The alluring scent of new stationary

For those of us who have never grown out of the excitement of getting new school supplies, the start of a new semester is a heady thing. (Getting high off those fumes is may be what makes the impending mountain of grading bearable, perhaps. And no, I'm not talking about the fumes from those giant, black, industrial-strength markers with the metal bodies that really did make you loopy after five minutes. ...or those Trix-scented markers that came in the cereal boxes somewhere around 1992. Anyone else remember those? They were freaky.)

Right now, though, I'm talking about the much-more-intangible scent of fresh notebooks that are destined for particular classes. The odeur of possibility, of promise.

This semester, a passel of Maruman Token notebooks from JetPens.com is what's perfuming the air. I was looking for an affordable option for course-planning notebooks, something spiral-bound and ruled fairly narrowly that would still stand up to fountain pens, and the Maruman Token fits the bill perfectly. They're not very large--only 40 sheets in each--but that's pretty much perfect for class planning (45-ish class meetings and many days when I can double up notes for two classes on one page). Also, I think they're pretty good-looking critters: quiet, unassuming, smooth covers; very attractive blue-coated wire binding; nifty accented "a" as the cover decoration. (I also like that the design color is reminiscent of Iro Tsuki-yo--more on that in a minute.)

 But how does it stand up to what I actually wanted it for? Well, pretty awesomely, even if I cheated and tried out another new toy (a pair of Lamy Joys in 1.1 & 1.5 nibs) on it.

That's Levenger Regal ink in a Lamy Joy 1.5 calligraphy nib. I am already so extraordinarily pleased I picked up this pen: it makes this saturated purple display the best of its qualities. In a fine nib, it's a very dark, very assertive ink, and that's nice, but it doesn't advertise its purpleness as much as I'd like a purple ink to do. This pen really makes it look, well, regal. Also, this ink can feather a smidge, but it behaves well on the Maruman paper. Huzzah!

Quote is taken from the Anglo-Saxon poem "Deor": "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg" or "That passed; so shall this." It's a favorite of mine.


Then there's a bit with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo using a Lamy Joy with a 1.1 nib. I can't get over how much I like the shading/outlining quality of this ink. I will continue to work at my photography skills so I can someday get a picture that captures that. This time, the quote comes from Beowulf (2890b-2891): "Deað bið sella 
eorla gehwylcum þonne edwitlif!" or "Death is better to any earl than honorless life." Those Anglo-Saxons are all about saying it like it is.

Three other pens/nibs to look at, though the Regal makes a repeat appearance: Levenger True Writer F with Levenger Regal, True Writer M Stub with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, Lamy Studio F with Levenger Cobalt.

And this is the reverse side of the page. There's a little show-through, which doesn't bother me one bit (it's a working notebook, not a journal, and I usually only use one side of the page for planning so I can take any necessary in-class notes on the reverse), and no bleed-through.

Okay. There. Review. Sorry to get all infomercially on you, folks, if you're really not here for that sort of thing.

Let's talk about what's going into those notebooks in the morning.

There's going to be Annie Dillard. I'm teaching Composition II using Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a touchstone text (because if there's anyone who can pull together a thousand different kinds of research effortlessly and fascinatingly, it's Annie Dillard), and I love that book to the ends of the earth. ...I quoted Annie Dillard on New Year's Eve, too. That makes me happy. (She shows up in my Composition I course, too. And I will pull The Writing Life into one of the independent studies I'm directing. That's three out of five classes she's guaranteed to come up in. ...Beowulf will come up in five out of five, though, because I don't know how to not-talk about it.)

The other two courses are all about the other side of the pond: British Literature after 1800 & a Jane Austen independent study. That means I get to talk about Robert Burns and Pride and Prejudice and Oscar Wilde and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and A. L. Kennedy.

I get paid for this.

Life is good.

The proper place of things

I spent a big chunk of my Sunday adding books to my LibraryThing account. I had a basic account for a rather long time, promptly filled it with the allowable 200 books, and then let it lie dormant for a long while. Last week, I upgraded to a lifetime membership, and yesterday, I received a CueCat ISBN scanner from two brilliant folks--*waves at Laura and Linda*--so today, I dove in.

The awesome part is that I was able to log two and a half bookcases in around two hours. The less awesome part is that the other half-bookcase was made up of books that were too old to have ISBN barcodes, and so all of those needed to be logged by hand. So I gathered them up, two totebags at a time, and carried them downstairs where I could log books and watch football at the same time. 

(Yes, I am aware that my process is needlessly complicated.)

And that turned out to be rather pleasant, like visiting with old friends. You see, most of those books I had to log by hand had, at one time, belonged to a professor I had at Lycoming College: Dr. Emily Jensen. When she retired from teaching, she invited the campus's English majors to her office to empty her bookshelves because, she said, her best copies were at home. At the time, it was a bittersweet moment, of course: I was losing one of my favorite instructors, the one who'd really turned me on to Anglo-Saxon poetry, to Beowulf (hlaford of my heart), but there was also the excitement of getting an orange crate's worth of Old English grammar books and strange little treasures. As a nerdy wee undergrad, I was ecstatic: these weren't anthologies, these weren't "textbooks." These were the kinds of books that full-fledged scholars used, and it didn't matter at all that many of them were printed before my parents were even born. That was even a bonus: the alluring scent of yellowing pages and glue from far-off book binderies. 

Today, as I said, I spent time with those books. What stood out this time were the notes inside of them, the thin, pink-orange sheets torn off the cheapest of those old notepads covered in Dr. J's peculiar small handwriting. She wrote everything in a very upright cursive, and though her letters didn't slant back toward the left, there was always the suggestion of it, as though her hand was shaped by the Carolingian minuscule that comprised her subject areas of choice. I thought about taking a photo of her notes, but those still feel very much like hers, that they should stay between the pages where I found them. 

I'm going to spend a few more hours on my book-space tonight, too, and I will be in the best of company.

I'm not sure it counts as fine craftsmanship, but--

After a bit of inspiration yesterday from this article, I decided to break out some of the crafty things I've been saving up. Over the summer, I got turned on to book arts by the inimitable Deborah Poe, and since then I've been gathering up interesting odds and ends with the intention of making some hand-made books.

I have, of course, done very little with them.

Today, though, I settled in with twelve open tabs in Chrome pertaining to Coptic Binding, a stack of art paper, and a very beautiful greeting card sent to me by my friend Laura.

This was the result:

This experiment confirmed several things: 1) greeting cards are an interesting and green source of potential cover materials 2) but they really need to be reinforced with something before being used 3) a proper cover-punch or something along those lines would make much nicer holes than my awl 4) Coptic binding is super easy when doing the signatures and it's a right bitch where the covers come in. 

I am generally pleased with this experiment, though, as this will make a useful jotter for lists and things and it should be fountain-pen friendly because of the paper weight. It's multi-media paper, and it's certainly not as smooth and precise as Clairefontaine or Rhodia, but it doesn't feather like mad and it is thick enough to not suffer bleed-through. 

Yesterday, too, I broke out the new inks and some Tolkien quotes. Please forgive my inability to make certain letters in consistent fashion (I seem to swap between t-forms a lot). Paper is a Rhodia No. 16 graph pad, and all of this was done with a Brause dip italic nib.

Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo:

I'm as bad or worse photographer as calligrapher, and so I don't think the fantastic outlining really shows here. But the "Tolkien" at the end exhibits some really lovely dark, almost burnt-looking edges. The color is generally that saturated deep teal, but there's a warm quality to the ink that comes out where the lines are quite wet.

Iroshizuku Kiri-Same:

What really geeked me about this one is the range of color. It starts out as a very dense pewter and shades to a fairly ephemeral cloud-like grey. The lighter end is really washed out and so wouldn't be good for things like grading or professional use, but as a shade, it makes me ridiculously happy.

J. Herbin 1670 Rouge Hematite:

The fabled 1670. My photograph doesn't capture the range of color at all. The lighter areas are a very vibrant red-orange (there was a hibiscus flower at the Binghamton Zoo at Ross Park that was exactly that color), and the darkest areas are evocative of rust (in a really good way). There's also a gold fringe that appears where the line was quite wet (not feathering outside of the line, but inside of it), and I wish I'd had this for Christmas cards. It's magical.

I like magical.

On Timing

It is, of course, the last of the year. This is the day that we finish things, or we lament what we have not finished, or, perhaps most commonly, we ignore all of the unfinished things in that chrome-bright anticipation for tomorrow, for starting new things. All around the interwebs, we lay out our new clothes for tomorrow (I'm laying out my Mario Lemieux jersey), we prepare new journals and planners (Jackie at Letters & Journals has given me the urge to organize my paper-based life), we resolve, resolve, resolve. We have hope. It is glorious and invigorating, and I try so hard to save that feeling up, to say, I will hit the ground absolutely pell-mell this year.

I am, of course, not at all immune to any of these things. I'll spare you my resolutions: I break so many.

But I started a new thing today, a new written thing, and I don't even know what to call it. It thought at first it was some sort of prose poem or at the very least an experimental sort of narrative. It thought it was short. One version of it may, of course, be short. But short narratives don't sit well in my soul, and so it may become quite long (it wants a novel, of course it wants a novel, I am desperately sick of things that want a novel because one can't write six things at once that are all three hundred pages long and research-intensive, and yet that's what I love, and so I continue to be convinced that writing is the most contrary of actions anyone could take).

I started the new thing in a new journal, too (one I'd meant to save for something else, but I don't remember what the something else was, and so this new thing trumps the unknown), a lined 8x5 Rhodia. I had wanted to do my new writing for the year with one of the new inks, but the Lamy Studio was waiting, full of Levenger Cobalt, and there was no sense in waiting, in giving the idea a chance to squirm away.

I should, of course, know this already. I have read Annie Dillard.

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better." ~The Writing Life

But the real point of this is this: it is the day for finishing, tomorrow is the day for starting, but I'm starting today. I am hoping the momentum carries me forward. The method is something like the writerly advice to stop in the middle of the sentence when it's time to quit: if one always does that, there is always a place to start.

Unexpected Marvels

I'd been introduced to the nyckelharpa through the music of Väsen a little over a year ago by a dear friend, and through that lovely chain of discovery that is the internet, yesterday I found the music of Bardou. I certainly don't claim to be a source of real knowledge on the band, but it appears to be two blokes, one with the incredibly fascinating nyckelharpa and the other with a 19-string arch/harp guitar. 


Yes. Chew on that for a moment. I barely understand what that means, either. But I don't play the music, lady--I just listen to it.


But here are these amazing fellows doing "Greensleeves," which I found to be a really lovely boon to my less-than-festive spirits.





Definitely check out the rest of their tunes at YouTube. 

Regarding Parking Lots & Loafers

The campus parking lot this morning was a thin sheet of black ice, or perhaps just the result of an incredibly vicious frost on asphalt--whatever it was, I skated from my car to the door on the flats of my loafers. It's probably time to stop wearing loafers, and that's likely the universe telling me that, but when one is in the habit of sitting on one's right foot, it's best to wear shoes that come off easily. (My right shoe spends an awful lot of time on the floor under my desk, hollow and footless.)

Perhaps this is also the universe's gentle suggestion that I ought to learn to sit like a grown-up, with both feet on the floor.

I have no recollection of asking the universe for its opinion on either my footwear or my desk-side posture.

But the thrill of scooting along on the parking lot, that I'll keep, dear universe.

The Pony Express or How Mail Gets to Wyoming

Or maybe the mail doesn't get to Wyoming at all. I'm starting to think that's the case--my mother sent me my calligraphy set last Friday. As of the last post (on Saturday, a week and a day later), it still hasn't arrived. I'm miffed about that because noodling about with some ink and so forth is what I'd like to do just now. I spent literally all of my Sunday grading (all right--all of my Sunday minus a longish tea break at 10 a.m. and a very shortish dinner break at 5:30), and if I were a smart person, I would return to my stack of papers before I go to bed.

If I were a smart person, I also would do something else with my night that doesn't involve holding a writing instrument. Or typing. Or knitting. Generally speaking, I would do something with little or no involvement of my wrists and fingers.

Does anyone have any actual hobbies that fit this bill?

Perhaps riding Pony Express and getting the mail to Wyoming faster than its current pace would suffice.

Now I have my good and practical reason to get that horse I've always wanted.

Reading and also writing

I'm currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Williams (yes, I know: me and everyone else on the planet). The link goes to the book's LibraryThing page. What a cracking novel. I'm only about a third of the way through it, and I am dazzled by the number of significant and interesting narrative threads Mitchell's braiding here. The one that I am most interested in (the most human of them, perhaps) is, of course, the one the reader gets least of, but rather than feeling slighted by the choice, it's easy to recognize a) the narrative necessity of that construction b) the practicality of how that thread may weave itself through the rest of the plot with consideration to the novel's reality. And, well, it's lovely enough to want to keep that one set of interactions rare and striking and not dull itself with too much familiarity.

All that said, though, if the last 200 pages of the book want to be nothing but Jacob and Aibagawa, I would surely not complain one bit.

Segue.

I am needing, in a very significant way, to get past a wall of inaction this weekend if I don't want to call my writing goals for the month a sham and a mockery. (And, lest anyone be confused, I surely do not wish to do this.) The most prudent way to approach this, of course, would be to open up the Word document the novel is in and start typing, But I have the attention span, of late, of a sparrow. Or of my cat, The Scoo. See photo.

And so I think that I'll turn to pen and paper this morning. And, for those of you who like that sort of thing, the choice will be my True Writer Water Lilies pen filled with Levenger Cocoa ink, and the paper is the Ecosystem notebook that has been dedicated to this single project. (Seriously--Ecosystem notebooks, available at your local B&N or on the interwebs, are brilliant things. No crankiness at all with fountain pen ink, and mine, which is roughly 8" by 5", has held up to much, much rough treatment. I first discovered this gem through the Letters and Journals stationary giveaway, which I was fortunate enough to win in July.)

Anyroad, it's time to get on with it.

Compartmentalizing on a Snowy Day

Today is the first substantial snow of the year. The ground is too warm--from its 67 degrees yesterday--for any flakes to linger on roads and sidewalks, but the grass and the trees are powdered sugar-dusted, and the fall has been constant since it was light enough to notice the flakes.

I'm not supposed to be blogging just now--my to-do list is rather daunting at the moment--but I feel like I've been sprinting through my day and I need fifteen minutes of quiet, of stillness. I suppose writing a blog entry demonstrates how poor I am at actually achieving real stillness, but I am completing a single task in doing this, concentrating on one thing, and that's a milestone for me. (I even tried to manage to screw that up--the title of this post reminded me of a poem whose title I don't remember and whose author escapes me and whose lines I can't quote. Locating the poem, then, to reference properly, was not a success, and I spent five minutes with one hand on the keyboard and one hand poking the books on my shelf, willing one of them to turn into the anthology I wanted. If I had the correct anthology in my office, I could find it in a tick, because I remember where in the book it is, but I don't remember what it's called or who it's by. Memory is such a strange and fickle thing.)

My Tuesdays and my Thursdays often feel like this. I teach back to back classes (which fill nearly three hours) in subjects I love, and I am always breathless by the end of the second. This afternoon found me having meetings with some students and then with a poet from the community who was looking for some basic feedback: was his writing "good enough" to bother continuing to write? It breaks my heart that he even considered this a necessary meeting, but I understand the anxiety. The best part of it is that I got to meet a cool new poet (who has apparently been writing his entire life) who isn't a student, and I invited him to the open mic night that the awesome Casper College poetry class has started to hold twice a month. Hopefully he comes to that.

But that was another conversation to leave me somewhat breathless. (Maybe the real moral of the story is that Holly should learn to breathe between her sentences.) And so here I am, taking a few minutes to re-center before embarking on the rest of my afternoon. I do, at least, take a breath between the period and the next capital letter. Most of the time.

Lazy Sunday

Well, it's not exactly lazy-lazy--I still have a to-do list, but the weekend has felt incredibly decadent in that I didn't/don't have anything to grade. To that end, I've been rather productive in the sense that I've gotten a nice-sized batch of stories out into the world.

I've also decided that perhaps the more effective option for my November challenge might be to ensure that I do one writerly act each day. I say this because, while I've been accomplishing things, I haven't exactly been following my own plan. Mostly, I've been striking while the proverbial iron is hot--instead of revising one story, I did two. Instead of sending one story out to three places, I sent two out to a total of nine journals. So, I'm resolving not to be particularly fussed over what gets accomplished in what order, so long as something gets done.

One thing that has actually helped me to be productive is the acquisition of some new writing tools. I try to avoid relying on "stuff" whenever possible, but when there's a basic pleasure in using the instrument, I find myself far more interested in completing tasks. Most significantly, I'm talking about fountain pens. In March, I acquired my first fountain pen: a Levenger True Writer in a pattern called Water Lilies. It has since been discontinued, which is heartbreaking because it's really, really lovely (and inspired by the Monet painting, of course). In the past month, too, I added a black Levenger True Writer with a stub nib and a Lamy Studio to my new collection.

There are countless blogs devoted to the art of the fountain pen--to fine-tuning and appreciating the nuances of these instruments. At this point, I'm not qualified to comment on any of these issues, but what I can say is that there is a brilliant and beautiful simple pleasure in writing with a quality pen. The ink flows without any kind of pressure--not only is it much, much easier on my hands (which makes it easier to write for a long time), but there is a lovely metaphorical reassurance in that, too. The writing instrument isn't fighting the writer, so that leaves one with only the idea and the words themselves to wrestle.