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.

Twitterink

Watch this space. Or a new one.

My detailed report on the South-West pen show will follow soon, dear readers, just as soon as I can find time to put pen to paper and then fingers to keyboard. Finding time to update Ink Quest is always tricky, which is why I have this evening launched Ink Quest on Twitter. This is in no way intended to replace the real saga of my ongoing search for the perfect ink; it is, rather, merely a space for me to give addicted readers something inky to nibble on while the inktrée is being prepared. (Twitterinks can be no more than 140 characters in length.) Click here or follow the new link to the right to be taken to the twitterink.

Perhaps this change of medium will rejuvenate me, too. I say this because I realized this morning that the punchline to yesterday's Ink Quest post had actually been used on a previous occasion (on 23 January 2007, to be precise). I hope, then, that twitterink from time to time will help me to think of some new jokes for this blog. Or perhaps I'm just in pursuit of a blue dahlia.

Ink in use today: Levenger Cocoa.

Ink Fashion

I always knew this day would come.

Ink Quest has, as longtime readers will know, devoted nearly 330 posts to the campaign for the return of ink to the realm of fashion. From the deck of the Penquod I have hurled missive after missive demanding an end to the reign of the ballpoint pen, whose 'ink' (I use the term loosely) is predetermined and hidden away, and a simultaneous rise of the fountain pen, whose ink is always a sensuous, dangerous affair. All I have ever wanted is to live in a world where real ink is in fashion and not the sign of eccentricity, abnormality, and perversion. (A world, in other words, where inkthusiasts are not mocked as 'inkoids', to use the Inkette's term.)

It seems that my wish has finally come true, for the fashion pages of the Weekend magazine inside today's Guardian newspaper announced, in the regular column entitled 'The Measure', that 'Inky Blue' is the colour of the moment. We inkthusiasts have won! The Penquod can finally hang up its sails and stop whining. My days of persecution are over!

Or maybe not. What exactly does 'Inky Blue' mean? I probably have around twenty blue inks in my collection, but no two are alike. And that's just the tip of the inkberg, for The Writing Desk has over sixty different blues on offer. How would anyone ever know, then, if his or her blue ink met the criteria for 'Inky Blue'? 'Fashion' and 'fact' may be etymologically linked, but the facts of fashion are hard to fathom in(k) this case.

As you can see above, dear readers, 'The Measure' displayed a photograph of Kate Winslet opposite the statement about 'Inky Blue'. She's wearing a blue dress, so perhaps the colour of this garment is the mythical 'Inky Blue'. I've examined the image under a microscope, and I've looked through all of the blues in my collection for the closest match. I think that Aurora Blue is the winner, and I'm thanking my lucky stars that I ordered a bottle of this wonderful ink from The Writing Desk a week or two ago. As chance would have it, my Aurora Talentum is currently filled with the colour and has been making some beautiful lines today. I am the height of fashion.

But what if I'm wrong? What if I'm pinning all of my hopes to the wrong blue? What if Aurora Blue is not actually worthy of the blue ribbon? I am already sliding into a blue funk, partly because one of my three cats has been sitting on my lap and biting my hands while I've been trying to type these words. Has he been trying to signal the error of my ways and to stop me posting this entry, or does he simply have the personality of the Seinfeld character after whom he's named? Cats have remarkable powers of vision, after all, so perhaps he knows which of my inks really deserves the label 'Inky Blue'.

There is only one solution: buy more blue ink. And I know just where to go. Tomorrow, dear readers, the Penquod will strike out into the blue water and head for the outskirts of Bristol, where the South West Pen Show is taking place. This will be my first visit to any kind of pen show, so I'm rather excited (and also saddened to learn that honorary Penquod crew member Eileen will not be able to meet me there). I will, of course, report in full; I just hope that I'm not in search of a blue dahlia.

Ink in use today: Inky Blue?

XXX Penography XXX

Ink takes all sorts.

I've mentioned in previous posts, dear readers, how I use the marvellous Sitemeter to keep track of how many people visit this humble blog devoted to the quest for the perfect ink. I don't think that this can be explained in terms of megalomania (although Woody Allen's line about starting out life in Judaism and later converting to narcissism does spring to mind); it's more to do with idle wondering about who on earth reads this rubbish, where these deranged readers come from, and so on.

One of the most endlessly fascinating things about the information provided by Sitemeter are the words typed into search engines -- Google, usually -- which have led certain visitors to Ink Quest. As I think I've noted in the past, 'How do I remove biro from a cheque?' and 'What kind of ink is used on banknotes?' are fairly common, as are more obviously relevant phrases such as 'Noodler's ink shading properties'. Until now, I've never been disturbed by what people have been searching for -- many of the requests are hilariously irrelevant to this blog -- but two separate Google searches undertaken yesterday did leave me feeling rather uneasy.

The first came from a computer that was obviously in some kind of stealth mode, for, as you can see in the image displayed above, Sitemeter was not able to determine its ISP or geographical location. (The fact that Google.jo was used, however, leads me to believe that the request came from Jordan.) And the secrecy makes perfect sense, I suppose, when you observe, dear readers, that the Google user was in search of 'websites for child penography'. Yes, that's right: 'child penography'. I am fairly sure that this illiterate individual would have been disappointed by the contents of Ink Quest. Yes, this is, now that the neologism has been handed to me on a (rather unsavoury) plate, a blog devoted to penography, but I don't think that pens and ink are what the person was really looking for. On Valentine's Day.

I have a little more information about the second strange Google request that led to Ink Quest, but matters are actually even more baffling. I know that someone in the state of New Jersey entered the words 'clairefontaine france stationery jew' into the search engine at 10.01pm, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what prompted such a phrase to be typed. 'clairefontaine france stationery' would have been entirely unproblematic, and anyone merely wanting to know more about the magnificent paper would perhaps find various posts here helpful. But it's the 'jew' at the end that puzzles me. What's the link -- if any -- between Clairefontaine and Judaism? And why was the person who entered those words into Google interested in finding out more about the apparent connection? Has my blog been visited by someone who believes in some all-encompassing Zionist conspiracy? Does he or she think that the Jews control the world's paper supplies?

All of my question will remain unanswered. This, I suppose, is simply what happens when you run a blog to which anyone with a computer could theoretically have access. Once the words are out there in cyberspace, anything can happen. So, while the apparent paedophiles and the possibly anti-Semitic come and go, I'll just keep writing about ink and peddling the hardcore penography in praise of how mighty the pen is. (The last two words of that sentence ought to bring in a bit more dubious traffic.)

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue.

Trance Ended

I believed I'd transcended.

The day began with a moment of magic. I usually read on the train to work, but this morning I sat with my iPod treating me to the sounds of the new Van Morrison album, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. I have mentioned in many previous posts my love of Van Morrison's work, particularly the early masterpieces such as Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. Those two albums in particular have been constant presences in my life ever since I discovered them in 1990; there's not a note, not a whisper, that I don't know.

I was, therefore, beside myself with excitement on Monday when the recording of the fortieth-anniversary Astral Weeks live shows -- the first time that Morrison had ever played the album in its entirety in concert -- finally went on sale, and I've been listening with a sense of wonder all week. There are simply too many magical moments to discuss here, but I will single out one heart-stopping instant when, towards the end of the title track, Morrison takes the band's volume right down. (Anyone who's ever seen him live will know the kind of semi-silence I'm talking about. When old friend Nixon and I saw him in San Francisco in 1993, he faded 'Sweet Thing' until you could have heard a pin drop, and then slipped seamlessly into a sublime, epic 'My Lagan Love'. On another occasion -- I can't remember where or when -- I watched in astonishment as 'Summertime in England' became so quiet that Morrison actually told the band to step away from the microphones to take things down further; the members of the horn section then stepped off the stage and walked through the audience, playing softly as they went.) After the familiar lyrics to 'Astral Weeks' have ended, he adds something new to the calm: he simply repeats the words 'I believe I've transcended' over and over again.

I happened to reach this point in the song just as my train was halfway across the bridge over the Taff. (Curious readers can click here, here, here, or here to see photographs -- not taken by me, I should add -- of the river and the very bridge over which my train was crossing.) At the precise moment when I heard 'I believe I've transcended', the bright morning sun flashed on the water and lit up the world. Synchronicity. I believed I'd transcended.

This glorious moment set the morning up rather well. When I got into the office and unpacked my pens, I found that my choice of inks for the day (Noodler's Nightshade; Diamine Indigo; Diamine Royal Blue) somehow felt right. (There have been many occasions when, although I've liked as separate entities the various colours chosen, their juxtaposition hasn't quite worked and has ruined my day.) I believed I'd transcended.

More specifically, I believed I'd transcended what I once heard Van Morrison call 'mundane reality'. He was being interviewed for a wonderful episode of The South Bank Show entitled 'Clear Cool Crystal Streams'. The theme was Irish music, and various musicians were called upon to discuss the place of their own work within the larger national tradition. Bob Geldof was sent to speak to Morrison, who was asked at one point about the influence of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry. (Morrison once set Kavanagh's 'Raglan Road' to music. He also spoke to Geldof about the influence of Beckett and quoted the famous 'I can't go on, I'll go on' line from The Unnamable; if only that had been given the Morrison musical treatment.) I may not be quoting entirely accurately, but I'm pretty sure that Morrison said he was inspired by Kavanagh's attempt to achieve 'transcendence of mundane reality'. 'Raglan Road' is just the name of an ordinary street, in other words, but by the time the poem's finished with it, it's much more than that. By the same token, Van Morrison's 'Cyprus Avenue' is about far, far more than merely the Belfast street of that name. They've transcended.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about my moment of transcendence that ink's appeal lies precisely in its ability to bring about a 'transcendence of mundane reality'. As I believe I've noted in previous posts, my job is one that requires me to spend a great deal of time with a pen in my hand, taking notes and writing dull, pointless academic texts that no one in his or her right mind would ever care about. It's the ink and the ink alone, I think, that keeps me going: only by regularly changing colours can I hope to achieve transcendence of my mundane reality. I ink, therefore I am.

Transcendence never lasts, though, does it? You can climb up for a moment -- transcendence, etymologically, is all about climbing -- but the weight of mundane reality will always pull you down. And, sure enough, my transcendence soon came to an end.

Not long after I'd returned to my office from the library, where I'd been taking notes and taking delight in the appearance of the Noodler's Nightshade upon Clairefontaine paper, I unscrewed the barrel of my Aurora Talentum to check how much Nightshade remained in the converter. This is when things started to go wrong, for I immediately noticed that the pen was leaking. And not just a gentle drizzle: ink actually poured out of the pen onto my hands. (I still have traces of Nightshade beneath the fingernail of my left index finger. It's most unbecoming.) My training from the Ink Academy immediately kicked in, and I grabbed a plastic bag for urgent quarantining of the pen. I then ran along the corridor, knocking students out of the way as I went (Code 17, people! Lock the building down! Inkjured officer coming through!), and somehow managed to make it to a sink without ruining my new grey suit.

Photographic evidence of the quarantined object is displayed above. I'm a little scared to open the bag, and not just because there will inkevitably be another airborne toxic event when I unscrew the barrel. What if there is something seriously wrong with my beloved Aurora? What if it's ready for the final transcendence? What if it will not live to see another aurora? I think, on reflection, that I will leave the pen in quarantine for forty days. (That's what 'quarantine' actually means, after all.) Maybe a brief spell in the wilderness will lead to some kind of transcendent miracle.

I am firmly back in the realm of mundane reality. Ink lifted me up ... and ink soon brought me back down to earth. I believed I'd transcended, but soon the trance ended.

Ink in use today: Diamine Indigo; Diamine Royal Blue.
Ink under fingernail today: Noodler's Nightshade.

Sophink's Choice

I have nothing but cold words for you today, dear readers.

'How', I hear you cry, 'is that any different from the usual frosty, anti-social, misanthropic way of things at Ink Quest?' Well, I mean it literally on this occasion. My words are cold. The ink that formed them was close to freezing.

Just as Britain was plunged into its coldest, snowiest spell for nearly two decades, the boiler at Ink Towers chose to fail, leaving us entirely without central heating from Sunday evening until this morning, when the British Gas engineer, who had been waiting for an exotically named object known as an 'expansion vessel' to arrive, finally restored the heat. While the entire nation was brought to its knees by a few snowflakes, we huddled and shivered around a single electric heater that the Inkette had managed to borrow. (The country's inability to cope with a few centimetres of snow has been truly hilarious. A Canadian graduate student of mine expressed his utter incredulity at the fiasco. 'This isn't snow!', he declared, just as the national stocks of road salt ran perilously low after about half an hour. 'What's wrong with you people?' Having witnessed last March Montréal's remarkable ability to carry on as normal in the face of proper snow, I feel he has a point.)

The arrival of the lone, life-saving heater in the freezing Ink Towers raised something of a dilemma, however. A dilemma that I came to call Sophink's Choice.

The Inkette suggested that we should use the object to heat Baby Ink's bedroom before he went to sleep, and then -- having wrapped him in two sets of pyjamas, a sleeping bag, and a duvet -- move it to our room. I was about to say 'Good idea', but my mind suddenly turned to my collection of ink, which now resides in a large wooden box in the attic room. Without heating, that loft space can get very cold very quickly, and it occurred to me that my ink might freeze and be ruined. 'Or maybe I could put the heater up in the loft to keep my ink safe...', I found myself saying to the Inkette.

Fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm will probably remember the moment near the beginning of the sixth series when Larry makes a mistake that sends his marriage to Cheryl crashing onto the rocks. Cheryl is on board a plane which looks as if it is about to plummet to the ground, so she rings him from her seat to profess undying love. He, however, is in the middle of having the home entertainment system fixed by 'the TiVo guy', so he asks her if she can call back in ten minutes. I can't find the whole scene on YouTube, but you can see part of it beginning at roughly 0:30 in the following clip:



Let's just say that the Inkette responded to my suggestion about the placement of the heater in a manner strikingly similar to Cheryl David when she eventually arrived home. What the Inkette failed to understand, however, is that I was being called upon to make a choice every bit as difficult as Sophie's Choice. 'Don't make me choose! I can't choose!', I cried as the dilemma (heat the ink or heat Baby Ink's room) reared up in front me.

In the end, and in the shadow of the possibility that I would not live to see our tenth wedding anniversary in March, Sophink's Choice was made in favour of Baby Ink, who settled down for sleep in a cosy room. 'One day', I whispered to him as he drank his milk, 'I will tell you the tale of how I bravely and selflessly chose you over a stack of bottles of coloured liquid.' Above my head in the attic as I read him bedtime stories ('Once upon a time, there was an evil woman who destroyed her husband's ink collection...'), however, I was sure that I could hear ice crystals forming in the ink, glass cracking, colours dripping. Sounds that make the blood of any inkthusiast run cold.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.