Pro Patria Mori (non empti)

I’m getting a start on my yearly Rememberance mope. Unlike the merry, Vincent Price-ish morbidness that attends Hallowe’en, this is an entirely somber and reflective event. I went into this in some depth during the D-Day posting in the summer, so I’m not going to repeat myself at any length here. I’ll leave it by saying that I spend roughly a week ahead of and several days after 11 November pressed down by a sense of undischargible debt.

I also spend at least the week and intermittent periods of the month ahead of the day in a transport of rage. Why? Christmas advertising. It strikes me as somewhat dismissive of the day to lard the air surrounding it with remonstrances to dump out one’s wallet as a way of honouring the most festive holiday of the year. I like Christmas, admittedly coming at it from a secular Dickensian angle rather than a Christian one, but the jollity of it from either standpoint (I may not be a Christian, but I’ve grown up around them and I quite comprehend what a good deal a saviour’s arrival must be) is greatly at odds from the kind of emotion that recalling the deaths of quite literally millions of people engenders. Christmas ads should wait until the 12th.

I’ve made a bit of a hash of the Latin above, I expect, but I find it interesting that the translation of “to buy” sounds to English ears like “empty”– this constant urging to buy does indeed hollow out our holidays, removing the underlying meaning and emotional power from them. I suppose I should be glad that the adverts are Christmas rather than Rememberance Day flavoured, as I might well blow out a blood vessel if presented with commercials suggesting that the Battle of Ypres should move me to buy cut-price underwear.

Today’s pen: Sheaffer Vigilant
Today’s ink: Herbin’s Lis de Thé

Dug out.

No interesting contemplations of Mannenhitsu-do today, just a brief crow of either triumph or lamentation. I’ve sent off the last five someone-else’s pens in the house, which leads to:

-Hooray! No one is waiting for me to finish their pens!
-Boo! I’ve run out of employment!

The latter is balmed by the knowledge that there are a few more in transit, which would likely be in hand now if the various US and Canadian postal services hadn’t gotten very picky about the format of the return address (not good enough to cross the border, but good enough to get it back to the person who sent it– odd).

I suppose I should take advantage of this hiatus to get some of my own pens off the “to do” pile… but my son has spent the weekend learning to climb stairs, and insists on doing so at every opportunity now. Who could have expected that parenting might be tiring?

Today’s pen: Parker “51″
Today’s ink: Skrip blue-black

Oh, skip it.

The Regular Job is full of ringing telephones, as our marketing department has done something to encourage activity. Unlike the usual blissful isolation that is one of the more charming aspects of Regular Job, I find myself speaking several times an hour with members of the general, base, common, popular public.

In these interactions (those few that aren’t on the theme of “Why are you pestering us with your advertising? Take me off your mailing list! How did you even get my address?”), I usually offer the caller an item of information they need to write down. Several times yesterday, I was halted in mid-sentence by this unhappy insertion:

“Oh, wait! My pen is skipping.” Pause, with scribbling noises in the background. “OK, go ahead.”

…and I restrain myself from suggesting that they get a fountain pen. Fountain pens will skip, of course. This is not a sudden-onset problem, though. Either it’s a problem right from the start, and usually down to a misfitted feed, or it’s a sign that the pen is pretty much out of ink. It sometimes crops up if there’s a disagreement between pen and ink (this is infrequent, but some pens just don’t like some inks), but once again, you know it’s a problem right away when you start writing.

Ballpoints are your villains for skipping. Assuming one can convince them to write at all, they will stop and resume in a whimiscal and contrary manner. Whether it’s through deformities in the ball, lack of traction, or the devils that live in the goo that calls itself ink, I can’t say, but there’s not preparing for it, and the cure– extra pressure and lots of vigourous scribbling– is bound to put even more pressure on your joints.

It’s another reason I don’t use the things. When I’m doing a patch of writing, I don’t want to be suddenly faced with a lacuna in my sentence that can only be overcome with an attention-disrupting flailing gesture. I’ll stick with a reliable, mature technology, thank you very much.

Today’s reliable pen: Parker 45 Flighter
Today’s freely-moving ink: Pelikan black

Pendemic

On Monday, the first round of H1N1 innoculations started in this province. Great mad lines of people who had seen great mad lines elsewhere showcased on the news were clamouring for a jab for their children (children and sickies being the only ones eligible– a few from neither camp were also clamouring, and were shown the door). On Tuesday, my wife took our son for his shot, and it was apparently like going to a poorly reviewed short film; in, paperwork, stab, cry, and home in a half hour, including a required fifteen minute rest to see if he’s allergic to the proteins the stuff is grown in.

I have previously arranged some entries for dramatic effect, so some persistent readers will expect this pause in the narrative to be a builder of tension before I reveal the possibly humourous and shocking other shoe.

Nope. No two-headed offspring for me. His hair remains in his head, and he’s not gone some unfashionable colour. His appetite was a little off yesterday morning, but returned by late afternoon.

So what? So go get your innoculation. It’s not going to do you any harm (in the vast majority of cases– some people are allergic to their own toes, after all, so anything is possible), and it might keep you from getting sick, and most importantly, making other people sick.

I’ll be going in for mine as soon as the roster clears. Apparently pregnant women are now allowed, and since professional hockey players appear to be high up the list it should be no time before I can attend a clinic.

I hope this sniffle doesn’t develop into anything….

Today’s pen: Waterman 52 1/2 V
Today’s ink: Pelikan blue-black

Now he’s done it!

Some time ago, I was contemplating here upon the propriety of using a pen which had drifted through the ages in an unused state. Yesterday’s nearly-morbid entry on pen morbity has moved me to commit an irretrievable act– I have used an unused pen!

(A digression: Let’s be honest– no act can truly be undone, unless it’s one that the application of Ctrl-Z has effect on. You may untie your shoes, burn a manuscript, or bury an inconvenient corpse, but at very least Time and Entropy keep track.)

The funny thing is, this is not a pen that is subject to the dissolution considered yesterday. This is a pen of modern, petrochemical plastics that barring application of hammers and flame will last until the sun engulfs the planet. However, in the odd mood that yesterday put me in, no doubt a hangover of excess Hallowe’en spirit, I decided that I was not doing myself nor the pen any favours by leaving it unattended. It was made to be a writing instrument, not a mere tiny exhibit in a completely private museum. The fact that the previous owner, to whom it was clearly a gift, chose never to apply it to its intended use, should not constrain me.

So, after 46 years of inactivity, a pen takes to the field. Doris McGovern, I hope you had some good pens in your life, because you’ve missed out on using a beauty.

Today’s debut pen: Sheaffer Lifetime
Today’s supporting cast of ink: Herbin’s Vert Empire

Post Scriptus: There must be something in the air– I see that the latest installment of Ink Quest also concerns itself with mortality in a semi-auto-elegaic way. Or is it something in the ink?

Vapour Rub

In the constellation of reasons that I like vintage pens, one of the more luminous objects is the smell of them. Unlike markers, the dangers of sniffing fountain pens are mainly limited to embarrassing and mysterious marks on and about the nose, but there are rewards to be had from it.

Ink itself has a smell… sometimes. Most modern inks are very low-key in their scents, although the aroma of Noodler’s is quite pronounced. Vintage inks have a definite smell to them, but it’s not one to apply to the nose too frequently; most of the agents that produce the smell have been banned as either carcino- or teratogenic, although the effects were mainly felt by those working in the factories.

Absent of the ink, the pens often have a smell all their own. Most frequently, the smell is less pen-engendered than it is the result of prolonged storage in an ignored back corner. Musty? I suppose so, but as the olfactory bulb is lodged in the hippocampus, smell is a powerful moderator of memory, and every time I smell that dusty-leather and old-paper smell, I am treated to a replay of a happy day spent in my grandparents’ basement, where we would frequently haul out and examine the simple treasures in the wholly unnecessary basement wall safe.

Today’s pen has a smell that is specific to the pen, one which is frequently found in pens of the late 1930s and 1940s. Celluloid, the plastic based on wood! It has a very distinctive aroma, essentially camphor, but the mind constructs a false recollection of long-ago cold remedies. It’s a warm smell, and it speaks of the organic origin of the material– not dragged up out of the earth by rough industry, but grown (and then slathered in chemicals, but that rather disrupts the imagery, doesn’t it?).

There is, though, a little nugget of worry that accompanies this happy inhalation, one not connected to the chemical similarity of celluloid to explosives (but I’ll thank you not to smoke around my pens…). The sense of smell is your head’s built in molecule detector. For there to be a smell in the first place, the item which smells must be shedding tiny amounts of itself into the air around it. Every time I pass a pen under my waiting nose, a small fraction of it leaves the main body to whirl through my sinuses and then rush into the world to mingle with the methane of a million proto-hamburgers and the dying exhalation of Karl Marx… or Groucho, if you prefer.

My celluloid pens are dissolving, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. One day, a future archaeologist may find the incorruptible gold points from my collection, and misinterpret their use, for the rest of the pen will have become part of the atmosphere around him.

Of course, at that point, I’ll be in much the same state and won’t care particularly. There’s no sense in becoming vapourish over it. *SNUFF!*

Today’s fragrant pen: Sheaffer Vigilant
Today’s non-aromatic ink: Herbin’s Lis de Thé

Equity?

Having dabbled in seasonal quasi-occult stuff last week, I’ll return to the more present world of pens today.

I’ve just concluded the oddest transaction I’ve ever been involved in, and I’m not sure that I’m not lodged on some kind of moral hook over it.

A chap contacted me through my web-site, saying he fancied one of my pens and would I like to trade? I overcame hesitation (I want to make money on pens, of course, but I’m also a quivering addict– it’s not unlike saying, “Can I pay for that cocaine with some different cocaine?”), and he explained what he had to offer. Of that, I expressed interest in four pens, two manifestly less valuable than what he wanted from me, one about on par, and one in open market terms worth a good deal more.

I state my interest and estimate, and in short order the rest of the thing unfolds:
- He sends me all four pens, suggesting direct inspection.
- I say that the even-value item is probably the best trade.
- He says to keep all four, send along the one he’s after, and if I can find a pen he’s having trouble tracking down, I might send it as well later.

So… I’m rather ahead on the deal. This not-yet-found pen is still not worth, in pure money terms, as much as the three pens I’m calling extra, but I guess if he thinks it will bring him the subjective value in happiness, I shouldn’t fight it.

Today’s conventionally-purchased pen: Parker “51″
Today’s ink: Skrip blue-black

A true ghost story.

I post this today because I generally don’t appear here on Saturday, and for all that our son is putting brakes on our usual efforts to creepificate the house, there’s still some tombstones to be set askew in the front yard and a pumpkin to vivisect.

Some years ago I was with a group of friends at a Scout Camp about an hour’s drive outside the city– all adults, this group, we’d just rented to place from the Boy Scouts for the weekend. The camp centers on a building erected in the late 1800s, and was reputed to have been the site of treatment for tuberculosis victims by the doctor who constructed it.

There is a camp-fire circle not far from the main building, and it being a fine night, many were gathered about the the fire. At one point, one of the company breaks away, takes a few steps out into a clear space before the building, then returns.

“I’m not sure I recognize the person looking out the upstairs window,” says he. “They don’t look too happy.”

Someone else goes for a look, also failing to recognize the woman at the upper window (the lower, by the way, were permanently boarded over against vandals). The action repeats until several have failed to recognize her. Finally, an enterprising person decides to go in an see who it is.

Upon entering the building, it is forcefully recalled to them that the upper floor was removed a decade previous. The is no one at the window, nor could there have been.

“Stuff,” you say? “Hooey?” A couple of years before this event, at the same place, a discussion was engaged, prompted by reminiscences of one of the people who had helped remove the upper floor, regarding the general eerieness and occasional manifestations during the reconstruction. Stuff and hooey were frequently called, culminating in one of the sceptics saying, “It would take an awful big something for me to believe in ghosts.”

Just at that moment, the heavy fire-doors which had been installed at the end of the place both banged open, suddenly and violently at the end of the swing the hydraulic closers would allow, and then crashed back closed in a way a very heavy and strong person would have trouble replicating with one door (we checked), never mind both. The deck beyond was empty, and no one stood within ten feet of the doors within.

Proof? Of course not. The very nature of ghosts, theories regarding infrared cameras and elecromagnetic fields to the contrary, is that they defy proof. A dozen people saw each event, and half of them felt it proved nothing. But they all, in the latter case at least, jumped and shouted at the time.

I wonder how they’d feel about it if they’d seen the whitish transparent indistinctness drifting down the place where the stairs I’d removed the previous day had been? The absent upper floor was in part my doing, and I was the instigator of the door-crashing discussion.

Todays altogether canny and natural pen: Wing Sung 612
Today’s upsetting ink: Hallowe’en home-made special– on a base of Skrip red, small amounts of Herbin Lis de Thé and a touch of Quink black to make a nice not-quite-fresh blood colour. It’s the hit of the office (amongst those who notice).

Jekyll, Hyde, & Co.

I have mentioned previously that I cannot stick to a single pen, through what might be called whimsy or a lack of concentration, depending your inclination, although I put it down to the joy to be had in variety. In this lead up to the best of all holidays, I wonder if the joy is not that which one gets from taking on, covertly, a different nature?

I was brought to this contemplation by the morning’s work with today’s pen. Roughly co-eval with the previous day’s pen, also with a fine point, and yet the nature of the writing is different. Not, I hasten to point out, just the way the ink is deposited on the page, but the actual form of the letters. Unlike Stevenson’s unfortunate doctor, I don’t have to disguise my writing through clumsy tricks when undergoing my transformation– the writing is the very manifestation of the change!

It’s very subtle. One might suspect that this was the work of two brothers, not far apart in age and taught in the same school. But it’s different. Picking up a new pen brings to the end of the hand a new persona, not unlike the Warner cartoon in which Bugs and Elmer are beset with a swarm of hats (Plop, a gangster! Whoosh, a bride!) and how far up the arm that amendment might extend is anyone’s guess….

Here is yet another reason to select fountain pens over ball-points! There’s no need to muck around with possibly incorrect tinctures of indifferently pure mineral salts, when one can merely dash off notes in a variety of guises, and no limit on the number of faces one might assume. A shaded mash note with a fine flexible 14k, a confident memo to the boss with a medium firm modern steel, a demand for payment with a fat stub, and no one reading them all would suspect the same mind lay behind them all.

There is the question at the end of it all, though– if personality is affected so deeply by the pen in hand, what happens when the pen is put down?

Today’s influential pen: Esterbrook J fitted with a 9556 Firm Fine point (very film noir, leaving messages as if to a private detective from a friend in the police force in clear but slightly squared-off letters)
Today’s transformative potion: Skrip blue-black

Boo! Blah! Ssss! Geek!

I am a couple of days early, or course, but it being the most wonderful time of the year, my thoughts are running irresistably towards Hallowe’en. Thanks to the now-cognitive presence of my son, my wife and I won’t be able to go as mad for the grand holiday as we could wish, making the house into a palace of terror (two years ago, clusters of children would stop at the end of the driveway, confer, and in half the cases not approach– many candies were the reward of the brave!), and watching horror films.

Note the last two words there. I nearly said “scary movies”, but I didn’t want to wander into territory defined by Scream and claimed by Saw and Rob Zombie. To my mind there is a difference between a movie which insinuates through mounting evidence that the world is other than one had believed it to be, and one which shouts, “BOOGABOOGA! This is what guts look like!” A horror film is the former, while the latter differentiates between Scream- or Saw-inspired by whether it’s making smirkingly smug references to previous films or not. Post-modern ironicism nor torture porn make for a horror film.

I will not discount the place of viscera in a horror film, mind you. The difference is that the whole point of the film is not to cause the viewer to cry, “Oh, ick!”, but to use the ick to underline the situation. A modern horror film, faced with the numbing effect of modern news, can hardly avoid some of it. The Ruins is an excellent example of the sort of thing I mean– the gore isn’t wanting, but it’s in service to the story rather than the goal.

They is another film that pleases me greatly, for the same reason that it offends a lot of on-line commentors; the monster is never clearly shown. Some details are displayed, but the whole of it remains murky and obscure, letting the imagination not only fill in its details, but fit it into the dark corners of your very own home.

My regular Hallowe’en viewing includes, almost invariably, Hallowe’en, the original outing from 1978. Dated as some components of it are, it was the first of that sort of thing, and possibly the purest– think not in terms of improving technology, but rather the rapidly diminishing payback of squeezing juice from a fruit. I also rather like The Thing which was made by the same director a few years after Hallowe’en, and which stands as one of the few examples of a remake serving any kind of a good purpose (although I’ll defend The Thing from Another World against all insults).

Were I in the mood for a nice little British tale of witchcraft, I’d certainly trot out Night (or Curse in the US edit) of the Demon– the monster is shown in this one, and quite early on, but it’s such a corker and the story between appearances is so good I can forgive it.

We have decided to dress my son as Edgar Allen Poe, as his hair works for the costume, and this brings me around to the fine… er, fun movies made by Roger Corman using Poe’s titles, and occasionally some story elements. The only two I can really recommend without comedy raising its mood-crushing head are Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death, and the only thing to really recommend them is also what recommends The Raven– lovely old Vincent Price. He also raises Bert Gordon’s The Tingler to art, with his interaction with Patricia Cutts being a display of how two people can be terrible to one another without the movie stinking (a trick modern writers should try to figure out, since so many current scaries are populated entirely by jerks).

Price is also the only thing to recommend The Haunted Castle, which claims to be Poe but which lifts a Lovecraft story. If you want to find decent interpretations of the Old Man of Providence, The Resurrected is one of the best things going despite some ’80s cheese-effects towards the end. The only link I’m putting in is a plug for a very low budget Call of Cthulhu, which I urge the buying of– it’s a labour of love, and it’s very true to the material.

Finally, although my list goes much, much farther– as a Godzilla fan, I can’t let the giant monsters go without mention. Had I the time, it would be the original Burr-free Gojira, the very recent All Out Monster Attack (don’t be fooled by the title), or the remarkably good non-Godzilla Cloverfield.

Next year, he’ll be old enough to go to the Grandparents for the night.

Today’s pen: Waterman Crusader
Today’s ink: Mont Blanc Racing Green