Pro Amor Patriae

Oh, I’ll bet I’ve spelled that wrong; I’ll be writing ROMANI ITE DOMUM all over the forum for the rest of the day, now.

In any event, tomorrow is the sesquicentennial of Canada as an independent country (as recognized by European nations).  We do this on the first of the July not to sneak in before the US’s national celebration, but because having a summer celebration is much better than one in winter, and because it one is free to choose, why not the first of the month?  It makes for a tidy calendar.

Today’s films, therefore, are little bits of national history programming which we occasionally get to enjoy rather than adverts on TV.  There’s plenty of them, and I’ve chosen ones that I think give a pretty good sense of the sort of interior mixture of pride and regret that a lot of Canadians are steeping in currently.

Today’s pen: Pelikan M600
Today’s ink: Chelpark Black
(Not Canadian?  Oh, dear, me– we’re a mosaic of many cultures here.  They’re in Canada, so they’re as Canadian as I am)

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This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Sheaffer Stylist TWSBI Mini Pelikan P1 Parker 51	Montblanc Royal Blue Herbin Lie de Thé Diamine Marine Herbin Éclat du Saphir	18 manuscript pages (thin air up here.  Thin indeed).

The annual summer silence is about to descend on this enterprise, as my two weeks away† from The Regular Job begin on Monday.  Of course, the way things have been running lately, the interruption will be almost imperceptible.  As it ever the case, I’ll hope to get some writing done around the expectations of family and fabric of the house without expecting to.  This will make for a good deal more physical work than last year, carting the giant heap of paper home and then shifting it out of the way while doing whatever it is that gets in the way of writing is; we remember that another translation of codex is “lump of wood.”

We will try to overlook a more colloquial use of the word by native Latin speakers; blockhead.  I’m sure I shall feel like one in a fortnight when I’ve failed to advance the work beyond its current state, however much I hope to.

Meditation Time

Here’s a chap messing around with a pen.  I occasionally do stuff like this… in one corner of a page, for about two minutes.  I don’t devote quite the level of resources to it that he does, either; nice paper, boutique ink.  Very inexpensive pen, though, which is worth pondering.

The trick will be to not see any of that stuff when you close your eyes to go to sleep tonight.

Today’s pen: TWSBI Mini
Today’s ink: Herbin Lie de Thé

 

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Faber-Castell e-motion Pelikan P1 Sheaffer Stylist Parker 65	Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Diamine Marine Montblanc Royal Blue Herbin Bleu Myosotis	18 manuscript pages.

This week was a bit of a struggle, and not for want of inspiration or direction.  I knew exactly what the scene at hand was to be, but I was doing something terrible to the protagonist.  I’ve done plenty of terrible to other characters, mind you, and the protagonist has been dealing with the fall-out from it, and even witnessing some of it, but that’s all comfortably fictitious supernatural terribleness.  This week the terrible was of a true-to-life nature, the sort of thing that happens all the damn time in the news and which makes us all shake our heads and wonder at the base nature of humanity.

What made this hard is that it wasn’t something that was done to the protagonist; it was something he did.  Given who I modeled him on, and who the inspiration for his victim is, it was a steep bit of the path to the summit.  All the more so because I can imagine the sort of assumptions that will get made post-publication; if the author wrote this, then doesn’t it stand to reason he thought thus?

No.  No it doesn’t.  That’s why the slow progress.  I was axle-deep in cognitive dissonance.

Also, you’ll note there that I flatter myself with the notion that there’s going to be publication. Vanity still has a seat at my table.

OH!  I forgot, in all that– struggle or no, I’m out of the red at last:

Blast… er… Subtle Menaces From The Past!

If you’re like me, you shouldn’t be out wandering around without a minder appreciate a carefully constructed fictional reality.  There are few more careful craftsmen of such things than the HPLHS, and this little gem is one of theirs:

If that didn’t make enough sense, or is only ringing a small and distant bell, here’s the inspiration.

Today’s pen: The Nameless One (based on past entries, it moves me toward films like that)
Today’s ink: Waterman blue-black

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Parker 65 Sheaffer Stylist Faber-Castell e-motion Pelikan P1	Herbin Bleu Myosotis Montblanc Royal Blue Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Diamine Marine	21 manuscript pages.

No profound thoughts this week; I do find myself having to tamp down impatience to be bloody well done this first draft, and not just because I’d like to get onto the back-up-able phase and silence worries about fire, flood and nesting rodents.  The calendar pages are flying off the wall!  Other stories want writing!

Electro-Quick Car-o-matic!

A possible side-light to my (apparently) retrograde political notions is an interest in non-combustion vehicles.  Had I but the money for a PV roof, a Power Wall™, and an electric car, I’d be revelling in the quiet joy of driving about town on the back of harnessed lightning.

But I wouldn’t expect to go quite this fast:

Today’s pen: Faber-Castell e-motion
Today’s ink: Herbin Pousièrre de Lune

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Sheaffer Stylist The Striped Enigma Parker 65 Pelikan P1	Montblanc Royal Blue Waterman blue-black Herbin Bleu Myosotis Diamine Marine	26 manuscript pages.

Unfashionable Political Views

A funny thing happened here over the weekend, and of course, “funny” can be variously interpreted.

…as in “unusual or uncommon”:  I got about thirty times the usual amount of traffic.  The behind-the-scenes stats reveal that this is a result of sudden notice being taken by people considering fountain pens on Reddit.  More to the point, people were looking at an old entry in which I write in a fairly loose manner about my Soyuz accordion-filler, and coincidentally about western perceptions of the way things got made in the old Soviet economy.  We can put this down to a freak spasm of the internet, of course; the all-seeing eye of humanity’s collective online presence passing over something of mine in such a way that I actually noticed it.  Apart from the strange up-tick of status, no big deal in the grand scheme, although there is an odd inward twinge of pride mingled with performance anxiety.

…as in “amusing”:  Because my stats let me look at the Reddit entry… well, I looked.  And then I had a giggle.  At least one of the commenters there urges me to get over the fact that there isn’t a Soviet Union anymore, I guess because I express doubts about capitalism being substantially better than Marxist Leninism.  The giggling is that someone would think I was pining for the good ol’ days of the Cold War based on the fact that I’m not convinced that capitalism is super-awesome (on the basis of income inequality, environmental degradation, and that even the IMF isn’t enchanted with all aspects of current fiscal thinking), or even, good heavens, that I was pining for a chance to join the fellowship of the long queues for black bread and dodgy vodka.

Seriously, no thanks.  In as much as my memory stretches back that far, I also remember the sort of literally life-or-death risks people would take to get out of the Soviet Union and its satellite states.  I may not be a capitalism cheer-leader, but if what called itself communism in the USSR is the alternative, I’ll definitely stick with what I’ve got.

For the record, I think we’re in the throes of some kind of socio-economic paradigm shift brought on by corporate capitalism’s inclination towards cannibalism; I’m not much happier about that than I am with the current state of play, because paradigm shifts tend towards discomfort.  I’m also in no position to suggest what that shift is towards, since they’re inherently opaque from one side, and I just hope that when it settles it’s something a little more humane than what we’ve got currently.  If I were to express a hope, it would be utterly Utopian, something like Scandinavian socialism writ large with some of the more benign aspects of the Federation of Planets thrown in… but that’s wishful thinking.

And, no doubt, I will offer some amusement for someone else, now that I’ve written all that down.

Today’s pen: Sheaffer Stylist (a company that practiced (GASP!) profit sharing with the employees!)
Today’s ink: Montblanc Royal Blue (giving away my paradoxical inclination towards monarchy as a foundation of government!)

PS: I also have a notion that the failure of my humour to transmit properly might be down to a shift in the terrain.  In 2012, when that entry was written, post-Soviet Russia wasn’t an entity we were taking anything like as seriously as we’re taking it in 2017.

There’s an Old Saying…

Actually, it’s a pretty new saying: Just because there’s tentacles, it’s not necessarily Lovecraftian.

The applicability of this is open to debate on today’s little film, but it’s kind of fun, so I’m open-minded.

Probably Lovecraftian.

Today’s pen: Whatever this thing is (don’t be afraid; it’s mysterious, but it’s pretty)
Today’s ink: Waterman blue-black