random thoughts on books and reading and pens and paper and all that good stuff

I realized a couple of days ago that nearly everything I've been reading since last fall is either about Paris, set in Paris, or might as well be set in Paris. Also, about art, or artists, or museums, or artistry, or paint - use of paint, creation of paint, colors in paint. Since I've never (alas) been to Paris (alas), and can barely write legibly, let alone paint, I wonder how much my subconscious is telling me about what I ought to be looking at.
Do I want to go to Paris? Yes, yes, yes.
Can I speak French? No, no, no (despite two French courses in college, which left me with only enough vocabulary to order foods I don't eat). 
Since the last painterly book I read (and have not yet reviewed) is about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, I'm tempted to buy one of those Art Nouveau coloring books and break out the colored pencils. Do any of you enjoy coloring? Do tell -- 
(This would be a good time to point out my friend Penny's personal challenge - "conquering perfectionism through doodling."  Some of her photos are here, and I love them!)
Hmmmm.

February is for A Month of Letters, sponsored by Mary Robinette Kowal. The challenge is simple: send 23 pieces of mail during the month of February. My month is going pretty well - I know I'll get to 23 before the 28th - and even if I don't (or, if you don't, if you decide to join late), it's still fun to meet new people, and to find something to say about whatever you like and mail it to someone. Postcard? Fine. Missive? Fine. Just - write!
Alas, I missed the online social hosted by the Letter Writers Alliance - yes, there is such an Alliance, and yes, go visit them now!



The C.S. Literary Jewelry Reading Club is reading Jane Eyre. I love Jane Eyre. I first got a copy at the old Barnes & Noble bookstore on 18th St. and 5th Ave. when I was in elementary school. My parents took me there; while they were looking at art books, I wandered to the used books, and found a lovely hardbound copy, old even then, in a maroon cloth binding. Reader, I read it the next day, and have read it innumerable times since. For this book club, though, I will have to change my method of reading because -- I can no longer see well enough to read the dense, wee font. Yes, I am heartbroken. Has this ever happened to you? Can you make the transition to reading an old literary love on your e-reader? I'm scouting for a paper copy with a readable font... but in the meantime, it's the Nook for me. 

(By the way, Kerry's jewelry -  at C.S. Literary Jewelry on Etsy -  is wonderful!)








What's new in your literary/bookish/papery part of the world?

The Missing Ink - review

The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Handwriting is good for you,” says Philip Hensher. “It involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate, and individual.”

(The incontrovertible truth of the author’s conclusion is made so much more endearing, to me, by the nonchalant use of the Oxford comma.)

This is not an author who shies from his opinions, or from sharing his vocabulary. Haruspication! Really? Oh, Philip, how do I love thee?

The Missing Ink is a very personal amble with handwriting and pens. You get history, style, art, practice, and glances into strange places, real and virtual. How delectable to learn that there is a “gloriously mad blog” out there that teaches how to improve your penmanship by changing your menu? Or that the Prince of Wales writes long letters to various government ministries, imparting his philosophy in purple ink?

The subject of handwriting analysis yields treasures. What does one have to see to believe that the penman “would jump out of an aeroplane… and drink the homebrewed absinthe of a Serbian warlord”? (And what, I wonder, would that do to my own handwring?)

Hensler devotes an entire chapter to the pen that has been my own guilty pleasure for over half of a century: the Bic Cristal. How many of these have I used until the last of the black ink, long disappeared from view and confined only within the oh-so-solid confines of the point, finally discharges its last, perfectly-black line? I hoard them against the day that some scribbling tyrant decides these pens are no longer necessary in the corporate line.

I love to read about ink colors. Hensler says, “I am not quite convinced about writing with blue ink… It is cozy and friendly, but perhaps not very serious… Beyond [blue-black or black], we are really into exotic and faintly frightening territory.”

Were I to write to the author, I would respect his preferences, but in (almost) all other ventures, I profess a great love for the purple, the turquoise, the sepia – even the occasional oxblood.  I am, in most things, a child of the sixties.

(I do admit to having been chastised by a pen friend, once, for writing a red letter on yellow paper. Point, as it were, taken.)

Oxblood brings me back to Oxford. Yes, I love this book with all its whimsy, chattiness, and excellent punctuation. You – you know who you are – will also. I promise.


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NaNoWriMo 2008

Write on Wednesday - calligraphy

The challenge: write about a time in your life when you were learning a new activity... and how you went about practicing it.


It's no secret that I write letters, I keep a journal, I collect fountain pens, and I get high on the smell of ink. What you may not know is that my handwriting is atrocious. It is cramped, it alternates between printing and crude cursive, and its slight backward slant could easily be interpreted as a mild sense of alarm at having to be viewed at all.

(It is, after all, the handwriting of a recluse.)

Years ago, in the months that followed the end of my first marriage, I grasped for words that might express the betrayals of trust that howled around me. Emily Dickinson knew.
Safe despair it is that raves -
Agony is frugal.
Put itself severe away
For its own persusal.

I copied lines of poetry into my journal and sprinkled them into letters. As my new life began to materialize, I decided that the words that sustained me could be better served (and less painful to descipher) if they were written in a prettier, more respectful hand.

Calligraphy was a popular adult-ed class in those days before choose-your-own-font allowed anyone to generate a perfectly-lettered document. I bought a cheap Sheaffer calligraphy set and joined a class. After the first week, our numbers plummeted. Many of the would-be scribes probably had expected calligraphy to flow, as if by wizardry, from their nibs. It doesn't.

Learning calligraphy is like learning to play the piano. Your fingers must learn basic movements - how to hold the pen, create the serif, the downstroke, the ascender, the descender. Then, just as you begin to string notes together to play a scale, you begin to assemble the pen strokes to create a letter.

I spent weeks on each stroke, each element, filling pages with black strokes, practicing at home, on tea breaks at work, anywhere I could uncap the Sheaffer. I was as happy to do nothing but practice these strokes as, years before, I had loved to play Hanon exercises.. In fact, I almost was reluctant to move on from the fingering exercises. They felt safe. But just as I gradually began to make music, I gradually began to combine letters to form words, words to form sentences, sentences to form stanzas.

The course ended before I was, in any sense, proficient, even in the most basic Italic alphabet. I never did learn the Bookhand that still charms me. But the practice itself gentled my emotions, soothed my aching world, and led me to pen more hopeful words.

"Though all levels you've been changing, getting a little bit better, no doubt," wrote Donovan in his "Epistle to Dippy." Indeed.



(Thanks to Penny, whose resurrected interest in calligraphy led me to recollect and write for this exercise.)

The Word Nerd Co-op

Beverly has started a new blog, The Word Nerd Co-op, where writers will be paired up to support each other's writing goals. Each of us received a questionnaire. Here's mine --

1. At what level would you describe yourself as a writer (for instance, just starting to take myself seriously; searching for a graduate program, etc.)? I'll choose #2: trying to take myself seriously. I'd also like to stop researching my subjects to death before I begin to write. It's my form of procrastination: natural for a librarian, but death to the writing itself!

2. What genre(s) do you write? My major genre is unfinished fiction, followed by unfinished poetry and essays. The essays remain undone because writing down my thoughts makes me doubt them!

3. How do you fit writing into your life right now? I try to write some each Saturday morning in the cafe at Barnes and Noble. I write ideas on random scraps of paper during the week - despite owning memo pads, Moleskines, and a collection of fountain pens, without which I won't leave the house. It's easier for me to lose scraps of paper. (Can you spell "self-defeating behavior"?)

4. What is your goal for this project (June 1-Aug. 31)? I want to complete two chapters of my novel. Any two.

5. What steps do you plan to take to reach that goal? First, I want to re-read what I've already written, organize my research (loosely - organizing research can be as powerful a substitute for writing as doing the research), and create a timeline or storyboard. (I may use the Snowflake method.) Then -- write. Write write write.

6. How do you reward yourself (or how would you like to be rewarded) when you meet a goal? A new pen? Pretty ink?

7. What writing craft books do you have/like? All of Natalie Goldberg's books, Pen on Fire, The Right to Write, On Writing, Writer's Book of Days, Escaping into the Open, Reading Like a Writer, The Pocket Muse, Bird by Bird...

8. Any craft books you’re interested in checking out? Knitter's Book of Yarn

9. What inspires your writing? Images, characters, and observations that beg to be written.

10. How would your author’s blurb read? Maybe the 6-word memoir I posted a few months ago: Wrong choice, wrong reason? Drink tea.

11. Tell us about your family (partners, kids, pets, etc.) Husband, and the wild rabbits that I feed in the back yard. (They get fresh carrots. We eat frozen.)

12. Have you ever participated in Nanowrimo (finished or not!)? Yes, twice, but I didn't finish.

13. What can you do to make it easier on yourself to meet your goal for this project? I can set a goal that's attainable, and I can talk about it with my husband & friends.

14. What are you looking for in terms of support from a writing partner (ex. Exchanging work for critique, being held accountable for meeting a word count goal, etc.)? I'd like to experiment with the voices of my characters when we write/e-mail each other.

15. What crafty pursuits do you enjoy when you’re not writing? Knitting.

16. What other hobbies/past times do you like? Reading: classic fiction, new fiction, poetry, thick biographies of women writers. Music: classical, ancient (medieval through Renaissance), modern folk-ish (Aimee Mann, Suzanne Vega, Loreena McKennitt, The Roches, Richard Thompson), international (esp. Celtic).

17. What non-writing-craft books have you enjoyed? The Omnivore's Dilemma, Harry Potter, The Thirteenth Tale, anything Jane Austen wrote, ditto Joan Didion and Diane Ackerman, The Peppered Moth (Drabble) ...

18 What else would you like to share with us? I'm a political junkie, a vegetarian, a tea fiend (think: PG Tips or Twinings' Orange Pekoe), a fountain-pen user and collector, and a recent convert to listening to books on my cheap little MP3 player.

Ms. Tigerpaw speaks of ch-ch-changes

In 2008, I resolve to seek...
... courage to follow my creative path with my pen and with my needles. I want my pen to write many letters, journal with honesty, continue writing the fictions it has begun, and practice compassion when I lose heart.
... continued learning for my needles. In 2007, they first knitted cables and (oh joy!) socks! In 2008, they will learn how to work Fair Isle, continue to knit for charity, create clothing for a very special baby, and be open for adventure.
... opportunities to express gratitude to my husband, my family, and my friends.
... new friendships in knitting groups, book discussions, and (perhaps) political activism.
... health, through exercise, attention to medical and emotional issues, fewer carbs and more protein, and (shudder) some quality time in the kitchen.
... inner peace, through meditation, mindfulness, gratitude, attention to synchronicity, and compassion.
... world peace, through whatever means possible or necessary.

Specifics? Well, take the quality time in the kitchen. My husband and I deserve better than pasta and steamed vegetables and left-over restaurant food. Although he is not a vegetarian, he enjoys tofu dishes, and it would be a mitzvah for us both if I expanded my culinary skills.
Fair Isle? I want these mittens with a truly bizarre hunger, and I shall knit them.
Etc.
I have lots and lots of specifics that I will journal about today - how many pounds I want to lose, the chapters I need to "snowflake" (thanks, Anna!) to make progress on my novel, how I'll get my checkbook balanced, specific knitting goals (including a pair of socks every month), plans for the piles and drawers and shelves that need to be decluttered to make room for thought in my home. My pen and a new notebook (thanks, Janet!) will be busy.
Etc.
But for today, for here, I want to focus on the path, not the instruction manuals and tools, because what I need more than anything is a sense of direction. I've been disorganized, dazed, cluttered, depressed, frightened, and reactive for far too long, especially in the last few months. If I can see where I want to go, it'll be possible to get there.

** Ms. Teabird Tigerpaw is my avatar on Second Life**