July 20, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:I'm sold
All right, I've just turned into one of those pretentious journalists who fanny about with Moleskins and fountain pens. I've always been a leetle bit obsessed with writing with the right pen, but I have held off on the absurdly expensive Moleskine notebooks. However, I bought one in Heathrow in May, because it was the only notebook on offer. Now it has combined with the celebretory gift of a fountain pen. Writing on that lovely, creamy paper with a fine gold nib is very close to a religious experience for this writer. I'm physically restraining myself from heading to a coffee shop right now with a pack of Dunhills and an idea for an experimental novel . . .
Posted by Jane Galt at July 20, 2007 3:26 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"Fanny about"? We were good with the weird spellings, but that may be over the adopted briticism line.
What does "fanny" mean when used as a verb?
That was meant to be ironically pretentious. It means "mess around", or "strut around"
Bravo. I'm on my second Moleskine and have found them indispensable.
I inherited a 40-year-old Watermans fountain pen from my grandfather a while back and loved writing with it. It seemed too valuable to just carry around in my pocket so I picked up a new Waterman Phileas. It's even better. Happy scribbling.
This post also reminds me of another great difference between British and American English: suffice it to say that the phrase "khaki pants" (phonetically) does not mean the same on both sides of the Atlantic...
Not me. I will continue to write all my letters to the editor on brown paper bags with a magenta Crayola crayon.
They stand out from the crowd that way.
dunno 'bout the dunhills, but go WRITE!
I'll just be over here in the corner lamenting being left handed, and thus never destined to write with a fountain pen, or geek out over paper...
because MAN!, writing a sentance backwards from the period is really hard...
I own a stack of various moleskines that I never touch because I never work with paper in a way sufficiently organized to justify the binding--I mean, I could keep a bunch of cryptic notes serially in a moleskine, but at the end of a full moleskine, I wouldn't have something to look back over and feel good about, I would just have a bunch of cryptic, irrelevent notes neatly bound.
What's fascinating about them, though, beyond the nearly psychotic community (search metafilter for moleskine and see real devotion), is that a rash of really good knockoffs is now available, especially in sketchbooks. Since the form isn't patentable or trademarkable, anyone can manufacture a real moleskin, and Modo y Modo can't do anything about it. The end result is a general elevation in the fashions of the notebook toting molerati.
However, if you consider buying a hand-tooled leather cover (http://renaissance-art.com/catg109/category.aspx), know then that you've gone completely fucking overboard.
Hey, the small softbound moleskins are not too pricy (about six dollars for a pack of three, in your choice of black or tan) and are just the right size for a coat pocket. You don't even know it's there until it's needed, and I haven't found any other product with the same perfect form factor.
As for fountain pens, I began to collect them about twelve years ago when we were still teaching our children penmanship. We discovered that they all wrote much better with the fountain pen than anything else. The point and the liguid ink seem to concentrate the mind.
And lefties can too use fountain pens, they just need to slow down a bit, use a good non-coated, non-recycled paper, and choose one of the old time inks (Parker or Sheaffer) that are not so vivid but dry more quickly.
The point and the liguid ink seem to concentrate the mind.
That, or the fact that a careless twitch with a fountain pen can, in less than a second, undo several hours' worth of painful work in a manner that no ink blotter can possibly undo. That, and fountain pen ink doesn't dry well on top of most common forms of correction tape and fluid, either.
The above factors do tend to focus the mind pretty sharply.
Myself, I tinkered with fountain pen calligraphy for a while, but advancements in computer technology utterly obviated any use for calligraphy beyond personal amusement...roughly within the span of my lifetime to date.
Fountain pens and brushed India ink, when used together, can produce some fairly impressive effects on some types of art media, but I haven't picked up a fountain pen for any other purpose in years.
Now you need to take the next step -- obtain a properly restored, classic fountain pen that fills from a bottle. An early flexible Waterman would be perfect. But I am also partial to the Parker Big Reds and some of the 1930s Sheaffers.
D, I understand the sinister-handed problem with writing when the ink can get messy. My Father was taught by the nuns that left handed wasn't only a gift from Satan, but that he couldn't write and keep from messing up while he wrote leftie. He became somewhat ambidextrous, then, because he ended up writing as a Rightie, then threw a ball and batted left and right...making him a real Moderate (except when it came time to vote).
I despise the physical act of dragging a writing implement across any sort of paper. If I hadn't had a typewriter in college, I'd have never graduated. If I had to write to blog, I wouldn't. Give me a keyboard.
I'm totally unqualified to comment on this. My handwriting is so bad I had to learn to type in junior high (middle school for you youngsters). OTOH, my girlfriend is a fountain pen geek. She spends all day wring beautiful notes about her clients. I found out about nibs.com. I spoke with someone there and got some hints about how to figure out her writing style. I got her a Christmas present of a Namiki Vanishing Point pen with a nib customized for her way of writing and she swears it feels like it is effortless.
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