Soy vey!

I apologize, dear readers, for the recent dip in output. I have finally returned from exile with a tale about another type of dip.

Ink Quest's ten-day silence is largely explained by the illness of Baby Ink, who has been suffering from a virus. In his usual contrary fashion, he chose to need constant attention at the very moment when a mountain of urgent marking landed upon my desk, so the week has been reduced to a blur in which I have been looking after him during the day and reading essays into the wee small hours. My espresso maker has never been so busy.

During a rare moment of peace on Tuesday, I found myself reading a Guardian interview with Xioalu Guo, the Chinese novelist and director. Identifying one of her fourteen favourite items, she stated, 'Soy sauce is like the ink I write with'. She probably meant this poetically, but I took the sentence literally and found myself thinking about what it would be like to write with soy sauce, which is, inkidentally, one of my favourite condiments. I love the fact that 'soy' means 'I am' in Spanish. (Would a bottle of the liquid, if it could speak, be able to say 'Soy soy'?) Soy just is. A splash of seasoning and a dash of ontology -- who could ask for anything more?

One of the main obsessions of the Penquod's endless voyage is the search for the perfect brown ink. As I have reported in previous entries, it has gradually become clear to me that I prefer darker browns (such as Noodler's Walnut or Rohrer and Klingner Sepia). With both this and Xioalu Guo's words in mind, I sneaked down to the kitchen when Baby Ink was asleep that night and scrutinized the bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce kept in our larder. It looked rich, alluring, silky ('silken soy' is, it transpires, an obsolete variation of 'silk'), and -- above all -- dark. Tip-toeing back up to my study, I selected a dip pen and returned to the kitchen, where I poured a small amount of soy into a little bowl. With racing pulse and fevered brow, I held the pen like a chopstick, slipped the nib into the fluid, and started to write on a sheet of Clairefontaine paper. (There is no blind covering our kitchen window, so I cannot imagine what our neighbour would have thought if she'd been peering in at this point.) Was I about to see the perfect brown? Would I need to write to numerous pen manufacturers to ask if salty liquid derived from soy beans is suitable for putting inside writing instruments? Would Noodler's ink have to give way to Noodles ink?

At first I thought that my tired eyes were deceiving me, for nothing appeared upon the sheet. I dipped and wrote again. Still nothing. '¿Donde estás, soy?', I cried. I received no reply. The page remained in a zen-like state of blankness.

It turns out that soy is nowhere near as dark as it appears in the bottle. Only under a very bright light could I detect the line left by the fluid. It was a yellow-brownish ghost of a mark. My dream had come to nothing. My dip pen was covered in a condiment, and I was staring at a contaminated bowl of soy. 'At times our brains lead us into plain silliness', as one of La Rochefoucauld's maxims has it. My attempt to put salt on the tail of the perfect ink had failed. I stood in my silent house in the middle of the night, a blank sheet of paper in my hand, feeling like an inkthusiast not worth his salt.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Omas Sepia.

Soy aquí...

... y estoy aquí.

Apologies for the ten-day silence, dear readers, but it has been a touch chaotic at Ink Towers recently. Rest assured that a new post is on its way (tomorrow, I hope). It will concern the strange image displayed above. Ink and soy sauce will be discussed at exhaustive length. Please be patient. Don't lose your tempura.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Noodler's Nightshade.

All Shook Up

I've got the shakes.

No, dear readers, I have not attempted to kick the ink habit by going cold turkey with nothing more than a Bic ballpoint for company. I am, rather, referring to a rather strange experience that I had this morning with a bottle of Noodler's Lexington Gray. I've been left feeling rather shaken by the entire inkident.

Ever since my beloved bottle of Omas Grey caught some terrible disease and expired, I've been idly toying with the grey inks left in my collection. Herbin Gris Nuage was popular for a while, but I soon discovered that it can be too pale for some occasions. (It photocopies about as well as milk, for instance.) Diamine Grey's subtle vintage tones have also pleased me from time to time, but I tend to tire of the colour after a few days. The one grey I haven't given much attention, however, is Noodler's Lexington. I liked the shade when I first bought it, and the fact that it is waterproof is hugely appealing, but I stopped using it some time ago when I became convinced that it looked like little more than a faded black. I want a grey to be just that; there should be no grey areas.

Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan happened to mention his fondness for Lexington in a recent email, so I decided to shake the dust off the bottle and give the ink one final chance when it came to filling my Aurora Talentum this morning. Inspired by a recent thread over at The Fountain Pen Network about the tendency of Noodler's Eternal Brown to settle during periods of inactivity, I did something that I've never done: I shook the bottle of Lexington firmly for about thirty seconds. When the froth had retreated, I dipped the nib and twisted the top of the converter.

As soon as I put pen to paper, I knew that the shaking had done something miraculous. What was flowing gloriously onto the page was not a washed-out black; it was, rather, an elegant, distinctive grey. I had quite literally shaken things up and shaken off the troubles of the past. Lexington Gray had been reborn.

Having written all day with my 'new' colour, I now find myself wondering if all of my inks would look different if shaken. Have I effectively doubled the number of colours of my collection in two shakes of a lamb's tail? Have I finally found the perfect use for the cocktail shaker that sits quietly in my kitchen? Should I model my shaking technique on that of Tom Cruise in Cocktail?

I will from this day forward be known as the king of agitation. Call me Sheikh Shake.

Ink shaken today: Noodler's Lexington Gray.

Colour-blind

What counts as colour?

The 'Style' section of this weekend's Sunday Times newspaper contained an article entitled '50 reasons why you're still single'. The left-hand page gave twenty-five items for men ('Because you ... believe that certain things are self-cleaning', for instance), while the opposite page addressed female readers. My inkthusiastic eye was caught by the eighteenth reason why a woman might be unattached: 'Because you ... write in coloured ink and/or use smiley faces in handwritten letters.'

My question for the author of the article is this: what would mean to write in colour-free ink? I accept that a case could be made for black not technically being colours, as I've heard it proposed that it's the absence of colour. I don't find this at all persuasive, but I'll leave that debate (and the issue of 'smiley faces') for another occasion. I'm more interested today in the journalist's turn of phrase. I believe that she actually means, 'Because you ... write in an ink that is neither blue nor black...' Those two shades are, of course, the ruling duo, and I have discussed their reign on several previous occasions. It seems to me that the author's phrasing reveals just how dominant blue and black are: they're so obvious, so common, that they've transcended the status of colour. They're simply there; they're the default; they're unmarked; they're invisible inks, as it were. When it comes to black and blue, we've become colour-blind.

In White, a fascinating book about the construction and implications of race, Richard Dyer proposes that something similar often happens with the colour of skin (a word which, I've just noticed, is an anagram of 'inks'). White people, he points out, often believe that they don't have a skin colour or an ethnicity; such things, the argument runs, only belong to non-white groups. Whiteness is the unmarked universal; to be white is to be without colour. It seems to me that popular opinion, neatly encapsulated in this weekend's Sunday Times, claims something similar about blue and black inks: words written with them are devoid of colour, which only comes into play when the nib strays into the realm of brown, pink, orange, and so on.

When I began this blog in late 2005, I was strongly opposed to blue and black inks, precisely because of their ubiquity. All I wanted at that stage was to find the perfect brown; the mere thought of writing in blue or black would leave me feeling decidedly off colour. A little over two years and something like 230 posts later, my feelings have changed somewhat. While I'm still uninterested in black ink, I have come to appreciate the pleasures of a good blue (Diamine Indigo, Private Reserve DC Supershow, or Noodler's Aircorp, for example). An anxiety still colours my use of these shades, however: every time I fill a pen with blue ink, I worry that I am tacinktly contributing to the stranglehold of blue and black. Perhaps this is why I tend to prefer blues with a notable twist, such as the greenish hue of Aircorp, the vintage grey curtain of Indigo, or the remarkable glare of Supershow. These are no ordinary blues. When I sign my name in one of these blues, I at once signal my awareness of blue as a colour. Black and blue should not be allowed to enjoy the status of invisible inks. If we don't start seeing things in their true colours, life will remain stuck in the shade.

Inks in use today: Mont Blanc Racing Green; Herbin Café des Îles; Omas Sepia.