R.S.I.

I have chosen R.S.I. over hérésie.

I believe that today's 'inkipit' is hérissé with a special pun for Ink Quest's French readers, for I think that hérésie and 'R.S.I.' sound the same in the language in question. (I don't think I can take credit for the homophony, however: I seem to remember that it crops up somewhere in one of Jacques Lacan's seminars, along with the wonderful 'les noms du père/les non-dupes errent'.) But how, you are no doubt wondering, could Repetitive Strain Injury possibly be the alternative to heresy?

I have just begun editorial work on a 4-volume, 1600-page collection of essays devoted to the work of a certain figure. (I will not name that figure here, just in case it allows curious readers of this blog to figure out my real identity.) Because all of the pieces are already in print (in various journals and books, some of which are rather difficult to track down), I need to obtain written permission to reproduce them in my anthology from each of the copyright holders. As there are 90 essays involved, this is a somewhat laborious task. My publisher has offered to pay an assistant to help me with this kind of thing, but, being an obsessive control freak, I have decided to soldier on alone.

My task for the day was to prepare and send the mountain of letters. I could probably have made life easier for myself by, for instance, scanning my signature and automatically reproducing it at the end of each missive. And I could have cut corners by sending the entire list of contents to each copyright holder, highlighting just the relevant entry or entries, and asking him or her to ignore everything else. But I decided instead to sign each letter by hand and also to tailor things so that every addressee received a unique letter that identified the specific piece of work sought for the collection.

This, of course, meant that I spent the day repeatedly performing a very limited series of tasks with my hands -- move mouse, spin scroll button, click to highlight, CTRL+C, move and click mouse to switch to other document, CTRL+V, and so on -- to create the individual letters from the master table of contents. Then, when the pile of requests had been printed, I had to wave my fountain pen dozens of times in an elegant and flamboyant manner to form my signature. (Actually, I should say 'fountain pens, for I ended up using three different inks to sign the documents: American copyright holders' letters were completed with Noodler's FPN Galileo Brown, while their European counterparts were treated to Aurora Blue or Noodler's Violet.) Each piece of paper was then slipped into an envelope, and the flap was sealed. Finally, the return address was stamped onto the top left-hand corner of every item of mail.

While this elaborate, hopelessly inefficient routine produced a mountain of missives that had been crafted with care and adorned with glorious ink, it has also generated a dull ache in my right hand. To be more specific, as the photograph displayed above confirms, I have been left with something that resembles a withered, mangled claw. (Fans of Seinfeld may wish at this point to remember an episode entitled 'The Checks', in which Jerry's hand cramps up after he has to endorse a huge pile of royalty cheques relating to his appearance on the Super Terrific Happy Hour. 'What's with the claw?', asks Elaine at one point, in typically sensitive fashion.) I thought that switching regularly between three pens (a Sailor Sapporo, a Pelikan M200, and an Aurora Talentum) might have prevented the onset of Repetitive Strain Injury, but I was clearly wrong. R.S.I. has won, hands down.

Etymologically, heresy is all about choice: hairetikos refers to one who has the ability to choose. And I, dear readers, have made my choice: I brushed aside bland, computerized homogeneity, and I chose instead to honour each letter with uniqueness and ink. In signing my letters -- don't, inkidentally, forget the origin of this use of the verb 'to sign' -- by hand, I took a stance against the heresy of the modern world, where ink and personalized letters count for little. (Does no one at large companies sign letters by hand these days? Is the signature of a new Head of Customer Services scanned for endless digital reproduction at 9.01am on the day that he or she starts the job?) But my faithful hand has now become a stigmatized claw that may never write again. Perhaps I will have no choice but to use a digital, ink-free signature from now on. I have sacrificed myself on Inkalvary so that others may live ink-filled lives. I suppose it's just the cross I have chosen to bear.

Inks in use today: Aurora Blue; Noodler's Violet; Noodler's FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown.

The Inkeons

I'm leaving ink behind.

The Penquod has just returned from a somewhat disastrous summer holiday in a small village on the coast of Cornwall. (Let's call it Balbec, shall we, dear readers?) The troubles began even before we left, for, just as I had got the cats ready to go to the cattery, I noticed that the car had a flat tyre. A closer look revealed that a large screw was protruding from the tread. It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Ink Quest, I'm sure, that I have no absolutely no idea how to change the wheel on a car; it is precisely this kind of stereotypically masculine activity that I have spent over three decades avoiding. As time was tight, however, I thought that I would at least get out the manual that came with the vehicle, just to see if I could figure out what is involved. Although there were several pages of instructions, I could make no sense of them, and one paragraph seemed to imply that failure to tighten the nuts (or are they bolts? is there a difference? who cares?) in the correct order would lead to instant death at speeds of over 20mph. We decided, therefore, to look in the Yellow Pages for companies that come out and fit a new tyre. For some strange reason, I lapsed at this point into the American English with which I lived for a year over a decade ago, and spent a good five minutes looking for 'Tires', not 'Tyres', and shouting 'Nowhere in the whole of the South Wales area sells tires! It's all farm equipment and sports facilities!' to the Inkette. I eventually figured out my mistake, and we then wasted what felt like hours ringing every tyre company in the area. No one was able to come out to help us, so we ended up asking the AA to save the day, which they did in remarkable time. (And in a remarkably good mood, too, although I'm sure that my membership file now has a marker on it that says 'Lowest Possible Priority for Call-Out: Big Girl's Blouse Who Doesn't Even Know What a Jack Is. Lower Priority Even Than People Who Have Simply Run Out of Petrol'.)

We eventually arrived at our destination, but Baby Ink then decided to come down with an ear and throat infection, which meant that he spent most of the week screaming and refusing to sleep. For the first time since records began, the sun shone for five consecutive days in Britain, but Baby Ink chose to mark the occasion by howling so loudly in public that people reached for their video cameras to capture exclusive footage of the Lost Wolf Child of Mesopotamia.

His illness meant that we spent more time than we'd expected in the cottage that we'd rented for the week. While I was filling up a syringe with his antibiotics one morning, I noticed that one of the shelves in the kitchen held a pot containing several ballpoint pens and one disposable rollerball. I assume that these had been left behind by previous residents, as the entire cottage housed a curious selection of items that people had evidently bought for their holidays, but then decided to leave for future occupants. The freezer, for instance, contained three frozen pizzas and some beefburgers, while the bookshelves in the lounge were groaning beneath the weight of archetypal beach/airport novels. More strangely, a pair of rather unflattering elasticated chinos were hanging behind the door of one of the bedrooms.

The pot of ballpoints, of course, became something of an obsession for me. Once again I found myself shaking my head at the way in which the invention and dominance of the biro has killed off all respect that most people have for their writing instruments. No one, I think, would dream of leaving behind a fountain pen for future occupants of a holiday cottage, and no one, by the same token, would worry about purchasing a ballpoint from a local shop, using it to write a few postcards, and then choosing not to pack it into a suitcase when preparing to leave. I briefly considered raising the tone of the holiday home by depositing my Visconti Van Gogh fountain pen in the container, but eventually came up with a much better (and cheaper) alternative.

I've always been fascinated by the way in which the Gideons leave copies of the Bible in hotel rooms around the world. (When, precisely, are they placed in the rooms? When the hotel is built? Do the blueprints for every such structure indicate where the books will be positioned? And are the cleaners who prepare the rooms on a daily basis instructed to check that the Bible is still in the drawer? Are we, moreover, being invited to take the book away with us, or is the idea that we choose it over the mini-bar and the movie channel for a night's entertainment?) I know nothing about the organization, and I'm not personally interested in the message it's spreading, but the sheer perseverance of the Gideons, I feel, is admirable. I've just done a very quick internet search, and it transpires -- if this Wikipedia article can be trusted, which is by no means a given -- that the group distributes its holy book in more than 80 languages and 180 countries, and not just to hotel rooms. There's even, it turns out, a complex colour-coding system in use for the different covers of the Bibles sent out into the world.

With this in mind, I have formed a group called the Inkeons. I founded the movement, dear followers, by depositing a single cartridge of Herbin Lie de Thé ink in the pot of ballpoints in our rented holiday cottage. I have no idea if anyone will ever find and use it, but I have hope in my heart. I have no holy book, but my mission from now on is to leave ink cartridges in the drawers of the world's hotel and motel rooms. Alongside each gift from the Gideons, travellers could now find an offering from the Inkeons. My hope is that they will turn to it in their darkest hour, find salvation, and spread the Good News of ink wherever they go. I urge all inkthusiasts of the world to follow my lead by depositing a single cartridge of ink in every hotel room that they visit. If I have to spread the word alone, the work of the Inkeons will take an aeon.

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Lie de Thé.

Travelling Heavy

'Your job is to pack your things for the holiday.'

Also sprach the Inkette as she left for work this morning. The Penquod is nearly ready to leave for its summer vacation, but I have not yet placed an item of clothing into the suitcase. If nothing has changed by the time the Inkette returns from work this evening, there will be a lot of broken ink bottles, but I'm afraid that I'm struggling to get the job done. Pictured above, in fact, are the only items that I have set aside so far for the holiday:

- One Clairefontaine notebook. Who could possibly resist stationery that's marketed under the slogan 'Douceur de l'écriture'? I must, inkidentally, publicly thank an extremely generous reader of Ink Quest who, after reading last Saturday's post, kindly offered to send me an Italian leather journal for my trip. The offer arrived just hours after I had bought the Clairefontaine pocket book, though, and I'd hate the thought of anyone actually taking time out of his or her day and spending hard-earned money to post luxury items to the author of a blog who does little but send forth misanthropic, barbaric yawps about how the world is persecuting him.

- One tin of Herbin Lie de Thé ink cartridges. Every beach holiday needs a muted brown ink, I feel. And if its name refers to the dregs left miserably in the bottom of a tea cup when the good stuff has disappeared, all the better. I have, inkidentally, just emailed the Herbin ink company to suggest that a new Anglo-French hybrid colour, 'Plague de la plage', be launched for summer 2009.

- One Visconti Van Gogh fountain pen. Chosen largely because the unusual clip could double as a harpoon if the coast of Cornwall is suddenly besieged by sharks. And it's always good, when soaking up the sun, to be reminded of a man who cut off his own ear.

- One copy of Samuel Beckett's Complete Dramatic Works. The ultimate 'beach read' for plage-phobes. I'll probably start with Happy Days, in which Winnie spends the play buried up to her waist, and later her neck, in a giant mound. (The stage directions don't specify what the mound is made of, but the presence of a parasol leads me to imagine that it is, appropriately enough, sand.) And perhaps I'll end the holiday by setting up a deckchair in the middle of the village and giving a reading of Krapp's Last Tape: 'Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back'. (All of this sung to the tune of 'La Macarena', of course.)

Beyond this, though, who knows? I simply can't decide what to put into my suitcase for the holiday. How can I possibly know today what I will need next week? No matter how many items I pack, I will inkevitably long for something left at home as soon as we arrive at our sunny destination.

As usual, Roland Barthes had the right idea. As I briefly noted in a post dating from January 2007, the obsessive lover of fountain pens, stationery, and ink recreated his Parisian study with meticulous care in his holiday home in Urt:

Autre Argo : j’ai deux espaces de travail, l’un à Paris, l’autre à la campagne. De l’un à l’autre, aucun objet commun, car rien n’est jamais transporté. Cependant ces lieux sont identiques. Pourquoi ? Parce que la disposition des outils (papier, plumes, pupitres, pendules, cendriers) est la même : c’est la structure de l’espace qui en fait l’identité.

[Another Argo: I have two work spaces, one in Paris, the other in the country. Between them there is no common object, for nothing is ever carried back and forth. Yet these sites are identical. Why? Because the arrangement of tools (paper, pens, desks, clocks, ashtrays) is the same: it is the structure of the space which constitutes its identity.]

It's very simple, then: I have a day or two to duplicate every item in my possession for transportation to my holiday destination. Unlike Barthes, though, I don't actually own a second property, so the other fifty-one weeks of the year will find me looking for a large amount of storage space. What is to be done?

Perhaps the answer lies in an old joke from Steven Wright:

The other night, I came home late and tried to unlock my house with my car keys. I started the house up. So, I drove it around for a while. I was speeding, and a cop pulled me over. He asked where I lived. I said, 'Right here, officer'. Later, I parked it on the freeway, got out, and yelled at all the cars, 'Get out of my driveway!'

Yes, dear readers, I am taking my house on holiday with me, putting the motor into the mortar. When people ask me where I'm staying while I'm away, I will say 'Right here, in my home'. 'Oh, you have a second home', they will reply. 'No', I will respond, 'just the one, but it goes everywhere with me. It's like a home from home.' I'm just about to ring the Cornwall Tourist Board to ask if they have any car parks big enough to take a house, and I should probably check the legal situation with the DVLA before we leave. ('Hello, DVLA? Could you tell me if my licence allows me to drive a building? And in which window should I display the tax disc? How many doors does my vehicle have? Well, one at the front, one at the back, and eight inside. Excluding wardrobes and the cat flap. Does it have a sunroof? No, just regular tiles. Have I made any modifications to the vehicle since I bought it? Yes, I've put up some bookshelves, taken up the carpet and painted the floorboards, installed Venetian blinds, and put some decking out the back. And we're having a loft conversion done later this year.)

Forget travelling light; this is all about travelling heavy.

Ink in use today: Abraxas Anthrazit.

PS (18 July): Honorary Penquod crew member Arty has suggested that I might also want to take with me for beach reading the 'lost' Samuel Beckett work described in an article in The Onion some time ago.

Book of Note

Take note, dear readers, that you will need to make the most of any entries appearing in this noted blog in the coming week, for the Penquod is preparing to sail to the south coast of England for a short summer break. Although I hate sitting on the beach as much as Larry David does (see the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'The Thong'), I have no doubt that the Inkette and Baby Ink will require my constant, uncomfortable presence sur la plage, so sneaking away to an internet café to update Ink Quest is going to be something of a long shot.

I have, of course, been giving great thought in recent weeks to my holiday pen, ink, and notebook. (I was pleased to discover that honorary Penquod crew member Stefan recently agonized over precisely the same matters before leaving for a vacation in California. He emailed me while soaking up the sun to inform me of the colours upon which he had eventually settled, but he added that he somehow forgot to take the chosen notebook with him. The last I heard from the frontier, he was having to make do with a cheap alternative from a convenience store; I would, given the circumstances, have abandoned the trip and flown home.) I usually take my Visconti Van Gogh with me when travelling on business, but I feel that something different is needed for non-work-related expeditions. I'm currently considering the eternally reliable Pelikan M200 fountain pen, and I'll obviously need an accompanying ink that screams 'I hate summer and beaches'. Noodler's Heart of Darkness fits the bill, but I'm not keen on black inks, so perhaps Noodler's Nightshade will win out.

As for the notebook, well, I am going to buy a new one for the trip. (The Inkette appears to have purchased an entire wardrobe of beachwear, but I'm simply refusing even to contemplate a floral shirt, shorts, and summer shoes. What's wrong with brogues and cufflinks on the sand? And why does the merest whiff of seaweed lead most British men to believe that long trousers are now unnecessary? I will say this only once: shorts are for people partaking in sports. And if your name isn't Ben-Hur, you have no business wearing sandals.)

My decision to invest in a new notebook was partly prompted by a magnificent book that I've been reading this week. It's called Walter Benjamin's Archive, and it brings together, among other things, a wide range of materials from Benjamin's notebooks and files. While the work of some of the other members of the Frankfurt School tends to leave me cold, I've always had a soft spot for Benjamin. Few people have written more convincingly -- or more beautifully -- about the practice of collecting, about the love of material objects, and about the anguish of being separated from personal possessions. (If, incidentally, you don't know the story -- or stories, to be more precise -- about how Benjamin, a German Jew, died while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940, and if you don't mind allowing a dark shadow to fall upon your Saturday, you can find out more by clicking here.)

What I didn't know until now, however, is that Benjamin was a lover of fountain pens, notebooks, and ink. I've always had my suspicions that he was an inkthusiast, but confirmation of my feelings did not come until I read Walter Benjamin's Archive, which quotes at one point a letter written by Benjamin to Alfred Cohn in 1927: 'I carry the blue [note]book with me everywhere and speak of nothing else', he confessed. 'I am sure that there is nothing else of this kind as pretty in the whole of Paris...'

Seven of Benjamin's notebooks have survived, and Walter Benjamin's Archive contains many beautiful colour reproductions of some of their pages. As I looked at the images, two things repeatedly caught my eye. First, Benjamin evidently liked to experiment with different colours in the fountain pens that the volume tells us he prized. One sheet of paper -- which doesn't appear to be part of one of the seven complete notebooks -- sees him switching shades every few lines, as the first picture displayed above shows. The colours used are not named, sadly, but I assume that this is simply because the terrible turmoil of Benjamin's life means that such details are long lost. The second thing that struck me about Benjamin's notes was the handwriting itself. 'It is almost always precise and fine', note the editors, but they add that its size varies considerably. Beginning in the 1920s, he developed 'a penchant for small script'; the second image posted above shows a text from 1926, in which Benjamin's letters measure just 1-1.5mm in height. This makes them, the editors point out, 'difficult to decipher with the naked eye'. Such a style of writing posed problems for Benjamin, too: Jean Selz, the book adds, once recalled that 'he never found a pen that was fine enough, which forced him to write with the nib upside down'.

I have on many occasions hailed Roland Barthes -- who publicly confessed to buying sixteen bottles of ink in one afternoon, and who dismissed the ballpoint pen as only suitable for 'churning out pisse copie' -- as my great hero when it comes to the quest for the perfect ink. It would seem, however, that petit Roland now has a rival in the form of Walter Benjamink.

I will need to check my own archives before I can say whether or not the two ink- , pen-, and notebook-loving men were ever in Paris at the same time. Without the bookshelves of my office to hand, I cannot recall precisely when Barthes, who was some years younger than Benjamin, lived in the French capital. I know that he moved there in the mid-1920s, but I also know that tuberculosis took him away from the city to a sanatorium on a couple of occasions during what may well have been the period when Benjamin was in exile in Paris. And Barthes, if I recall correctly, was teaching in either Bayonne or Biarritz at some point in 1940 (the year in which Benjamin was forced to leave occupied France). It is possible, then, that the two inkthusiasts were never in the city simultaneously. Even if they were, it's unlikely that their paths would have crossed.

None of this, of course, stops me dreaming about Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin meeting by chance in a Parisian pen shop, communicating across the gap of generations and languages, comparing notes and notebooks. I will watch carefully for the inky-fingered ghost of WalteRoland when shopping this week for stationery.

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue; Noodler's Violet.

Teal thyself

In Marnie, one of Alfred Hitchcock's later films, the eponymous heroine experiences strange neurotic episodes whenever she sees the colour red. At one point, as the image posted above shows, she spills a single drop of red ink upon her sleeve. This is enough to provoke an outburst that alarms her colleagues. She is eventually cured when, thanks to a little help from a zoologist acting as a psychoanalyst, a repressed memory of a traumatic, bloody murder is uncovered. Now that her problem has been 'worked through', to use the language of psychoanalysis, she should be able to live happily ever after. (Note to readers who like to spot pens and ink in films: 'Tippi' Hedren is perhaps the inkiest of the Hitchcock heroines, for there's also a lovely moment in The Birds, which predates Marnie by a year, where a close-up shows her writing with an elegant Esterbrook fountain pen. I hereby propose that she be renamed 'Inky' Hedren.)

Longtime readers of Ink Quest may remember a post from May 2007 where I linked the sight of Waterman Blue-Black ink to the teal colour of the hospital scrubs that I was wearing when Baby Ink came rushing into the world. Unlike some, I don't mind the fact that Waterman Blue-Black is actually a teal-like shade, but I have found in the last year or so that I cannot use the ink without experiencing a Marnie-like flashback to the somewhat traumatic scenes that surrounded the 'ventousing' of Baby Ink after something like fifteen hours of labour. The Waterman bottle has, therefore, tended to remain tightly sealed and firmly repressed to a dark corner of my ink box.

I have, however, filled a pen with Waterman Blue-Black this morning, and I have written this entry in my notebook without experiencing a single neurotic inkident. Yes, dear readers, I have been cured. (Not of all of my neuroses, naturally; there are some problems that only death can solve.) Allow me to relate the event that led to the miraculous 'working through' of my issues with Waterman Blue-Black.

My sister gave birth in the early hours of yesterday morning, so the Family Ink made the short drive to see the proud parents and the new arrival yesterday evening. I have not been back to the hospital in question since Baby Ink was born there a little over fourteen months ago, so stepping back inside the maternity ward was a somewhat strange experience. When I first saw the room filled with mothers and their tiny babies, I could not believe that Baby Ink -- who was running around, desperately trying to switch off crucial medical equipment and open doors marked 'Private' -- had ever been that small (or that calm). But the sounds and smells of the ward brought back vivid memories of his newbornness, as did bumping into the midwife who was in the operating theatre when he was suctioned out. 'Did I really deliver him?', she said, looking down at the marauding toddler; I'm almost certain that she placed the emphasis upon the last word.

As we were making our way out of the ward, the most striking reminder of all presented itself to me, for I caught sight through a window of a woman wearing teal-coloured scrubs. Strangely, though, my first thought upon seeing the colour was not 'operating theatre'; it was 'Waterman Blue-Black'. Yes, dear readers, I had turned the tables on my symptom: for over a year I have been thinking 'operating theatre' whenever I've seen the colour, but last night I went back to the source of the association, glimpsed the shade, and thought 'Waterman Blue-Black'. This reversal of the usual neurotic sequence has somehow broken the spell: I can now use the colour without experiencing feelings of unease. Teal is now just the colour of ink. I have, by going back to the ward, managed to ward off anxiety. The association with scrubs has been scrubbed out. I have been restored to full health, tealed.

Ink in use without neurotic consequences today: Waterman Blue-Black.

PS: A small update on Sailor Grey. I still love the colour -- which is, with the exception of the old Omas Grey, one of the nicest greys around -- but I'm finding the ink a little dry at times. There have, for inkstance, been several occasions in the last couple of days when I've thought that my Sailor Sapporo pen has actually run out of ink, but a quick check of the converter has revealed plenty of Sailor Grey remaining.

Light-writing

Ink Quest is clearly photogenic.

There is, as I hinted in a recent post, a close link between writing and photography, for 'photography' literally means 'light-writing'. And if a writer, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, needs a room of his or her own to be able to work, it might be said that he or she requires a camera if pen is to be put successfully to paper. (It's a shame that the English 'room' bears no trace of the Latin 'camera' or the Greek 'kamara'. The closest we get, I suppose, is the somewhat obscure 'chamber'; the Italians and the French, who retire nightly to a 'camera' or a 'chambre', will see the link much more clearly.)

I've always wanted to be able to take elegant photographs and to flounce around the world with a Leica slung around my neck, but I just don't have the eye for it. Whenever I open and close the shutter, I somehow shut out all artistic traces. I briefly took photography classes in school, but these ended in total failure. (This may have had something to do with the fact that the teacher spent most of the lessons in the darkroom teaching us how to roll cigarettes for him. If anyone knocked on the locked door, he would shout, 'Can't you see the red light? We're developing films in here!' On one memorable occasion, he took two of us in his car to the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock. After lunch at a pub in Bath, where he let us order beer, he got pulled over by the police for speeding. What they didn't notice while they were busy warning him was that the speedometer needle had actually fallen off and been replaced -- I'm not making this up -- with a cocktail stick. Oh, the glory of the pre-risk-assessment era!) If my grade for the course had been sent out by telegram, the message would simply have read, 'F. STOP.'

My relationship to photography, therefore, is strictly a passive one; I can do nothing but admire the skill of others. When I was being taught how to roll cigarettes in a darkroom in a small Welsh town in the late 1980s, there was little opportunity to see proper photography. The local library stocked a few books, and a trip down to Cardiff could involve a visit to ffotogallery, which used to be on Charles Street, but has since relocated to a town several miles from the city. That, however, was as good as it got. These days, by way of complete contrast, magnificent photography is widely available on the internet. Honorary Penquod crew member introduced me to a brilliant site a couple of years ago, but I've somehow managed to forget its name. Arty, if you're reading, could you possibly refresh my memory?

One site whose name I can remember, however, is Flickr. Many of the millions of images held there are uninteresting family snaps, but there are some glorious pictures to be found. More specifically, there are some wonderful shots of pens and inks. (Graphy-photography?) If you've never seen a white Pelikan M400 with a Binderized nib, for example, you can click here and enjoy the view. Or, if the cap from an Omas 360 is what tickles your fancy, voilà! And ink is just as well represented. Here are two of the rather lovely (and costly) Caran d'Ache Colours of the Earth bottles, and here is a sultry shot of a Waterman bottle alongside an Omas fountain pen and a leather journal.

I am not ashamed to say that I have spent a great deal of my spare time admiring pens and inks on Flickr. 'Hello, my name is [censored]. I'm addicted to looking at penography on the internet'. While searching for pictures of Noodler's ink bottles yesterday (my wife was out; I was lonely), I was stunned to find a picture that made a reference to this very blog. More amazing still was the photographer's comment which stated that the image was actually inspired by (I'm sure that he meant inkspired by) Ink Quest.

It's astonishing to learn that this humble ramble of mine could inkspire anything. (Well, apart from contempt, which it never fails to inkspire in the Inkette.) I am delighted, dear Flickr photographer, dear light-writer of writers' delights, to discover that Ink Quest has lent something to your lens. And I offer above my tribute to your tribute, my return shot, my photo-copy.

Ink in use today: Sailor Grey.
Camera fumbled with today: Olympus FE-100.
Software used in an attempt to correct utterly shambolic original image: iPhoto.

Politinks

Inky fingers have never been an index to so much.

Ink Quest deliberately keeps its distance from political debates, partly because squabbles about politics seem constantly to ruin forums such as The Fountain Pen Network and Pentrace, and partly because I become less and less interested in political issues as time goes on. Walter Benjamin once noted that fascism aestheticizes politics and that socialism responds by politicizing aesthetics; inkism, I would add, aestheticizes aesthetics. It's all about the pleasures of deeply superficial matters such as the way that a certain ink catches the light, the glorious glissando of a nib across fine paper, or the cool weight of a stoppered bottle in the hand. There's no party, no parliament, no comradeship, dear readers, and inkism doesn't seek to alter the course of world history. Marx thought that philosophers had only ever interpreted the world and that the point was to change it; inkists just want to be left alone to make elegant lines on paper.

I couldn't help noticing this weekend, however, that ink has unwittingly found itself at the very heart of the political scandal in Zimbabwe, for a front-page article in the Guardian newspaper reported -- and offered photographic evidence to confirm -- that indelible ink was being used to stain the fingers of voters in the general election. 'They said they would come to see if we voted,' said one resident of Harare. 'They know if we went to vote we would have to vote for the president. They were watching.' The article went on to add that one brave Zimbabwean had tried to trick Mugabe's henchmen by not voting and instead smearing his fingers with ink from a ballpoint pen.

As a lover of ink (and a loather of ballpoint pens), I naturally wanted to know more about the kind of ink used to stain the fingers of all those who had cast their votes. The newspaper reported that it was indelible, but no more details were offered. Was it a special, unique colour made by Zanu-PF in a secret ink factory, or was it a readily available brand? If it was the latter, does a well-known ink company now have ink on its hands because it has become Robert Mugabe's colour of choice?

A global debate about how best to respond to the re-election of Mugabe is now raging. Some have proposed an Iraq-style invasion by the bringers of light; others have suggested intensifying economic and cultural sanctions against the country. It occurs to me that inkists wishing to show solidarity with the oppressed people of Zimbabwe find themselves in a rather difficult position. A neat, media-friendly way to signal outrage at the way in which the election was conducted would be to stain one's fingers with ink and refuse to let the colour fade until Mugabe has been deposed. (Tabloids would inevitably come up with headlines such as 'Giving Mugabe the Finger'. Le Monde could have 'Un doigt d'encre -- on doit le faire', perhaps.) But inkists, of course, always already have ink-stained hands, so the power of the statement would be diminished considerably. As George Costanza once noted, in an episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Calzone', it's only worth giving a tip in a restaurant if the waiter or waitress actually sees you going to the trouble of giving the tip:

GEORGE: So, let me ask you a question about the tip jar. I had a little thing with the calzone guy this week. I go to drop a buck in the tip jar, and, just as I am about to drop it in, he looks the other way . And then, when I am leaving, he gives me this look -- 'thanks for nothing'. I mean, if they don't notice it, what's the point?

JERRY: So, you don't make it a habit of giving to the blind?

GEORGE: Not bills.

It would seem, then, that any inkist who wishes to enter the political arena and publicly register his or her outrage at the situation in Zimbabwe will need to come up with a different tactic. But this is where I cannot help, dear readers, for political strategy appears nowhere on my list of skills. ('Staining my fingers with ink', however, is up there in the top five, surrounded by 'Enticing people to persecute me', 'Ruining social occasions with misjudged comments', 'Finding the cloud that surrounds the silver lining', and 'Eternal complaining'.) You inky-fingered souls will need to devise your own plan of action. Now, you'll have to excuse me because the postman has just delivered my bottle of Sailor Grey ink from The Writing Desk. I am about to enter the inking booth, open the bottle, and inkevitably stain my fingers.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Sequoia.
Ink shortly to adorn hands: Sailor Grey.

PS (1.45pm): The Sailor Grey has now been tested (and I managed only to get a small amount on my thumb). It's a truly delightful grey, and it is very much a grey grey; there's no chance of this colour being mistaken for black. It's not as pale as the ghostly Herbin Gris Nuage, though, so it should be suitable for documents that need photocopying. This is one ink that certainly gets my vote.

PPS (3 July): It would seem that I'm not the only one without an interest in politics. While shaving this morning, I heard a hilarious interview on the radio with Gemma Garrett, the current Miss Great Britain who has now decided to branch out into politics by standing as a candidate for the Miss Great Britain Party in the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. I cannot find a dedicated page for the party, but I did manage to discover a section of the Miss Great Britain website where a manifesto includes the following items:

- Compulsory health and beauty education to improve the looks of Britons;
- A British Bank Holiday which encourages people to look fabulous for the day.

You have to admire a candidate who stands on such tickets while dismissing David Davis' opposition to the 42-day detention policy as a 'trivial obsession'. When asked by BBC radio if she knew the names of key political figures in Westminster, Miss Great Britain confessed that she didn't, before adding that she wasn't actually interested in politics. A desire to make Britain more glamorous. A general air of superficiality. An avowed dislike of political issues. It's like I'm looking in a mirror.