Pen and Paper

Now that I’ve finished reading Sedaris’s thoroughly enjoyable When You Are Engulfed in Flames

, I’ve moved on to Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away

, about the practice of writing memoir. Here’s page 1:

Writing is an athletic activity. It comes from the whole body, your knees and arms, kidneys, liver, fingers, teeth, lungs, spine—all organs and body parts leaning in with you, hovering in concentration over the page. And just like any other sport, it takes practice. Behind the football we see on TV, the players have put in hundreds of hours before the big game. The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart. Begin to work those muscles. . . . Pick up the pen and do these ten-minute exercises. Choose a cheap notebook, in which you are not afraid to make mistakes. Use a fast pen. Try out different ones. Find what suits you. The mind is faster than the hand. Don’t slow the hand down more with a ballpoint or a pencil. . . . But I like a pencil, you say. Then use it. What about a computer? Use that if you like. Only know that handwriting and pressing the keys with your fingers are two different physical activities and a slightly different slant of mind comes out from each one. Not better or worse, just different.

For me, the distinction between writing by hand and writing by computer is private versus public.

When I write private stuff on the computer, I find that I tend to whine a lot, and the result is rather unsatisfying. If I write with an audience in mind, though, the computer affords me the modicum of distance I need to articulate my thoughts properly, to explain, to choose.

When I write public stuff, or stuff that will become public, by hand, the result is similarly unsatisfying. My emotions get tangled up in my words, and I can’t sharpen my thoughts enough to make them understood by someone who is not me.

Many years ago, my mother gave me a fountain pen. It was a Sheaffer Targa

(that’s a picture of it to the right). I even bought a special italic nib made for lefthanders. Then I misplaced it and bought another so she wouldn’t know, and ended up with two, both of which disappeared somewhere between Vermont and Florida. I deeply mourn their loss, because the pens were so wonderful to write with.

I recently started hunting for a replacement online (and oh my goodness, how expensive they’ve become now that the line has been discontinued!), but my intuition keeps nudging me, telling me I’ll find my long-lost pens squirreled away in some box I never unpacked. I just don’t have the requisite grit and determination right now to do such a careful search.

I wanted that pen mainly so that I could write in a journal I bought a few years ago. I was looking for last-minute Christmas gifts, and ran across this beautiful book, bound in black leather with gilt-edged pages and two—count ’em, two!—ribbon markers. So it was a gift to myself.

Problem was, I decided I couldn’t violate that book’s pristine pages with a anything less than a fine fountain pen, and I really wanted my old pen back. So it sits on my bookshelf, still wrapped in its protective clear plastic envelope, waiting for the Great Day.

One evening I realized, with a shock, that even if I had found my wonderful fountain pen, and had filled it with some expertly blended ink—somewhere between jet black and a deep maroon, taking care that it doesn’t come out a shade of brown—I wouldn’t have the heart to desecrate That Book. It’s too perfect. Those pure, blank pages mock me. How could I possibly have anything worthy to write in it? I’d have to write on computer, refine it, make it perfect, then transfer it to the Book with great care, like a medieval scribe. And even then I’d probably make a mistake somewhere, a misspelling, a blob of ink, and it would all be ruined. Utterly, utterly ruined.

I liked Goldberg’s idea of finding a notebook you won’t be afraid to make mistakes in, and I have a nice, cheap pen that I really love. (The Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, with its Unique Liquid Ink Technology. While I generally prefer black, it’s available in a decent array of colors. The purple is strangely compelling.)

But I think I’m going to take the middle ground. I’ve found some refillable journals with hand-torn pages of acid-free paper, hand-stitched to lay flat when opened. The covers are hand-stitched leather with a gorgeous rope tie. When out of their covers these journals (ranging in size from 4×6 to 9×12) look positively nondescript, almost a tiny bit dowdy, which actually appeals to me; but inside their covers, they are terribly inviting. These—I think, I hope—are books I wouldn’t be afraid to write in with my cheap roller ball pens, wouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes in, wouldn’t be afraid to cross out and scratch over, and make doodles in when my mind wanders, or even jot the occasional grocery list in. I think. I hope.

And in these journals, I can write secrets. Things I want to say but can’t show to others, at least not until I and everyone I have ever known or even met in passing are dead. Not that I have that many deep, dark secrets, honestly. I just want a place to write them if I do.

Basically I’ll do Natalie Goldberg’s ten-minute exercises in them, or perhaps Julia Cameron’s idea of “morning pages

,” or maybe some of the writing experiments proposed by my beloved Deena Metzger in her Writing for Your Life

. Some of them may show up as blog posts. Some of them may become reflections on the long process of dying, or Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of

morphic resonance, or the proper way to cook asparagus, or unique ways to dispatch one’s enemies.

In which case I’ll get to use words like defenestrate and oubliette. And that will make it all worthwhile.

My Favorite New Word

Well, it’s not a new word, by any means. Just new to me. I do this. I run across a word that just excites me, though I’ve never been able to explain why it does, and I savor it for months or years.

I think it started a long time ago when a fast food chain—Roy Rogers, if I’m not mistaken, which shows you how long ago this was (at their peak, they had 650 restaurants, then in the 90s they sold most of them to Hardee’s, and now they’re down to, like, 51 nationwide)—ran a commercial that included a “word of the day,” which I think was one of their sandwiches or a side item. The ad ended with this line: “Tomorrow’s word: Windowsill.” The announcer said “windowsill” as if it were a deliciously foreign concept, mysterious and intriguing. I loved the idea of making the mundane something new and bizarre. To this day, “windowsill” (always pronounced in the same stentorian tones) remains a favorite word.

I’ve picked up other favorite words along the way. A former employee, a woman, shivered visibly every time the word tongue was uttered. Once, my friend Jim and I worked together to pack up a crowded, electronics-filled office and tried to sort out the morass of cables, wires, and extension cords that we found. Covered in sweat and dust, I waggled a cord in his face and yelled, “This thing is . . . superfluous!” Jim burst into hysterics and called me a filthy name.

I enjoy the word ubiquitous. It’s a seldom-used word for things that are everywhere around you. That simple contradiction just makes me giggle. On the other hand, there’s sesquipedalian. It’s a big word that means . . . well, “big word.” Literally, a word that’s a foot and a half long.

I love the simple words for things that we use every day but never name. You know the plastic bit on the end of a shoelace? It’s an aglet. Lovely word. A square section of a concrete sidewalk is called a flag, derived from flagstone, even though they look nothing like actual flagstones. A forward slash / is properly called a solidus. It’s named after the old Roman coin for reasons that are quite interesting (at least to my mind) but a little off-topic here. And the strips of wood that separate and hold the panes of glass in a window are called mutins, glazing bars, or astragals. Perfectly interchangeable words. I love it.

My new favorite is “interpunct.” It’s the tiny centered dot that separates words and letters. Originally it separated words, which in many languages tended to run together in one long unbroken block of text. It was used mainly in Latin script, but Germanic runic writing used it as well, and Chinese script frequently employs it even today. Most languages now use word spaces instead of interpuncts (spaces came into vogue around 700 C.E.). Dictionaries often use interpuncts instead of hyphens to separate syllables to avoid confusion with words that are properly hyphenated, like well-being (which would then be printed as well-be·ing).

As much as I like interpunct because of what it means, I like it even more for the way it sounds. “Punk” originally meant a female prostitute, then became the bottom in a male-male sexual relationship (which is how it became a term for the “slave” or protectee in a prison relationship). It became the term of choice for a juvenile delinquent, though it’s always denoted a worthless person, and which is why the punk rockers wanted to turn it into a term of rebellion and empowerment. And more recently, “to punk” has come to mean “to play a prank” on someone (I think because it made the punkee look like a fool, but I’m not sure).

So would an “interpunk” mean a punk in transition, or one who likes to surf the ’net?

Your Work Changes You

I was reading the new David Sedaris book, and thoroughly enjoying it, until I came to a chapter that employed subheads and sub-subheads. And the designer didn’t do them right, to my way of thinking: they should have been sized differently, perhaps set in a different typeface, with a bit more room between the subhead and the text. And every time I encountered one of the book’s subheads, I became more and more irritated.

A friend who studied filmmaking said his studies all but ruined his enjoyment of going to the movies. Unless a movie was extremely well-crafted, he kept seeing technical flaws, and it kept him from just watching the story.

Now I can’t read a newspaper article without editing it (most mornings, I find myself screaming at Florida Today, “Does no one proofread anymore? Can no one write a cogent paragraph?”), can’t read a magazine article without thinking about layout and font use, can’t watch a movie trailer without saying, “Copperplate Gothic Bold, again? Really? Don’t you people own any other typefaces?”, and can’t read a book without sighing, “What a shame, I’d have designed this so much better!”

In short, graphic design has made me a miserable human being.