my array of false affectations, to be the enemy of truth. Through and through foe and faux.

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.

PS (12 April): I have, in the light of a message from honorary Penquod crew member Ken, decided that a small postscript is perhaps needed. When I proposed above that lovers of fountain pens and ink embrace the label 'pretentious', I wasn't suggesting that we're all shallow, affected creatures. (I am, of course, but I wouldn't want to tar you all with the same nib.) I know that we ink-fingered inkdividuals truly believe in the inkherent superiority of a fountain pen that has been filled with well-chosen ink; we're not just trying to inflate ourselves by creating a flashy image, in other words. My aim, rather, is to reclaim something of the term 'pretentious' and to insist that, if the truth of the world is the reign of ballpoint pens, we might be better off on the side of the false. In other words, I'm suggesting that it's time to think about pretension as something positive, something of which to be proud, simply because it's the mark of being at odds with the general lack of interest in writing instruments. Think, for inkstance, of how the term 'queer' was reclaimed by certain groups fighting for gay rights; 'We're here and we're queer' therefore became a defiant, empowering chant. 'Pretentious' does not rhyme quite so easily, but I've come up with the following, which I offer as a rallying cry: We're pretentious, and it's tendentious. What was once an insult is thus now an inksult.

Restrainink Order

Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Ink! Ink!

Anyone who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho probably remembers the gruesome sequence in which Norman Bates frantically cleans the bathroom with a mop and a towel when he learns that 'Mother' has rather rudely butchered Marion Crane in the shower. 'Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood!', he cries when he discovers precisely what the troublesome Mrs Bates has been up to.

While the famous sequence in which Marion is knifed to death is deeply disturbing -- I don't know how many times I've seen it, but the hairs on the back of my neck always spring to attention as soon as Bernard Herrmann's shrieking score strikes up -- there's a sense in which I find Norman's mopping up even more unsettling. There's something truly horrific about the way in which he splashes the mop around in the blood-stained bath, then runs it down the side panelling. And the subsequent grabbing of a pristine white towel to finish off the job just makes things worse.

I usually like to model myself on another of Hitchcock's characters -- Roger O. Thornhill from North by Northwest, as played to perfection by Cary Grant -- but last night I found myself thrown headlong into the role of Norman Bates.

I have read many horror stories about what happens when you drop a full bottle of ink, but I had not, until yesterday, personally been through the experience. It was about 9.30pm, and I had taken a fairly new bottle of Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black into the bathroom in order to fill my Aurora Talentum. I had drawn ink from the bottle earlier in the day without a hitch (I was preparing a vial to send to honorary Penquod crew member Stefan), but I was not so lucky second time around. When I unscrewed the lid, the bottle slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. It didn't smash, but it did empty all but about half a centimetre of its contents over the pale wood. And the toilet. And the wall. And the hems of my trousers. And my feet.

Time seemed to stand still. The house was suddenly very silent. I knew that I had to act quickly, as the Inkette had gone up to the attic in order to send a few emails. If she came down and discovered the spillage, I knew that there would be blood and ink to mop up.

As I looked down at the mess, I realized that I had no real idea of where to begin. Because my feet had been splashed, I knew that moving was not a good idea. But moving was going to be necessary if I was to be within reach of something with which to begin mopping up the disaster. Suddenly, as the ink continued to drip from the toilet to the floor, I vaguely remembered reading something about surviving a chemical attack: If your clothes have been contaminated, strip. And so, dear readers, I carefully removed my inky shoes and trousers -- be still, your beating hearts -- and, just to be on the safe side, my jumper. I was now standing slightly back from the spillage in a t-shirt, underwear, and socks. The house was still silent, so the Inkette, I concluded, had not yet finished typing.

Most manufacturers of toilet paper celebrate the absorbent qualities of their tissue; they have clearly never used it to mop up Noodler's ink. My initial attempts to clear up the disaster area with Andrex toilet paper didn't really make much of a difference: within seconds, the paper would be saturated, and the resultant smudging seemed only to make the spillage bigger. Remembering Norman Bates' speedy recovery, I reached behind me for a large white bath towel. I dropped it onto the puddle and watched as it gradually became blue. When it had made a significant difference to the spillage, I drafted in a small sponge, which I repeatedly soaked and used to wipe away what remained. (I did consider dashing downstairs for a mop, but I decided that this might have alerted the Inkette to my desperate race against time.)

After about ten frantic minutes, the floor, the wall, and the toilet all looked as good as new. The towel, however, was ruined, and the sponge had become a dark blue colour. My trousers, I conceded, will probably have to be relegated to the category of 'Apparel to Wear While Painting', but my desert boots -- which are uncannily similar to those sported by Norman Bates in the second image displayed above -- are fortunately dark enough to make the ink stains invisible. (Praise be to Kiwi Multi-purpose Protector, too!) Exhausted, I stood back and surveyed the sparkling scene.

It was then that I noticed it. Just above the skirting board to the side of the toilet was an ink spot. I found a clean corner of the towel and wiped. Nothing happened. I dampened the towel and tried again. Still nothing. 'Out, damn'd spot!', I cried, but it refused to budge (presumably because it had fallen upon matt paint). Just as Norman Bates' clean-up operation is eventually ruined by a tiny scrap of paper that he fails to flush down the toilet at the motel, my perfect recovery had run aground upon a stubborn ink blot.

I decided that I should simply confess to the Inkette. (I did consider blaming the whole thing on Baby Ink or one of the cats, but I quickly realized that they'd all have flawless alibis.) She was not amused. Ink fact, she has banned me from taking ink into the bathroom. Yes, dear readers, a restrainink order has been served.

I am typing these words at 6.40pm. In around three hours, I will need to fill my pens in preparation for tomorrow's working day. But where will I open my bottles? Which room will fill in and allow me to fill in peace? To where can I and my colours run? Speak up and spill the beans, damn'd house! At this moment in time, I can see no way of sweetening the spill.

Inks eventually directed inside pens today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Common Blue-Black.

'I married crisis on the fifth day of May'

'Is ink your mid-life crisis?'

The Inkette asks me this question as our car is overtaken by a shiny, noisy sports car. Its driver is middle-aged, balding (or, as Elaine Benes would put it, 'clinging to scraps'), wearing a leather jacket and Aviator shades, and has the roof down (even though it's a cold morning in Inktown). He's been trying to overtake us for the last few minutes, and I've watched with amusement in my rear-view mirror as my deliberately slow driving and impromptu braking has made him angrier and angrier. He finally gets his chance to sail past us and on towards the twilight years of his life.

'Is ink my mid-life crisis?', I ask.

'Yes', replies the Inkette. 'When I first knew you, you weren't interested in ink and fountain pens, so is it some kind of weird interest that's developed as you approach forty? You're hardly going to take up extreme sports, are you, so is this your thing, your equivalent of that idiotic man's sports car, jacket, and shades?'

'You raise an interesting question', I replied.

I've been thinking about the status of my inkthusiasm ever since, and I've been trying to figure out if it's somehow related to the march of time, to my own slouching towards the point at which I'm supposed to lose the plot for a while, arm-wrestle with mortality, kick and scream against the looming of the gloaming. (But when exactly is 'mid-life'? Forty? Forty-five? How would anyone ever know the mid-point of his or her life? As the mighty Roland Barthes puts it, in 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...', 'the "middle of our life" is obviously not an arithmetical point: how, at the moment of writing, could I know my life's total duration so precisely that I could divide it into two equal parts?') And I have, after much deliberation, come to the conclusion that my obsession with finding the perfect ink is not a manifestation of a mid-life crisis.

This is merely because every aspect of life has always been, and will always be, a crisis for me. British television used to air an advertisement for an insurance company whose slogan was 'We won't make a drama out of a crisis'. My motto, by way of contrast, probably ought to be 'I will make a drama out of a crisis. And I will find a crisis where you thought no crisis could possibly exist. Bring me your molehills and watch me turn them into melodramatic mountains. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will soon show them what misfortune is really like.'

Let me give you an example. Every day when I leave for work, my briefcase contains three fountain pens. I spend a great deal of each evening thinking about the colours with which I will fill my pens before I go to sleep. But I also spend a great deal of each train journey to work believing that I have made the wrong choice. Last night, for instance, the combination of Herbin Lie de Thé, Noodler's Prime of the Commons, and Noodler's Eternal Brown seemed like a winner. But as the train pulled wearily out of the station near Ink Towers a little after 8am this morning, a familiar feeling seized me. What were you thinking, you idiot? Lie de Thé and Eternal Brown are a match made in hell. Why don't you just open the window and throw your precious writing instruments onto the tracks? (It's not just ink, by the way. Not long after this kind of thought runs through my mind, I start to believe that my choice of tie and silk pocket square is equally misguided.)

It's not surprising, perhaps, that 'criticism' and 'crisis' share the same linguistic root. My problem (well, one of the many), I think, is that I subject details in which no one is really interested to absurd levels of criticism, thus provoking a general and ongoing state of crisis. For me, vast amounts of time and energy are spent trying to get things like ink, espresso, pocket squares, cufflinks, and shaving creams right. Other issues generally deemed more important by the wider world -- social interaction, professional respect, an opinion on the global economic crisis, for instance -- fall by the wayside as I weigh up the best brown for a Stipula 1.1mm italic nib.

And because I am so out of step with convention, there is little support on offer. I know, for instance, that I could turn on Radio 4 at 10pm and gather enough information to form a solid and untroubled opinion about the G20 summit in London or the situation in Gaza. Help, in other words, is close to hand. But where can I turn at 9.30pm for advice about the inks that I have chosen for tomorrow's working day? Yes, I could ask other inkthusiasts -- members of the Fountain Pen Network, perhaps -- but we're all as lost in the inkwell as each other, aren't we? Yes, I could ask the Inkette, but I know in advance what the response will be. ('You're going to look like an idiot whatever you choose, so it doesn't make any difference.')

But perhaps my eternal state of crisis isn't something to worry about. Wouldn't my life be unbearably boring if I wrote with the same ink day after day? What would I spend my money on if I suddenly found the silk pocket square to end all silk pocket squares? Don't I need the crisis and the relentless self-criticism to carry on? Some experience a crisis of faith, but I think I must have faith in crisis. (Could this wane? Could I one day find myself suffering from a crisis of faith in crisis?) Why confine the crisis to the middle of life? Embrace it. Let it rule all of your days. Hear my cry seize with love crises.

Inks subjected to criticism on public transport today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black; Noodler's Eternal Brown.

Inkvasion of Privacy

Make room for the camera.

British newspapers have been filled in recent days with reports about the arrival of Google's 'Street View' function upon this septic isle. There have, it seems, be numerous outcries about its 'invasion of privacy', and I have just read on the BBC News website that dozens of images have, in the light of complaints, been removed since the facility was launched.

As one who values privacy and invisibility, I was rather shocked to discover that Ink Towers appears in technicolor glory on Street View. Google's camera car must have sneaked past last summer, for the window boxes are shown in full bloom, and there is no sign of the Velux window installed in the roof towards the end of 2008 as part of the epic Ink Towers loft-conversion project. I have given thanks to the great ink bottle in the sky that I was not standing in the doorway when the images were captured. I remain inkvisible ... for now.

When I had finished being outraged, I decided to put UK Street View to good use by virtually revisiting some of my favourite British pen shops. They have featured here by name in previous posts, but never in images. And so I present you, dear readers, with a brief gallery of inky haunts frequented at various moments by the Penquod. (I have had to exclude Cardiff's Pen and Paper, as it is hidden away within an arcade. I cannot even show you the entrance to the passage in question, as the Google vehicle must have been forced to obey the 'No public traffic on St. Mary Street' rule.)



First up is Pens Plus, Oxford. This is perhaps my favourite British pen shop (although I should add that I have yet to visit Nottingham's legendary Pen Sense). I seriously considered stabbing myself with a ballpoint when, one Saturday a couple of years ago, we drove all the way to Oxford from Ink Towers ... only to find that the shop was closed for the week.



Webster's in Petts Wood, near Orpington. I believe that I have described in earlier posts my insane journey during 2005's blistering heatwave from the centre of London (where I was staying for a couple of days) out to Petts Wood, where the UK office of Sailor Pens had kindly sent a couple of 1911 fountain pens for me to try. I came away with the burgundy model. And sunstroke.



Ah, the luxurious entrance to the Burlington Arcade, London. Many expensive delights await within, among them the mouth-watering vintage fountain pens of Pen Friend. Some protest about the prices in the shop, but how much must the rent be in the Burlington Arcade? No trip to London is complete without a longing peep through the window of this charming little shop. And a second mortgage.

More inky images from UK Street View will appear here in time, no doubt, but for now, at the end of a day spent running around after Baby Ink, who has generously decided to develop chickenpox this weekend, I am going to retire to a camera obscura.

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue.

The Soles of Ink Folk

My kind of town.

New York, though, not Chicago. I love the Windy City, yes, and one of the early Ink Quest posts sang its praises, but I have always felt that I should have been born a New Yorker, even though I've never actually visited the city in question. I blame this on a steady diet of Woody Allen films, Seinfeld, and a line in Don DeLillo's White Noise about how 'the art of getting ahead in New York [is] based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way'. (Isn't that what Ink Quest is really all about?)

I have, therefore, always had a grudge against the universe for deciding to have me born in small-town South Wales. The last part of R.S. Thomas' bitter 'Welsh Landscape' sums my feelings up rather nicely, ink fact:

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

And it was while I sat surrounded by 'sham ghosts' and 'an impotent people' last weekend, dear readers, that I truly cursed my non-New-York-ness. I was reading the Sunday Times, and I happened across an extract from the autobiography of Stanley Johnson, father of Boris Johnson, the somewhat idiosyncratic Mayor of London. I have no interest in either figure, but the headline caught my eye: 'Baby Boris: All Blond Hair and Dipped in Ink'. I was compelled to read on.

The ink in question formed part of a remarkable tale about the author seeing his now-famous son for the first time in the maternity ward (which was, we're told, in a hospital 'situated by the river around East 70th Street'):

I was told that the new baby was already safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the nursery in a cot, along with half a dozen other new arrivals. As I peered through the glass, I found it difficult to determine which our child was. The babies were lined up so that all I could see was the soles of their feet, which were uniformly black. Just for a moment I thought there had been a mix-up and somehow Charlotte had given birth to an African–American or Puerto Rican child. I asked a passing nurse for guidance.

“We dip the feet in ink to take their footprints as soon as they are born,” she explained. “We want to avoid mix-ups. You can’t use the babies’ fingerprints. Not when they’re newborn. They’re too soft.”

I have no idea if this inky ritual was standard practice in the hospitals of New York in the 1960s; for all I know, it may still be ink operation. But I do know this: British hospitals did not welcome children into the world with a dip in ink when I was born (less than a decade after Baby Boris). And dipping certainly doesn't happen now, for Baby Ink's identity was marked in the maternity ward in 2007 with a seemingly indestructible electronic device that was strapped around his ankle. Impossible to remove without a special key, this object would set off alarms and cause all doors to lock shut if anyone attempted to take the new arrival past the sensor positioned near the door to the ward. I think we have the device in his 'baby box', but, while I have a clear memory of the nurse removing it from his leg, I have no idea how we then got out of the hospital without the alarms activating. The mystery of the modern world deepens.

If I had been born in New York, then, I would probably have had my tiny, wrinkled feet dipped in ink not long after taking my first breath. While I have spent many of my adult years worshipping at the feet of ink, that is to say, I was deprived of the chance to get my foot in the door at the very beginnink of my life. I got off on the wrong foot. This, no doubt, is why it took me a while to find my feet with writing instruments, why I used ballpoint pens without objection in school, why I did not buy a bottle of ink until I was in my thirties. Because I was not born in New York, it took me years to get my feet wet. (This is surely why I am, like poor Marcel, always ink search of lost time.)

I am going to put my foot down and put my best foot forward: my sole mission from now on will be to convince British maternity wards to dip the soles of babies into ink. The National Health Service will, in time, come to toe the line. Ink will be there at the beginning of every life, and every child will naturally gravitate towards fountain pens. The ballpoint will die as people start to vote with their feet. The soul of ink will survive. Some feat.

Ink underfoot today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (21 March): Honorary Penquod crew member Ike has been in touch to inkform me that I am clearly onto something. He was, he notes, born in Atlanta, Georgia, some years before Boris Johnson popped into the world, and he still has a card from the hospital that displays his mother's fingerprints and the prints of both of his feet. (The practice was clearly not confined to New York, then.) A decade later, he adds, he received his first bottle of ink and a green Esterbrook J fountain pen. This latter development can only have been because, as he puts it, ink has been in his blood from the very beginning.

Comink Relief

I have been laughed out of court.

Today, dear readers, is Comic Relief Day in the United Kingdom. As those of you who are not based in this green, unpleasant land may not know, once a year we are all invited to 'do something funny for money'. All funds raised are then used in various campaigns to take a few steps closer towards, as the charity's slogan puts it, 'a just world free from poverty'.

One very common way of raising money for the cause is wearing 'silly' clothes to work. This, then, is the day on which a simple trip to the bank becomes an encounter with the cast of Toy Story ('Your overdraft has just plunged to infinity and beyond!'), or buying a train ticket takes twice as long because every transaction must be accompanied by a song from the cast of The Sound of Music ('The hills are alive ... with the sound of an overpriced ticket that is the result of Thatcher's criminal privatization of the railways!')

While I have nothing against raising money for the cause in question, I do find this yearly ritual rather unsettling (and not just because I instinctively recoil from any injunction to have fun and be wacky). I autistically like things to be the same as they usually are, so suddenly having to buy my predictable lunch from someone dressed as an armadillo is deeply disturbing to me. Ink fact, I try not to go out at all on Comic Relief Day. Stay in the bunker. All this will pass, just like Christmas, royal weddings, and the Olympics.

This year, however, there is no escape. I normally work at home on Fridays, but today I have to go into the office. Worse still, we were informed earlier in the week that Baby Ink is expected to wear 'silly clothing' to nursery today, ideally in the colour of red (to match Comic Relief's famous 'red nose'). At 7.15am, then, he sat downstairs and ate his breakfast while wearing a (red) Welsh rugby shirt (because sport and nationalism are silly), a pair of trousers that are too short for his legs, and several Comic Relief stickers.

As I studied his strange appearance, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. 'Why', I said to the Inkette, 'don't we hang a biro around his neck? That would make him look really silly.'

The Inkette took a sip of her coffee, sighed, and said, 'There's no need. He's your son, so people will automatically know that he's an idiot to be laughed at.'

And thus I made my own special contribution to Comic Relief.

Inks in non-zany use today: Conway Stewart Blue; Sailor Brown.

Book-end?

'What are you doing?'

The Inkette has just entered the living room, and I've spotted her slipping The Book of Ink into her handbag. (The Book of Ink, for those new to Ink Quest, is the small Clairefontaine notebook in which I keep a record of every ink that passes through my hands. The photograph displayed above shows the first page of the section devoted to blues. Obsessively curious inkthusiasts may wish to know that I have divided the book into 'Browns', 'Blues', and 'Other'.)

'I'm putting this notebook into my bag', comes the reply.

'But that's the Book of Ink. What are you doing with it?'

'I've been making some notes in it, and I'm taking it into work tomorrow morning.'

'But that's the Book of Ink!'

'The what?'

'The Book of Ink. It has all of my ink samples in it.'

'Oh, I did see some scribbling, but I thought it was just scrap paper. It was by the side of the computer, and I couldn't find anything else to write on.'

'Just scrap paper? But it's the Book of Ink!'

'So I gather. I'm still taking it into work with me.'

'But you can't! It's the Book of Ink! It has all of my ink samples in it.'

'So I gather. I'm still taking it into work with me.'

'But what have you done to it? Have you scribbled all over my samples?'

'No, I've just used a page at the very back of the book to jot down some points.'

I decide that I need to see the damage for myself, so I cross the room and take the notebook out of the Inkette's bag. My precious samples are still inktact at the front of the book, but, sure enough, the final page is now covered with the Inkette's writing. In a cruel irony, she's used one of my fountain pens to make the notes.

'Well, it's ruined now', I say. 'Years of work have gone down the drain. I'll have to start all over again in a new book.'

'But it's just ink', the Inkette wearily replies.

I'm about to open the telephone directory to the section marked 'Marriage Guidance Counselling' ('Hello. Yes, I think my wife and I are suffering from inkreconcilable differences...') when I have an idea.

'Fine. I'll tear out the final page, and you can then take just that to work', I suggest.

'But that will make the front page fall out. You'll lose your valuable ink samples'. The Inkette now seems to be enjoying herself.

'Okay, well, I'll get a Stanley knife and slice out the last page, leaving just a thin margin in place.'

'What a good idea.'

And so, dear readers, this is precisely what I did.



The Book of Ink will live to see another day, but I don't think that I can claim to have brought the Inkette to book. As far as she's concerned, it's still just a collection of pointless scribbles.

I offer this tale of horror and salvation because I know that many inkthusiasts who read this blog are in relationships with signifinkcant others who mock our obsession with ink. (The Inkette is very fond of calling us 'inkoids', for inkstance.) Should you ever find yourself in a situation such as the one described above, dear readers, you can simply take a leaf out of my book.

Inks in use today: Conway Stewart Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

PS (12 March, 6pm): The Inkette has just read today's entry and has informed me that I have completely misrepresented her. She was, she insists, much ruder than I have suggested.

An Ointment

'I am writing on a table with a green cloth, lit by two candles, and taking my ink from an ointment jar'.

I have just stumbled across these words in a letter written by Gustave Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet on 1 December 1849. The young Flaubert, who had yet to make his name with Madame Bovary, was in Cairo; his infamous travels in Egypt had just begun, and he had recently sent his mother a note in which he likened the sand of the desert at sunset to ink.

I have suspected for some time that Flaubert was an inkthusiast. A previous Ink Quest entry recalled, for instance, some of the inky moments in Madame Bovary, such as the heroine's noting that arsenic tastes like ink. The hilarious Bouvard and Pécuchet, meanwhile, inkorporates a spillage of ink and revolves around two copyists who have fine handwriting. And the author himself only appears to become emotional about his impending departure for Egypt when he has to pack away his pens and papers. (See the travel notes relating to his journey from Croisset to Cairo for this latter inkident.)

The image of Flaubert dipping his pen into an ink-filled ointment jar that sits in front of him on a well-catalogued table is a wonderful one, partly because it has reminded me that inkthusiasts devoted to fine fountain pens and elegant colours always know precisely where their ink is coming from, simply because they probably spent hours considering which shade to use, and then filled the pen with care and patience. To love writing instruments, in other words, is to be aware of originks. Users of ballpoint pens and other pre-filled, disposal atrocities, by way of complete contrast, know nothing about where their ink (I use the term loosely) has come from and how it found its way into the pen. Their role in proceedings is minimal. They're writing blind, with history scribbled out.

For once, I know how they feel: one of my pens currently contains an ink without a name, without a past, without a source. How on earth have I allowed myself to wander inkto such terrible territory? I shall enlighten you, dear readers.

I was rather traumatized to learn last week that honorary Penquod crew member Arty had lost his Parker fountain pen. Perhaps in an attempt to negate the trauma, Arty reported that he was going to take the opportunity to upgrade to a better model. He identified a budget and asked my advice. I pointed him in the direction of the Pelikan M200, which is, in my opinion, the finest fountain pen available for less than £50. But poor Arty immediately found himself facing a problem: finding a nearby pen shop with a decent selection of Pelikans for careful trial is impossible.

I decided to break the golden rule of nibbery. Yes, dear readers, I lent him my M200 for several days. I can't say that I slept a wink during this time, but the anxiety was worth it, for Arty soon reported back that he was now ready to purchase a Pelikan. (He's actually going for the M215.) By the end of the week, my M200 was safely back in my hands and the world, thanks to my selfless action, contained a new Pelikfan.

My pen came back to me without a scratch, but Arty had refilled it. I'd invited him to do this if the existing Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon ran out, so I wasn't remotely troubled by his actions, but what did take me by surprise was the colour of ink chosen by the new Pelikfan. I very rarely use black -- ink fact, I believe that I have no more than a small sample or two of this shade in my collection -- so the sight of the colour coming from the nib of my M200 was most unusual. Beyond that, I soon became obsessed by figuring out the identity of the ink. Brown inks I can usually name at fifty paces, but blacks are unknown territory for me. I suspect that Arty used Parker Quink Black, but I might be wrong. Cross? Waterman? Diamine? (All of these brands are available in the pen shop that lies not too far from Arty's house.)

Not knowing the source of the ink in my pen -- or even its name -- threw my entire life into disarray. Yes, I could have emailed or texted Arty to discover the truth, but I don't think that being inkformed would have entirely restored the order of things. I am normally in obsessive, autistic control of as many parts of my life as possible, and I am accustomed to being inkvolved in virtually every part of the writing process that occupies so much of my time. Suddenly finding that one of my favourite pens contained an unknown ink, and simultaneously realizing that I had not been involved in its selection or insertion, catapulted me into the realm of the unknown and the uncontrolled. The origink was unclear. The 'I' in ink had become a little smudged. An exinkstential crisis, all in all.

From now on, then, I'll be keeping a close eye on the origin of my inks. 'Origink, therefore I am' will be my mantra. If I have to follow Flaubert and dip into an ointment pot every few lines, so be it. (But how will the flow bear up?) Ink fact, I'm going to take to carrying such an item with me wherever I go. And so ends the fable of the anointment of an ointment.

Inks in ointment pot today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil; Sailor Brown; Aurora Blue.

PS (3 March, 9.20am): A new honorary Penquod crew member who shall go by the pseudonym 'Ken' has been in touch with some crucial questions relating to the mysterious ink in my Pelikan M200:

What if Arty matched manufacturer of ink to manufacturer of pen and used Pelikan 4001 Black?

This is possible, of course, but I can think of nowhere in the city that sells Pelikan ink, and I don't believe that Arty has yet been drawn into the all-consuming world of inkternet purchases.

What if Arty used - the horror! -- india ink?

Again, this is possible, but I can see no signs of catastrophic clogging in the pen, so I'm pretty certain that Arty filled it with fountain-pen-friendly ink?

What if I cannot ask Arty to be sure of anything?

Ah, the postmodern condition. To be sure, I cannot be sure that Arty is sure of anything. If anything, anything is sure to be anything but sure.

What does it take to become an honorary crew member of the Penquod?

What are the thirty-nine steps? What is the speed of dark? Did you sleep well? ('No, I made a couple of mistakes.') I'm afraid that I cannot reveal the answer to this question. I think that there's a moment in an old Philip K. Dick novel, possibly A Maze of Death, where a character is able to ask any question he wants, with the promise that a truthful answer will be given. He chooses to ask if God exists. He's told that he can't be given a reply because wouldn't believe the answer.

Label -- damn! -- sans merci

Show ... and tell.

I promised in Sunday's post to offer a full report on my visit to last weekend's South-West Pen Show; I have now finally found time to put pen to paper and then words to screen.

Roland Barthes, my great hero, was apparently uninterested in the outskirts of cities. Whenever he visited London, he would always ask Annette Lavers, his guide and translator, to take him to Piccadilly Circus. '[I]t's only the centre of towns which interests me', he would say. I'm fond of what lies at the heart of a city, but I'm also fascinated by what lies further out, in the margins, at the limits, at the point where the city starts to fade away and into something else. One of the things I like most about arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, for instance, is the train journey down into the city through the suburbs, through the places where tourists don't usually venture. Am I, I always ask myself, in Paris yet? How about now? Or now? On my last trip to the city, in fact, I had to visit one of the universities miles from the city centre. This was both thrilling and disorienting. As I stepped out of the métro station and waited for the car that had been sent to collect me, I looked around and realized that I had no idea where I was. I could see none of the familiar Parisian landmarks. My pocket map of the city was useless: I had wandered off the page, out of the grid. Things only got stranger when I finally arrived at the campus to find nothing but buildings in the North African style. Before my guide explained that the architects had consciously sought to reproduce Morocco in Paris, I had been anxiously asking myself, 'Just how far have I wandered from the Bastille?'

Why am I telling you this? Well, dear readers, I discovered a day or two before the South-West Pen Show that the Hilton hotel where the event took place is miles from the centre of Bristol. Actually, I'd say -- without really understanding the finer points of the city's sprawling geography -- that it's located at the very limits of the town, just at the point where the M4 and M5 motorway interchange forms a mighty concrete barrier.



To add to the sense of strangeness, the hotel appeared to be marooned in the middle of an industrial estate, which, because it was Sunday, was deserted. I stepped out of the ink mobile, looked around, and wondered where on earth I was. Bristol, yes, but not the centre of Bristol, not the part with which I am familiar. I wasn't even sure that I'd come to the right place. Was the whole event a hoax?

The hotel's receptionist confirmed that the show was indeed underway, and I was directed to the relevant room. The air was thick with pens. I thought I could hear the sound of a nib being ground. I paid the entry fee and was handed a small adhesive label. 'That's your name tag', said the man. He must have noticed the expression on my face, for he immediately added, 'But you don't have to put your name on it. It's just a way for people to know who you are. If you want.'

I immediately felt that I was in an awkward social dilemma. I didn't want to cause offence by handing the label back, but I also have a profound aversion to wearing a name tag. In fact, I hate being called upon to identify myself in any way. I find being asked my name by a stranger deeply intrusive, and my instinctive response is, 'Why do you need to know? What difference does it make? Why is it any of your business?' I have actually taken to using pseudonyms in busy branches of Starbucks when asked for my name so that it can be attached to the espresso cup. I was 'Roland' a couple of days ago, appropriately enough. This is all, no doubt, part of my anti-social condition. If I surrender my name, aren't I agreeing to take part in conversations and human interaction? (Let me be perfectly clear: this has nothing to do with a sense of superiority. Trust me, you simply don't want me to be included in your conversations and friendly behaviour. I'll inevitably ruin things, so make sure to keep me at a distance. With this in mind, I have deleted the Ink Quest Twitter account, as I quickly discovered that Twitter is designed for interaction.)

When he was not busy exploring Piccadilly Circus, Roland Barthes taught at the Collège de France. In a lecture given as part of the course on The Neutral in 1977-8, he spoke of how any form of question ('What is your name?', for example) can be unsettling:

Now, what I want to point out is that there is always a terrorism of the question; a power is implied in every question. The question denies the right not to know or the right to indeterminate desire.

Any question, he continues, ‘entraps one in an alternative’: to answer or not to answer. And while the latter might seem like an obvious way to resist the terrorism of the question, simply refusing to reply, notes Barthes, ‘very quickly leads the one who doesn’t answer to death, erasure, or madness’. ‘What we must do’, he concludes, ‘[…] is to learn how to denaturalize questioning’, and he offers a wonderful example of how this task might be accomplished. In the summer of 1977, he recalls, he greeted a young woman in a grocery shop in Urt by saying, ‘The weather was nice yesterday’. In reply to such a comment, he notes, ‘one might expect yes/no (and rather more yes, since the subject is not conflictual!)’. He was surprised, then, when the woman replied, ‘It was hot’. This response, Barthes observes, ‘neither affirms nor denies the nice weather, [but] displaces the paradigm toward another paradigm, indeed another value’. The terrorism of the question ('The weather was nice yesterday, wasn't it? Answer me on my terms.') is thus neutralized.

Because the blank label handed to me at the entrance to the pen show was implicitly asking me two questions ('What is your name? Where do you live?'), I decided to take Barthes' advice. I accepted the badge, attached it to my coat, but left it blank, as you can see from the photograph displayed at the top of this post. I noticed a couple of people looking at it with slightly puzzled expressions on their faces, so I can only conclude that I managed to neutralize the terrorism of its questions.

I enjoyed anonymously looking at the pens on sale, and my mouth watered on several occasions at the sight of some rather decadent Parker Vacumatics and various Omas models. As it was my very first visit to a pen show, I was happy simply to be surrounded by so many magnificent fountain pens. A penoply.

I was, however, a little disappointed that there were not more varieties of ink on display. (The Inkette did wearily remind me that it was a pen show, but honorary Penquod crew member Anna put it rather well when she said that a pen is nothing without ink.) I saw one stand with a large selection of Diamine colours, but not much else, so I came away empty-handed. I had probably set my sights a little high, of course, as I had fantasies of table after table groaning beneath the weight of exotic inks not usually seen the UK. Perhaps what's needed, then, is an Ink Show. Pens would be allowed, yes, but ink would take priority. No one would be asked his or name upon entry. And the only labels handed out would read, 'Keep your distance'.

Inks in use today: Sailor Brown; Aurora Blue.

PS (4.20pm): A PhD student whom I have managed to convert to fountain pens, real ink, and expensive notebooks ('Ditch the biro or the thesis gets failed, son') has brought my attention to a rather terrifying BBC News story about the death of handwriting. Click here to read all about our frail faith, our craft or sullen art. Keep writing on those spindrift pages, dear readers!

Followink

Following up, briefly.

I awoke this morning to find my email inbox filled with messages from Twitter. Each one informed me that a named individual is now 'following' me. I can't decide if this makes me the messiah or the hunted, but it hasn't helped my habitual sense of paranoia and persecution.

Coincidentally, I read in the Sunday Times yesterday evening that the only people who use Twitter are those who have no real sense of identity. This seems perfectly fitting, as I've always been fond of a moment in Kafka's diaries where he asks himself what he has in common with other Jews. I don't even have much in common with myself, he concludes. (I'm paraphrasing; I don't have the book to hand.) I feel the same, and I have no desire to have a coherent sense of self. Identity is something to bury, in my opinion, which is probably why I spend my life trying to avoid myself. (As usual, a moment from Curb Your Enthusiasm spring to mind. Larry David, caught whistling Wagner, is denounced as 'a self-loathing Jew'. 'Well', he replies, 'I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.')

I don't know, then, what the Twitter followers are following. I seek to be nothing that can be followed. A ghost, it follows? (Inkidentally, I've always loved the fact that, thanks to a curious overlap between the verbs être and suivre, the French 'je suis' can mean either 'I am' or 'I follow'. Jacques Derrida makes much of this in his brilliant L'Animal que donc je suis.)

More to follow. À suivre.

Inks in use today: Sailor Grey; Aurora Blue.