Believe it or not, my plan for today was simply to pick up where I left off last week, but of course intervening events call out for commentary. But first, flex nib studies!
Since I arrived in the mountains pomegranates have figured prominently in my visual field. The above is from Tuesday.
By Wednesday, the mood had shifted. Halfway through the above I realized I’d rendered the dehiscence scar so that it resembled an exit wound.
And the tea towel so that it resembled a shroud.
Fortunately we’ve had a dog visiting, which has been a salve.
My apologies as ever for the execrable quality of the photos, not to say the absence of metadata.
I’m not in a mood to contribute to the “what the Democratic Party did wrong” discourse this morning, but I’ll offer two unrelated observations. The first is that, over seven waves of the World Values Survey, going back to 1981 (we’re now in Wave 8), you observe a monotonic growth in comfort with authoritarianism and military rule among younger cohorts of US Americans, coupled with a declining regard, in the same populations, for the rule of law.
That’s the analytic side of my thoughts on Tuesday. The interpretive side comes from something I observed passing through airports (EWR—MSP—SLC) last Thursday: US American men under the age of forty or forty-five no longer sit in public. They sprawl, they lie, practically recumbent, legs akimbo, in a posture that resembles nothing so much as that of a baby laid on its back. This is a posture that exudes an infantile egoism. And infantile egoism is bruv’s brand.
I raise this in part because, having offered this observation a couple times in the past couple days I’ve had more than one person tell me I should write something about it, and perhaps I shall. It’s coming up for me on the fiction side, but to write about it in a more essayistic key I’d like to take my time.
In the meantime, let us continue with Constraint.
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Switching modalities, and freeing ourselves of the aura of the dictionary word: how does the syntagm the pencil-like feedback of a Sailor fountain pen acquire meaning? No question, the phrase had meaning for me long before I picked up a Sailor fountain pen, and perhaps the key is the pencil-like, which offers a bridge to more familiar experiences. But the phrase became more meaningful to me once I’d become familiar with Sailor fountain pens.
(Does it matter how we hear the question? —acquire meaning for the individual versus acquire meaning for the community? It is possible that the meaning of the phrase the pencil-like feedback of a Sailor fountain pen has for me diverges from that which it has for most members of the fountain pen community—in fact, I suspect this is the case. For most of the discussion about the distinctive feel of Sailors is concerned with contemporary Sailors, whereas the two I use were made in 1967 and sometime between 1970 and 1973. So while there’s definitely something in the feel of my old Sailors that corresponds, in my mind, to pencil-like—some combination of how the nib is ground, with an edge along the sagittal midline, and the dryness of the feed—it’s possible I’ve projected the qualifier pencil-like on some other sensation than what most people have in mind when they refer to the pencil-like feedback of a Sailor fountain pen.)
As ever, if this did something for you, I bid you to SHARE IT, subscribe, send aged heicha, etc. And I wish you courage.