This is not quite the realization, or the attempted realization, of a New Year's resolution, because I didn't have the idea in time to make a resolution. But some resolve will be part of keeping it going. It's not that the idea of producing a thousand words or so each week is in any way daunting. I write more than that most days. But I do not write them on a keyboard, usually, except for what I produce at work. And I have been doing most of my writing by word processor or similar technology since the late 1970s, when the newspaper I worked for (the Star Phoenix in Saskatoon) went automated. I was the first MA student in my U. of S. program to write his thesis on a personal computer (a Xerox, with 8-inch disk drives, and less memory than a kids' toy these days).
What I usually write with when I'm in the mood is a fountain pen, in some nice notebook. My pen of joy these days is in the new Visconti Van Gogh "Starry Night" pattern, a Christmas present. It sends ink flowing gently over a CD 15 notebook. In Private Reserve "Midnight Blues" ink. None of this does a lot to make me a penman of note--my handwriting never has been grandly cursive. More henly scratchive.
I read of a fountain pen that did its owners some good in The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Daniel Sempere, the protagonist, covets a Montblanc Meisterstuck (thought the book spells it "Meinsterstuck" apparently to distinguish it from the "real" thing). The pen is part of a numbered series, with a gold nib. Daniel sees it in the window of a shop near his father's book shop. The shopkeeper tantalizes him with the story that this was the pen Victor Hugo used to write Les Miserables. Daniel's father is less than convinced, but does not want to ruin Daniel's delight in the pen and the story. Nor does he want to thwart Daniel's plans to become a writer--plans being held back by trying to produce stories with a Staedler pencil, a number two. Still, the father is shocked at the price of the pen, and skeptical about whether such pens even existed in Hugo's days. He tells the fifteen-year-old Daniel to keep writing with the pencil, and that he will get him the pen before he has finished his first story.
The fatherly skepticism is calculated to send a reader of on some research. At least, it did me. The Meisterstuck was first made in 1924. That's more than a sneeze away from pre-1862, when Les Miserables was published. The reference to Les Miserables is partly to get an intertextual connection between mid-20th-century Barcelona and mid 18th century Paris, I think. Besides, the fictional author, Julian Carax, wrote the fictional piece of fiction, The Shadow of the Wind, in Paris, having had to run from his home in Barcelona. There is even an evil Inspector, Fumero, echoing the Inspector hounding the pages of Les Miserables. In fact, though the Mei(n)sterstuck that Daniel does receive for his 16th birthday does not make him into a successful writer, he is able to return it to its previous owner, Carax, who wrote The Shadow of the Wind with it, and who then uses it to revive his own writing career. Something about the writer making the pen, not the pen the writer, I think.
What's this got to do with anything. Beats me, but I do love the feel of a pen in my hand, and the sight of the ink line shaping itself to the twists of my wrist and arm as I move the pen across the page. The way each different fountain pen I write with has its own array of distinctive expressive lines, and seems to take to its own ink. Glowing Private Reserve Electric DC Blue for the other Visconti Van Gogh; tropical Monteverdi Turquoise for the Acme "Nancy Wolff" pattern, with the dogs parading all around the barrel. The lush purple finish of Private Reserve Tanzanite for the Monteverdi. It's not quite the same as the tick, tick, tick of the keyboard, though there is some pleasure in watching the letters and lines accumulate across the screen, I have to admit.
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