Pen & Ink

My computer is still out for repair, so I must use the workstations at the library. This means that I am restricted to working only when the library is open (unless I decide to emulate the hero of my book and break-in during the dark of the night).

For someone like me, used to working late into the night, this restriction is a bit of a challenge, and my wife "The Compleat Technophobe" suggests that my crankiness is the result of digital withdrawal symptoms. This is, of course, utter bunkum. I am cranky because of the weather, because of the interference of social responsibilities, and because the library doesn't stay open until 3 am.

Rather than withdrawal, the lack of a computer is more like forgetting one's pocket knife, you keep reaching for a tool that you are used to having nearby. It's an irritation, not an insurmountable urge.

But not having the computer available has benefits. It forces me to work more deliberately and plan more carefully. This blog entry, for example, is being written during a sweltering Sunday afternoon, in longhand (italic, I hate Palmer Method), and, out of sheer perversity, it is being written with a dip pen.

Since I don't have air conditioning, a fan on the large oak table is giving me a bit of a breeze to make things more bearable. A couple of binder clips on the pad of paper keep the sheets from fluttering.

It is a good sensation to work this way. It's not just that I'm using writing tools that are not much different from those used by Major Tash, or whoever the ghostwriter of Henry's book was, it is the the forced change of pace. There's a lot to be said for low tech.

I'm not a Luddite, far from it, I love technology and gadgets, but I also have a certain discomfort at letting devices do too much. I carry a mobile phone, but not a PDA (at least not since leaving the corporate teat), and have seldom used a pocket-sized device to access the web (a situation that is unlikely to change as my eyes age. It confuses the heck out of people as I spend part of my time doing complex research over the internet and part of it analyzing and writing the results with a pencil or pen and a pad of paper.

When I was young, I was, for a time, an actor. One of my challenges was that it was difficult to memorize lines. I am, after all, the scatter-brained poster child for ADD. My options were to quit acting, try to apprentice myself to Marcel Marceau, or find some way to memorize better. In another context, my father had mentioned a theory of his that the act of writing something helps to embed it in one's memory. So I tried it. I wrote out all my lines and it worked. It worked even better if I wrote out the entire play. It worked if you typed but not as well, and this led to my conclusion that it wasn't the writing as much as it was the slower pace that forced you to think each word in order. It is a kind of physically imposed deliberation. When I moved from speaking the words of others to writing my own, I found that ideas and language that I composed in longhand were often better than those that I wrote directly on a typewriter. When word processors came along the difference remained.

A few years ago I tried the experiment of writing with a dip pen. It slowed the writing down in a different way. Now, I was forced to take odd little breaks in order to dip the pen again. I found it pleasant and a useful way to work. I've had a dip pen on my desk ever since.

I don't use a quill pen (I'll go into the historical quill pen mistake another time). I use a General's #204B penholder with a cork grip, and a Speedball "Bowl Pointed" steel nib which I dip into either Pelikan 2001 Blue or, if I'm feeling fancy, Norton's Walnut ink I keep the open inkwell in a wide raku bowl in case I have an attack of the klutzes. Squares of salvaged t-shirt material are pen wipes, extra nibs are in a medicine bottle and a plastic eyedrop bottle holds cleaning water. More pens are in a container that my wife made for me; reed pens, crow quills, and others.

And when I put my pen down, for a moment it rests easily on a six inch long cast-iron paperweight shaped like the upper surface of a log with two frogs on it.