My notes to myself for this newsletter advise me to write it off the top of your head, but as I’ve just finished polishing a book, the top of my head is something of a waste sensu “broad and empty expanse” — which is kind of great from the inside, but perhaps not so interesting for readers. This book was a particular slog. For most of four years I’d been in the habit of starting over every five weeks or so, convinced that this time I’d found the way in. In January I decided it was ride or die. February, March, and April were, let’s say, pressured, so it was something of a surprise to find, rereading what I’d come up with, that perhaps it works. And I do sense I’ve freed whatever blockage (to continue the hydraulic metaphor) I’d been facing. Already I have a next book in view, on which more anon.
But first! To cheap behaviorist props aka rewards for grinding diligence, and what better reward for completing a writing project than … a pen! I’d promised myself a new pen (or new to me, it need not be newly made) when I completed this thing, and having got through the first polish with no sense it’d be better consigned to the filter bag of bad life choices I’ve felt a mounting pressure to make good on this promise. The problem, of course, is that this promise runs headlong into my well-advertised abhorrence of STUFF and particularly the acquisition of STUFF, so the past few weeks have had me in a state of fixation that has tested the patience of my long-suffering, overly charitable partner, as I’ve lost more hours than we really need to reckon on r/fountainpens, pen YouTube, and pen eBay, weighing the cons of acquiring a tube of machined acrylic produced in Hiroshima sometime around 1970 with a sectioned cone of 21-karat gold affixed to the end. High-karat pocket pens manufactured in quantity and marketed to school children fifty-plus years ago for a cool ¥1,500 have become the object of a strange … I don’t want to call it fetishism, because the appeal of these pens lies in the fact that they were in fact remarkably well made, and the Sailors in particular are loved for the way the nib tips are tuned — with an edge rather than rounded, so you get a pencil-like feedback. So really it’s the promise of that feedback, that tactile experience, that has me curious. Every now and then you’ll find a Sailor from that era with a nib content as high as 23k — not on their posh presentation pens, on pocket pens of the sort you imagine being packaged in cellophane with a paperboard insert and displayed on spinners in neighborhood stationery stores (though in fact, it’s possible that one, though similar in form factor to the cheap pocket pens, was sold in a satin-lined leatherette box (background).
If my mind were not a broad and empty expanse there are many directions we could take this: the way pedestrian commodities, recontextualized, become objects of veneration, the lock-in that obliges Sailor to continue manufacturing cartridges that fit the feeds on pens made fifty years ago. But I’ll leave these for another day.
At this point I should probably spare myself the agony of acquiring something that will stick around and simply get myself some tea.