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.)
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