![]() The Signo, for me, hits the perfect balance between surgical accuracy and lubricating ink flow there’s enough ink to help the pen glide smoothly along the page with grace, but not so much that, as I’m a lefty, it smudges. And yet, as I already find the act of handwriting so taxing - using a standard ballpoint feels to me like shoveling dirt - I need this to be as effortless as possible. ![]() I often make notes in between lines on drafts, so I write in a small script. The pen slides discreetly into a pocket, and like a sinuous dagger it just feels meant to be held. I love the small black rubber grip, with its pairs of dimples, arranged in a pattern whose logic evades but intrigues me. I love the way the silver conical tip sits visible through its clear plastic housing, like a rocket waiting to be deployed. Aesthetically, there is the sleek silhouette, the smooth barrel, the graceful link of the arcing clip to the gentle curving cap viewed on its side, the pen perfectly evokes a Shinkansen bullet train. The cost is such that I do not mind if I lose it (almost inevitably, I will). Feeling a bit too much like the sort of trenchcoat-wearing creep who used to inhabit Times Square, I would, semifurtively, repair to the stationery department with a frequency that probably made the security guy nervous.įor me, the pen’s virtues are multifarious. “You’ve got to go.”Īnd so, on a lunch break from the main branch of the New York Public Library, I made my first of countless pilgrimages to that Japanese bookstore. It was thin, plastic and decorated with kanji characters. One day, I took a closer look at his pen. If only my own writing could look so exact, then my very thoughts might become more clear. His to-do lists were works of Vitruvian wonder. In a small black notebook with graph-paper pages, he was incessantly sketching or inscribing with a precision that left me achingly envious. That changed some years ago when an architect friend introduced me to the pleasures of inexpensive Japanese pens. At times, I feel as if I should have some weighty, burnished fountain pen that, as that ad for some luxury product goes, I don’t own but merely “look after for the next generation.” But as a left-hander with world-historically abysmal handwriting - in college, college, I once had to read an essay out loud to an indulgent professor from my exam blue book - I have never managed much affection for manual writing instruments. With solemn gravity, in places like Paris Review interviews, they are asked what they write with, as if their pen strokes were what readers ultimately consumed. Writers are supposed to have some mystical bond with their pens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |