Ceci n'est pas une 'update'

An update about updates. It's all highly postmodern.

A browser of Ink Quest who has picked up the narrative fairly recently asked me a basic question about the blog today: what is the Penquod? I can now see, dear readers old and new, that it could be quite difficult to keep up with all of the names and references that stretch back across nearly two years and 200 entries. (Even I sometimes have trouble remembering which pseudonym belongs to which real-life inkthusiast or friend.) In true 'Previously on Desperate Housewives' style, then, I thought that I would take the opportunity to provide a handy guide to some of the names (I couldn't possibly catalogue them all) that make regular appearances in Ink Quest:

- The Penquod: imaginary ship in which I sail around the world in search of the perfect ink. Modelled on the Pequod.
- Ink Towers: home of the Inkette, Baby Ink, the author of this blog, and three cats. Modelled on Xanadu.
- The Inkette: weary wife of the author of this blog. Likes to profess a love of ballpoint pens just to cause marital strife.
- Baby Ink: three-month-old son of the author of this blog. Oedipally uninterested in ink.
- Stefan: longtime crew member of the Penquod. Sends regular pun-laden missives from New York. Prone to wild pseudo-scientific speculation.
- Anna: crew member of the Penquod. Sends delightful parcels from Seattle. Responsible for the great Poussière de Lune outbreak of 2007.
- Gerry: crew member of the Penquod. Sends beautiful vintage ink from Michigan. Uses magnificent paper.
- Eileen: crew member of the Penquod. Seems to buy a new pen every other week. Owner of the world's most beautiful West Highland Terrier.
- Noelle: crew member of the Penquod. Incredibly generous with her collection of Parker Penman inks.
- Daphne: the newest crew member of the Penquod. Has an office next to mine. Has recently returned to fountain pens some years after a traumatic childhood inkident involving stained hands. A survivor.
- Carlos: colleague and sceptical reader of Ink Quest. Likes to correct my errors. Raises eyebrows and sighs a lot.
- Hugh: reader of Ink Quest. Lover of typography. Hugely enlivened the deck of the Penquod by recommending Loxley's book on the history of type.
- The Medinkette: younger sister of the Inkette. Trainee medic. Says that she would imagine the author of Ink Quest, if she didn't know me, to be a tubby, balding, middle-aged man with no friends.
- Nixon: dear, dear friend from undergraduate days. Early advocate of the Lamy Safari. Now writes penless television reviews for a national newspaper straight onto a computer. Brought down and sent to Accident & Emergency by the waves of Watergate Bay in summer 2006 while the residents of Ink Towers looked on, snacking, from Jamie Oliver's restaurant. Took up snowboarding instead. And crashed.

One good list deserves another, I suppose, so here is an up-to-date inkventory of the colours -- sample vials excluded -- currently held in the hold of the Penquod:

Abraxas Anthrazit
Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon
Conway Stewart Blue
Conway Stewart Brown
Diamine Blue-Black
Diamine Dark Brown
Diamine Golden Brown
Diamine Grey
Diamine Indigo
Diamine Prussian Blue
Diamine Royal Blue
Diamine Sepia
Herbin Gris Nuage
Herbin Lie de Thé
Herbin Poussière de Lune
Herbin Terre de Feu
Herbin Vert Olive
Levenger Cocoa
Mont Blanc Bordeaux
Mont Blanc Sepia
Montegrappa Red
Noodler's Black
Noodler's Britannia's Blue Waves
Noodler's Eternal Brown
Noodler's Lexington Gray
Noodler's Nightshade
Noodler's Sequoia
Noodler's Walnut
Omas Blue
Omas Sepia
Parker Quink Blue
Parker Royal Permanent Blue (vintage)
Pilot Black
Private Reserve Avacado (sic)
Private Reserve Chocolat
Private Reserve Tanzanite
Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux
Rohrer and Klingner Sepia
Sailor Blue
Sailor Brown
Sheaffer Skrip Brown
Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat
Visconti Brown
Waterman Florida Blue
Waterman Havana
Waterman Blue-Black.

I should probably end with a 'Next time on Ink Quest' trailer, shouldn't I, dear readers? So here goes: Next time on Ink Quest, the Penquod encounters a pile of empty ink cartridges while sailing down Cardiff's Senghenydd Road.... Don't forget to tune ink.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Diamine Blue-Black.

Burnt Offerink

I've never liked summer.

Regular readers of Ink Quest who have become accustomed to my miserable, misanthropic ways will probably not be surprised to learn that my favourite season is winter. I love the sight of bare trees and frozen earth, and I'm much happier in heavy, layered winter clothes than lightweight summer outfits. My main sartorial squabble with the latter season concerns coats: I hate going out without at least a jacket, so hot spells spell nothing but anxiety. And then there's my dislike of sitting or lying on beaches. I can never understand the point of this activity, or even what I'm supposed to do while my delicate flesh is being assaulted by the sun. I'm extremely proud of the fact that Ink Towers is situated a short walk from a beach that is covered with pebbles. The complete lack of sand means that it's basically impossible to lie down and sunbathe, which renders the place hostile, cold, and devoid of people even when there's a heatwave. You can, dear readers, probably blame this general winterest of mine on teenage years spent listening to Joy Division albums and stomping around moodily in a long black coat. (Come to think of it, the cover of 'Atmosphere' depicts what I would describe as the perfect holiday destination.)

There is, however, one summer ritual to which I always look forward with a sunny disposition: the first barbecue of the year. It's not really the food that excites me, although vegetarian barbecue options are much more appealing than they were, say, ten years ago. What I like about the inaugural open-air feast, rather, is the fire itself. I don't mean this in a macho 'Me man, me burn things' way; I merely like sitting daintily and watching the flames rise, flicker, and fall. And I believe that this has something to do with my love of ink.

As I sat mesmerized yesterday evening by the glowing coals of the first Ink Towers barbecue of 2007, in fact, my thoughts turned to the sacred liquid to which this blog is devoted. It must have been the whiteness of their heat (captured in the photograph shown above) that did it, for I found myself specifically thinking about the mythical Noodler's Whiteness of the Whale ink that has caused much excitement over at the Fountain Pen Network in recent days. What has really got the inkthusiasts all fired up is the fact that this is the world's first white ink for fountain pens. And I, as the captain of the good ship Penquod, am naturally interested in any ink that invokes the spirit of Moby-Dick, even if I can't actually think of an occasion upon which I would ever use the shade in question. (Honorary crew member Stefan has told me, inkidentally, that the box in which Whiteness of the Whale is sold comes stamped with the word 'Pequod'. He also said that, after countless days on the deck of the Penquod, this now looks like a typo to him. I am honoured to have eclipsed Herman Melville.)

But flames and ink are linked in a much more fundamental way, too: ink, etymologically speaking, is something that burns. The Oxford English Dictionary records that 'ink' is derived from the Latin term 'encaustum', which leads back to the Greek word (which Blogger will not, it seems, allow me to reproduce in its original form) for 'the purple ink used by the Greek and Roman emperors for their signatures', which in turn comes from the Greek for 'to burn in (see ENCAUSTIC)'. If you look up 'encaustic' in the OED, you'll find the following: 'Pertaining to, or produced by, the process of "burning in": a. with reference to the ancient method of painting with wax colours, and fixing them by means of fire; also to modern processes of similar nature ... b. in wider sense, with reference to any process by which pigments are "burnt in", e.g. enamelling, painting on pottery, etc. encaustic brick, tile: one decorated with patterns formed with different coloured clays, inlaid in the brick or tile, and burnt with it.'

The word 'ink' incubates incineration, then. 'Caustic' and 'ink' are melted together at the root. My passion for ashen, discussed in the entry of 14 July 2007, now makes even more sense. I should have marked that burning love letter 'return to cinder'.

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

Wall in a Day's Work

Can genes travel through walls?

Yesterday's entry discussed my complete failure to pass on genetically my inkthusiasm to Baby Ink. I accounted for this in terms of Richard Dawkins' theory of the selfish gene, but I now suspect another explanation to be more accurate. The gene that makes me love ink has, it seems, moved sideways. Through a wall.

The person who has an office next to mine has not worked here for very long -- she has appeared in Ink Quest on a previous occasion under the pseudonym 'Daphne', inkidentally -- but I soon discovered that she had a notable obsession with stationery. Within weeks we were discussing fountain pens, and Daphne was brave enough to recount a terrible trauma that occurred earlier in her life when purple ink leaked from a Parker fountain pen all over her hands. This traumatic event, I decided, was a wall that was preventing her from owning a fountain pen at present. (She confessed under analysis that she preferred other types of pen -- not ballpoints, thankfully -- and mechanical pencils.)

When I discovered a few weeks ago that Daphne was planning to buy a new pencil on a trip to Manchester, I started a campaign for an accompanying fountain pen to be purchased. Freud regularly writes of resistance mounted in analysis by those who have experienced profound trauma, and it's fair to say that Daphne was sceptical for some time. 'But it will leak', she was heard to cry on more than on occasion.

My constant reassurance that the purple ink leakage was not her fault, that it was a thing of the past, and that it was time to move on and live life to the full has finally paid off, however, for Daphne has this morning come into my office proudly to show off her new acquisitions from the Manchester branch of The Pen Shop: a Sheaffer Prelude pencil and matching fountain pen. I think, too, that she's secretly coming to prefer the pen to the pencil. (There's a terrible joke waiting to be made here about being 'easily lead', but I wouldn't dream of stooping so low.) I have offered to provide samples of exciting colours from the hold of the Penquod, and I believe that we are just one step away from complete closure and miraculous conversion to the Church of Ink.

I may have failed with Baby Ink, then, but I have managed to save another wandering soul inkstead. My ink-loving gene has, instead of passing from father to son, travelled sideways through a brick wall to the next office. A case, you might say, of lateral inking.

Ink in use today: Penquod Wall Nut (a thrilling mixture of Noodler's Black and Noodler's Eternal Brown; the result is not unlike Noodler's Walnut, but with added nuance).

Inkheritance

Richard Dawkins was right: genes are selfish.

One of the regular readers of Ink Quest, Noelle, recently asked me how Baby Ink, now almost three months old, is getting on. The answer, dear readers, is that he's absolutely fine. But while he has effortlessly mastered the art of projectile vomiting and screaming so loudly in queues that I am forced to leave the premises, he has a lot to learn when it comes to ink.

I took him into a pen shop for the first time on Saturday. I realize that there are more conventional father-son rituals on offer -- the first sporting event, the first arm wrestle, the first chewing of tobacco, and so on -- but bonding over ink has, perhaps predictably, always been top of my list.

It was with some excitement, then, that I wheeled his pram into the shop. He was fast asleep as we crossed the threshold, but I was convinced that he would immediately wake up and start cooing in a state of rapture when he sensed that ink bottles were near. To my horror, his eyes remained closed throughout, even when he was just inches from the Diamine display. I returned home and gave serious thought to my evident failure as a parent.

I had taken it for granted that the obsession would be genetically inherited. He looks uncannily like me at some moments, so he's clearly taken on board some of my DNA, but why has the inkthusiasm not been similarly transmitted? At first I assumed that he'd somehow inherited the Inkette's complete disdain for the world of ink. Would he grow up, then, I wondered, to be someone who uses ballpoint pens just to annoy me? Has he inherited not my love of ink but his mother's passion for handbags? Should all of my plans for future father-and-son outings to pen shows and shops be scrapped and replaced in my mind by scenes in which he asks for more pocket money so that he can pay for the 'boho chic' handbag that he's just won on eBay? (Please don't read any kind of homophobia into my comments, dear readers. As far as I'm concerned, he can do anything he wants with anyone he wants when he grows up, and I won't be remotely concerned if he wants to walk around carrying a handbag, but I will call in the professionals and have him medicated/blessed/exorcised/brainwashed if he says that he doesn't adore ink.)

But just when I was on the verge of concluding that the universe is set against me even at the level of the gene, I remembered the theory that Richard Dawkins put forward in The Selfish Gene about the genes selected for transmission from generation to generation are those that serve their own interests. Dawkins adds that the interests of genes can override those of the individual organism to whom they 'belong', of course, but I've come to the conclusion that my own selfishness is so strong when it comes to ink that it has intervened and refused to allow Baby Ink to inherit my obsession.

What has led me to believe this? Well, dear readers, it has occurred to me since the weekend that Baby Ink's development into an obsessive inkthusiast could put my precious collection of ink in peril. If, my logic now runs, he grows up to be a child who demands to play with ink, I will find myself in the position of being called upon to share. I may come home one day to discover that one of my precious colours has been used for scribbling or finger-painting. Worse still, I might open my vast ink box and find it empty because the bottles have been drained and used as part of a collage for the school Eisteddfod.

In other words, my genes have acted selfishly to defend the inks amassed in the hold of the Penquod. The obsession must remain exclusively mine if things are not to start slipping down an ominous helix. Chromophilia survives at the level of the chromosome.

Inks in use today: Mont Blanc Bordeaux; Noodler's Black; Noodler's Eternal Brown.

Eau, Cuisine

C'est encre-dible!

Because I am something of a Francophile, I have been using Herbin Poussière de Lune ink to mark Bastille Day this weekend. With every glorious dusty purple word that emerges from my nib, I have been saluting the good people of France, praising them for having a proper revolution that put the English 'Um, well, we're not, um, sure what would be the polite thing to do, so let's get rid of the monarchy ... and then bring it back for good' fiasco to shame. Salut, camarades!

But, dear readers, I have noticed something un peu bizarre about Poussière de Lune: it is both washable and permanent. I discovered this strange duplicity when I used it this morning to jot down a recipe for carrot and coriander soup on an index card. While I was busy cooking, I somehow managed to turn over the index card so that it ended up lying face down on the kitchen worktop in a small pool of water. When I spotted what had happened and rescued the card, I noticed that the ink had smudged onto the wooden work surface. The picture posted above is offered as Exhibit A.

Now, all inkthusiasts know that Herbin ink, while très jolie, is not permanent. I have, for instance, ruined a page of notes taken in Lie de Thé by spilling coffee onto them. I expected, then, that the mark on the kitchen worktop would wipe away in an instant. Mais non, dear readers, for what you see in the photograph above is a stain that has been scrubbed repeatedly. The ink would appear to have taken up permanent residence.

Readers of a scientific disposition will probably have a complicated explanation that involves a lengthy detour through chemistry. (Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan is, no doubt, consulting his periodic table and brewing up an intricate theory as I write these words, in fact.) But I, as regular readers of Ink Quest will know, have little time for science. (I believe, in fact, that it was, together with mathematics, invented as part of a global conspiracy against me.) I present you, then, with a wildly (yet typically) speculative explanation of Poussière de Lune's curious duplicity.

It all comes down to a strange collision of languages, I feel. The ink that found its way onto my worktop came from a pen. One of the Welsh words for wood is 'pren', which is 'pen' with an added 'r'. And the French way of saying the letter 'r' is exactly what is heard in the first syllable of 'Herbin'. In other words, there's a simple (trans-linguistic) formula:

'pen'+'Herbin'-'bin'=wood.

Meanwhile, the Welsh word for kitchen (the room in which the bizarre inkident occurred) is 'cegin'. I can't help noticing that the second syllable of this word is 'ink' without a 'k'. (This is not at all surprising, as Welsh has no 'k'.) In fact, if you loop the end of the word back to the beginning, you get 'inc', which is more than halfway to 'incio', the Welsh term for ink. Furthermore, the first syllable of cegin is one of the Welsh words for mouth. Some men, although I am not one of them, choose to grow above their mouths a moustache, and 'tache', of course, is the French word for stain. Here, then, comes the second (more complex) formula:

cegin+k-ink+unshaven top lip-'mous'=stain.

Now that I have solved the mystery of the wood stain, I expect the smudge to disappear from my kitchen. If it doesn't, I may have to invoke the spirit of 1789 and get out the guillotine.

Ink in use today: Herbin Poussière de Lune.

Be Still My Beating Hearth

I have a passion for ashen.

Ink Quest has recorded, for nearly two years, the endless search for the perfect ink. There have been many contenders, many pretenders, but the Penquod still sails the seas, unsatisfied, restless, convinced that The One is just over the horizon.

One of the longstanding obsessions is vintage colouring. What I crave, what I pine for with beating heart and fevered brow, is a modern ink that recalls in its shading the past. I want my words to look as if they have stepped out of ancient days.

I have, therefore, often fallen into the arms of colours that have a decidedly ashen quality. If I think of the modern inks in my collection that hint at temps perdu, I think of Diamine Indigo, Diamine Grey, Rohrer and Klingner Sepia, and Herbin Poussière de Lune. What these shades share, for all their differences, is a certain touch of ash.

But none of these glorious colours is The One, for I'm still searching for the perfect modern ink with a vintage tint. I've now realized, though, that I have been too metaphorical with the ashes; I need ash itself.

The revelation came from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a novel with a selection of delicious inky moments: Charles imagines his daughter with ink-stained cuffs; Rodolphe fakes emotion in his cruel letter to Emma by smudging his words with a drop of water, hoping that she'll imagine the cause to have been floods of tears; the bailiff arrives to draw up an inventory of property to be seized from the Bovary residence with an inkhorn in his hand; and, as I mentioned in my post of 4 July, the arsenic with which Emma eventually takes her own life tastes like ink. But it was another inkident in the book which caught my eye yesterday evening. In the second section of the novel, Emma receives a letter from her father. 'The writing must have been dried with ash from the grate', we read, 'for a little grey dust trickled from the letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she could see her father bending over the hearth to reach for the tongs.'

I don't know enough about mid-nineteenth-century French writing habits to be certain whether or not using ash to dry ink was a common practice. Flaubert's novel makes no suggestion that Emma's father had done anything unusual, so I'm tempted to conclude that ash was regularly used in this manner. (Is ash, on reflection, what Sir Humphrey, in Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, sprinkles on a freshly written note in a moment which led me, in the Ink Quest entry of 18 April 2007, to consider the acquisition of a thurible?)

I think, then, that I will need, in the name of a genuine vintage aesthetic, to start scattering ashes upon the pages of my notebooks. But from where will I obtain the magic dust? Could I cut a deal with the nearest crematorium? The local fire station? Or do I, in fact, have just what I need much, much closer to home? Ink Towers was built in 1901, so it has a fireplace in the living room, as shown in the picture posted above. I believe, too, that the chimney is still functional. Should I secretly disconnect the modern gas central heating and fire up the fire? The Inkette regularly claims that the house is too cold, and fights over the thermostat are a regular event. (I like a chilly, gothic ambience; she prefers something resembling Helen and Morty Seinfeld's Del Boca Vista condo.) I could, pretending that I have finally come around to her way of thinking, have the fire blazing every hour of the day. I could, that is to say, have my own copious supply of cinders for the optimum vintage writing experience.

Tongs are looking up. I have high hopes, fire in my belly, grate expectations.

Inks in use today: Herbin Poussière de Lune; Omas Blue.

Type-cast

I owe my very existence to the typewriter.

I've just been watching a rather interesting documentary about the history of typewriters on BBC4. (There are very few things that I genuinely admire about British culture, but I adore the way that the BBC will schedule a programme about typewriters during prime time evening viewing. I am happy to pay £135.50 a year to own a television if it means that such glorious eclecticism can flourish, and I propose the restoration of the gallows for those who break the law by owning a TV without a licence.) As the narrator was discussing the phenomenon of typing pools -- do such things still exist? -- it occurred to me that I would never have been born were it not for the invention of the typewriter.

My mother, you see, was a typist and shorthand secretary who trained during the glory years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the early 1960s she found work in the typing pool at the local police station, where my father was a young constable. One night in 1963, at a work social event, they met. Some years later, I arrived in the world, crying out for my bottle of ink. It was typing that brought them together and created me, in other words. To rewrite (or retype) Descartes: my mother typed, therefore I am.

The more I think about this, the more my obsession with ink makes sense to me. Not only did typewriting produce me, but one of my favourite childhood toys, long before I could even distinguish one letter from another, was an old typewriter that we had at home. I can't remember the make, but it was a solid metal behemoth with a delicate green casing. I loved nothing better as an infant (literally in-fans) than to hammer away at the keys and watch the gibberish emerge on the paper that I'd somehow rolled into the machine. In my naughtier moments, I would pull out the ribbon -- I can still smell its magical scent -- and cover my little fingers with its red and black ink.

I haven't used a typewriter for years, and I know that it can be quite difficult to find spare ribbons these days. None the less, I was delighted when the BBC programme ended by showing several fashionable young souls of 2007 sitting in a café with their typewriters and their teapots. There has, the narrator reported, been something of a typing renaissance in recent years, perhaps in response to the global eclipse of typewriting by word processing.

I know that at least one reader of Ink Quest successfully marries a love of fountain pens to a fascination with typewriters, and I believe that the same applies to Paul Auster, one of my favourite writers, who once published a wonderful celebration of the Olympia typewriter that he has used exclusively since 1974. There's a sense in which this is a strange combination of obsessions, though, for the typewriter could be seen as a rival to the fountain pen. (See, for instance, the furious attack upon the rise of mechanical writing over manual inscription contained in Martin Heidegger's Parmenides.) Even so, I'm tempted to return to my roots in ribbon and type by seeking out an old machine. (I seriously doubt that this will get past the Inkette, however. She found the fact that I wanted to watch a programme about typewriters deeply disturbing -- 'I don't have to make stuff up when I want to make fun of you to my friends', she remarked -- and she rolled her eyes when a man who lived in a tiny studio flat with two cats and three hundred typewriters was interviewed. 'That's what you'd be like if you didn't have me', she sighed.)

I fear, though, that a typewriter and a fountain pen might be at odds with each other in one crucial, practical sense. As I've discussed on previous occasions, modern nibs tend to be much firmer than their ancestors, partly because contemporary hands, raised on the hideous ballpoint, are used to pressing hard to make a mark. Even with this adjustment, one of the most striking things about switching from a biro to a modern fountain pen is the change of pressure that inevitably occurs. An elegant, well-crafted nib glides across the page with a fraction of the effort needed to haul a ball sticky with black goo from left to right.

Adjusting from computer keyboard to typewriter, however, means moving in the opposite direction, learning to press much harder than usual. Fingers need barely to move on a computer keyboard to process words, but a vintage typewriter's keys need considerable force if the metal arm is to rise to the ribbon and strike out its shape. It's called typing for a good etymological reason.

Dedicated readers of Ink Quest will know that I abhor feats of strength (unless, of course, they take place as part of Festivus). My worry is that a typewriter will require me to develop conventionally masculine muscles in my arms, thus negating my embrace of fountain pens for their appeal to wimpish weaklings. Worse still, I may have to trim the nails that I have meticulously cultivated over twenty-five years of guitar playing if I am to strike the keys accurately. When it comes down to it, perhaps I'm just not the right type.

Inks in use today: Sailor Brown; Omas Blue; Herbin Poussière de Lune.

Atomink

Have I become Death, the destroyer of worlds?

At the request of honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, I have added a link (beneath the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page) which allows the most dedicated readers of Ink Quest to receive instant feeds when a new entry is posted. I have absolutely no idea how I managed to accomplish this, though.

Stefan proposed the idea and, when I confessed complete technical incompetence, pointed me to a relevant 'Help' page on the Blogger website. The only problem was that the page assumes its readers know how to write HTML. (Is that the right phrase? Do you write HTML? Write in it? Or is it such a technologically advanced language that you just 'ray gun' or 'teleport' it into existence?) I was, therefore, required to delve behind the scenes and manually edit the code for the blog's template.

I'll be honest: I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I have never undertaken an exercise of such technological sophistication. I wondered if I was supposed to don a silver spacesuit and eat a three-course meal in the form of a small yellow tablet before proceeding. All I knew for certain was that I had a line of magical code -- '<$BlogFeedsVertical$>' -- which would, when inserted in the right place, somehow create a link on the main page to a mysterious entity called 'Atom'. I tried placing the shibboleth in all sorts of places, but this merely made the blog into a series of misshapen monstrosities.

After about thirty minutes of staring at the screen of code, I felt as if I was suffering from what Ted Mooney's brilliant novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, calls 'information sickness'. '<$BlogFeedsVertical$>' was giving me vertigo. In a fit of queasy desperation, I pasted the code into a random spot and pressed 'Preview'.

A ray of metallic light suddenly shone through the clouds. Robot angels sang. It seemed to have worked, and in the twinkling of an eye. I emailed Stefan to ask him to check the link, and he replied approvingly.

I still don't quite know what terrible beauty I have unleashed, though. 'Atom' sounds exceptionally futuristic, but its precise nature is unknown to my luddite mind. I know that the noun 'atom' etymologically means something that is indivisible, but I've just learnt from the OED that its Latin form can also mean, bizarrely, 'the twinkling of an eye'. And I've also discovered that there's an obsolete verb form in English -- 'to atom' -- which simply means 'to reduce to atoms, to atomize'. This construction seems itself to have been atommed (if that's the correct spelling) in the seventeenth century.

This curious cluster of connotations has me worried, dear readers. First of all, I can't think of the atom without thinking of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. And this reminds me that Stefan, the real importer of Atom to Ink Quest, lives not too far from Manhattan. Has he, so long a faithful member of the good ship Penquod, developed an evil plan to take over the world with a store of Atom-ic bombs? Was it really Stefan who emailed me yesterday to suggest the link to Atom, or has his identity been stolen by a power-crazed double? Second, the Greek term 'atomos' recalls 'Tomos', the Welsh version of the name 'Thomas'. As I walked past the library today, I'm pretty sure that I saw a former student called Tomos in the distance. I apparently glimpsed, that is to say, a Tomos.

'Everything is connected in the end', writes Don DeLillo. I have unwittingly started an unstoppable chain reaction that leads only to The End. I am an atomic patsy. An anatomy of things suggests that Atom will turn me into an atomy.

Inks in use today: Private Reserve Chocolat; Herbin Poussière de Lune.

Poison Pen

It's all Greek to me.

Readers of the early work of Jacques Derrida will know that the Greek term 'pharmakon', used by Plato in Phaedrus to describe the status of the written word, can mean both 'poison' and 'cure'. I believe that ink itself has the same strangely contradictory properties.

Ink Quest has been silent for over a week, dear deprived readers, for two reasons. First, I was away at another university towards the end of last week. (Sadly, I did not have time on my return journey to call into The Pen Shop in Birmingham for a bottle of Caran d'Ache Storm. I am particularly disappointed about this because I now know, thanks to a relatively new reader of Ink Quest who shall go by the pseudonym of Jay, that the city is the home of The Pen Museum and Learning Centre. I must engineer a special visit as soon as possible. It occurs to me that the Inkette has friends in the Birmingham area. Will she be suspicious if I suddenly suggest a trip to see them?)

Second, upon my return I was struck down by a rather unpleasant stomach ailment that led me to vomit all the way through my sister's wedding party. To make matters worse, I attempted to ring the Inkette on her mobile phone to let her know why I had disappeared from the event, but I managed to call right in the middle of my father's speech. The blaring noise of the phone woke up Baby Ink, who then started to heckle his grandfather. (You have nothing on me, Costanza.)

You will be pleased to learn, dear philanthropic readers, that I have now made a full recovery. I think, moreover, that I have identified both the cause of my illness and its cure. The night before I left Ink Towers for my trip to the north of England, I carefully filled my three fountain pens for the occasion. Well, not that carefully, for I accidentally splashed a drop Noodler's Eternal Brown onto a part of my finger where there was a fresh paper cut. I thought little of this at the time, but I now suspect that the ink entered my blood stream, made its way to my stomach, and began to unleash almighty hell. I experienced, that is to say, a case of poisonink. What would have happened if two, three, or four drops had invaded my system? Would I still be able to write these words, or would I have been inkterred by now? When Flaubert's Emma Bovary poisons herself, after all, she notes that the arsenic leaves 'an awful taste of ink' in her mouth. Madame Bovary, c'est moi?

But the poison, I believe, was also the remedy, for on Sunday evening I finally got around to exploring the delightful selection of inks sent to me last week from Seattle by honorary Penquod crew member Anna. (As if the inktoxicating colours were not enough, she also included gifts for Baby Ink and a package of some of the finest coffee I've ever tasted: Caffe Ladro's Diablo blend. I am currently and constantly, to use Nicholson Baker's phrase, 'operatic with caffeine'.) After trying out the Noodler's Squetegue -- an extremely unusual green-blue -- I dipped my Sailor Sapporo into the vial containing the majestic Noodler's Swishmix Tahitian Pearl. As I withdrew the nib, an excess drop of ink landed upon my hand, not in the spot where the paper cut had been last week, but where the naughtiest of my three cats had just scratched me when I dared to remove her from Baby Ink's pram.

Until the Tahitian Pearl entered my system, I was still feeling slightly unwell, and I went to bed that night hoping for a good night's sleep. Baby Ink made sure that this didn't happen, of course, but I did awake the following morning feeling entirely recovered and ready to continue my ongoing battle against the universe. I believe, then, that ink both poisoned and cured me. It's a pharmakon. As Derrida puts it: 'This pharmakon, this "medicine", this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison ... can be -- alternately or simultaneously -- beneficient or malficient.' He adds, in fact, later in the same essay, that 'the pharmakon always penetrates like a liquid', and even gives ink as an example. I spend my professional life teaching, among other things, the theories of Jacques Derrida, but I've evidently now started putting theory inkto practice by putting ink inkto my blood.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Swishmix Tahitian Pearl; Herbin Lie de Thé.