[writing] I Have A New Cross Pen. Bring On Your Sword.

3084.

Okay, so the title's a little grandiloquent. Or, hell, a lot. There was an alternative title to this posting, riffing on something Pete Seeger had written on a banjo as sort of an answer to what Woody Guthrie's guitar famously said: This machine surrounds facists and makes them surrender. 

But so what? It's my blog. You want me to be a shrinking violet about my bad self, you go write your own blog about me.

Anyway.

Licensed to carry in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
It's a First Amendment thing, yo.

It has latterly been my birthday, and I had recently lost my old trusty Cross Classic Century sliver chrome ballpoint. It's been a strange journey. I loathe ballpoint pens, generally speaking.  My personal favorite, aside from this unlikely hero, is the Pilot Precise V5. I like a fine line, not too fine, and the liquid ink from the Pilot is always perfect, has never let me down.

Sustaining a writing habit with the Pilot can be kind of pricey, though, and a little unsustainable to the personal economy, incomes being what they are these days. While I was in handwriting bliss with the Pilot Precise, in my daily work I actually consume pens. I leave them dry. I find excuses and reasons to write. When I was a kid I could scarcely be bothered; I thought pens lasted forever, or as near as practically so. As an adult, I exhaust them.

Ballpoints are also eminently practical, a truth so obvious as to be axiomatic. They travel. They rarely, if ever, leak. With a minimum effort of care, a ballpoint will keep going and going until the ink runs out. So a side quest was to find the perfect dependable ballpoint pen. Since I keep my personal standards in this area so high, it's been a long search.

Sometime in the last few years, I know not how, I battered Cross Century (judging by the style of the lettering, it was made before they started calling it Classic) fell into my hands. I was still obsessing on finding a dependable, affordable fountain pen (that was as I was getting acquainted with the Preppy) so it sat on the shelf for a while longer. Then, balancing the old Century in my hand one day I imagined that it was kind of a cross of two things; the desire to have a dependable modern writing tool and a well-designed object for daily use. 

And, heck, the thing just felt good. So I went to find refills, imagining it would be difficult. It was, a little, but I narrowed down Staples as the best source; not only do they have Cross-brand refills, and a more bargain-priced refill by Penatia that works acceptably.

There was a bit of a breaking-in period. The Century form factor was like a high-performance car: responsive, tight, giving if you got on its wavelength but unforgiving if you didn't (I tend to a vise-grip on my pen as I use it continually). So it's taught me a lot about writing with the pen rather than just dispassionately using it. You have to form a relationship with it, but once you do, it tends to reward you rather well.

Suddenly, it was gone. I have one suspicion as to where it might be, and that will have to wait until Monday to be followed-up. But I missed that pen a hell of a lot more than I thought I would, was obsessing on the fact that it no longer was available to me to use. So … what a perfect birthday gift! And so plans were made.

The purchasing experience was a bit more frought than I counted on. The display at Staples promises that you will get something from the stock room, all you have to do is bring a card from the little stack inside the little hole next to the display model and they'll run back and get one. I had, originally, the basic model, described as a Cross Classic Century Lustrous Chrome. Simple, austere yet elegant. it's the one with the black plastic tip on the clip end. But despite the inventory showing three there was not one. And yeah, we could get it shipped, but wanting it today made for an awkward moment.

How is it I was so obsessed over this silly ballpoint pen? I'm still more than a little amazed at myself. Well, if illiteracy is no virtue, then extremism in the acquisition of one's favorite writing utensil is no vice. That's what I always say (backdated).

The manager of the Staples was most kind and generous this day. After phoning Jantzen Beach and finding none in stock not there neither, and sensing, perceptively, that making me wait any further for this is punishment cruel and unusual, he found the next more expensive model and let me have it for the price we actually had already paid (payment processed before the inventory discrepancy had made itself known) for the cheaper model. And so I now have it.

The new pen is a Classic Century, but it's the Medalist. The biggest difference is the addition of 23-carat gold plate on the clip, the cowling near the business end and the end cap which was plastic on the Lustrous Chrome edition. It feels even better than the old one and it's a little more luxe without being blowout-ostentatious, so it's been easy to get to know and to use.

… even though, it must be said, it comes with a medium point rather than a fine point. It's acceptable for now; I'll not waste it. Writing is a sacrament and ink the consecrated wine. But what is it about pen companies that they think, unless you're looking for some fancy roller ball or gel-ink pen, all you want is medium? Irritating, is is.

But me and my new fascism-surrounding weapon will get along just fine I think.

This all may seem a little intense, but if being obsessive about my pen is wrong, then I don't want to be write.

Er, right.

[art] Saturday in Portlandia: Handwriting Class with Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay

3019.

If it's Saturday and I'm in a handwriting class and there are adults there, this must be Portland.

That's what I couldn't help thinking while waiting for the workshop to start, and various variation thereunto.

This last Saturday, the handwriting artists and calligraphers Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty held a three-hour seminar on their Getty-Dubay Handwriting Method in a room called Kempton Hall at the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in NW Portlandia. This was a feast for my eyes and senses on so many levels.

The room itself was large yet cozy, with the sort of clear-lacquered floor one expects to see in auditoriums and dance rooms. Inlaid into this is a large labyrinth, the kind that's popular these days to walk along as a meditative tool, and a stage at the front of the room which has seen decades of use, worn in that well-maintained, much-loved way such things can be.

All was in brown, comforting, earth tones. Above the room, on the south wall, a monumental painting of the cleric this room was named for commanded and watched over all; it's a very very kind space. And we were all there to see how we might right gud.

Er, write good. Sorry. Couldn't suppress the joke.

The seminar was free and offered me a chance to kick my obsessed-upon handwriting up to the next level, and The Wife™, who is writing more stuff these days and I couldn't be more pleased with this, wanted some tips to make her handwriting sing a little more.

Ain't no sin there, wanting to handwrite better, and I'll stand in nobody's way.

My handwriting has always been good, and the way I obsess on it, it should be. But a refresher betimes is no sin, and when you can get Getty and Dubay's insights for just showing up … well, as Tom once said, free is a very good price!

You may have heard that the preference for handwriting in America is declining, with even cursive in danger of becoming a lost art (I wouldn't be so sad as to lose cursive, but more on that later). So, even though the seminar  was on a Saturday tucked into a corner of NW Portland which is kind of hard to find parking in even on a slow day, the attendance was … well, extremely heartening. We got there about 35 minutes before the show got underway, which was lucky for us as we were kind of pushing it. Though I lived in NW back when it was still affordable, there's one thing that hasn't changed at all: Parking is hell there. We lucked and got one of the few spots in the Trinity Cathedral's microchip-sized parking lot.

I'd heard of Getty-Dubay handwriting before but this was going to be an up-close look, and I was eager, to say the least. I've been an advocate of italic handwriting (as opposed to cursive, which is what we all learned in school – I was a victim of the Palmer method) for all my adult life so far. When I was

The first of my many role-models.
Sourced from here.

in high school I had an epiphany after looking at typing from an IBM Selectric Light Italic typeball (how the olde-tymers kicked word-processing old-school, yo). I can't remember the day or time of the epiphany, but I do remember gaining, quite suddenly, the awareness of two things:

1. I didn't have to write cursive the way they said I had to anymore, and
2. If I made it legible, they wouldn't care anyway.

I had started in junior high, actually, writing my minuscule q a certain way that gave it a foresail-shaped banner instead of a loop, not knowing then I had discovered one of my own keys to distinctive, recognizable, and admired handwriting (I am not bragging when I say I've received more compliments than I can count on my everyday hand … it's the truth). 

What I was busy discovering, in my reinventing-the-wheel way, was italic handwriting. To most of us, italic means what I just did with that word italic there … giving it a slant for emphasis. The word italic comes to us from Italy, where the slanted hand was first devised. And it was  used there for fine, fine handwriting … every handwriting aficionado knows of Arrighi's La Operina, and it would do one no damage to peruse a copy when the chance presents itself. This is italic at its utmost, and most poetic.

Today's handwriting is a mess. This I lay at the door of what we commonly call 'cursive'. It has a noble purpose - speed. The word cursive itself shares Latin roots with a word which also gave us coursing and Corsair … words denoting fleet speed. Some call it running script. To promote quickness in writing, letters are joined and loops introduced, and if you can do it right, it stays readable. 

It's tough, though, to do cursive right. Cursive promotes speed and speed becomes its own excuse, leading to a mess of loops and capital letters than in no way resemble either the minuscule versions or the constructed, printed version. Sure, there's a G, Q and S somewhere in the strange cursive construction meant to stand in for them. But you've pretty much got to take their word for it. Cursive destroys legible handwriting, without legibility, nobody wants to do it much. Who's going to blame them?

Italic handwriting promotes deliberation, and if you started out slowly at it at first, don't worry: you needed training wheels before you can ride on two wheels, and starting out in italic can be maddeningly slow. 

But then, you weren't born writing cursive, either.

The Getty-Dubay method teaches italic handwriting with an emphasis on simple rules you learn on the 'printing' side of the learning curve which just about anyone who can hold a pencil can aspire to. Then, when you're ready to go to the 'big leagues' of cursive italic, you learn a handful of simple joins, then you learn you can use them or not, as you care to. There's a wonderfully simple structure that you can decorate up or leave spare as you please. Italic really is more simple to learn than you might think. I'd challenge people to find this out for themselves.

Upon arrival, we were greeted by a very nice and polite young lady who gave us white envelopes with the seminar's materials. There were handouts with practice-sheets (which we all used, rather lustily) five or six sheets of good-old-fashioned looseleaf, and the most delightful example-card which now has pride of a certain place in my studio. It's pleasant just to look at, and inspirational to look at besides. It'll stay up there for a long time to come, I expect.

The teachers, Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, give off the air of being elementary school teachers from way back and, as far as I was able to find, they were; you wouldn't think that they could deliver the basics in three hours but, by Arrighi's nibs, they sure were. The passion they had for this certainly delivered. And the classmates were as affable and friendly a group of learners as I ever wanted to find. There was free World Cup coffee, which can make a bad day good and a good day better, and they sold some of their books at a table in the back for a discount just for your having come out.

I've read books by Lloyd Reynolds and Fred Eager, and Getty/Dubay belongs alongside of them; ahead, because they are the current champions of handwriting as a thing in these modern times, a task which must seem thankless now and again. But I'd recommend this to everyone. Look, you don't have to write for anyone but yourself even to enjoy the fun in handwriting this way.

From what I've seen, Getty and Dubay run a seminar like this every January. They are more popular than you'd think, and if there's going to be another one in January 2015, then I'd just start making my plans now.

You can keep up with Inga and Betty on their website, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com/.  I've seen their books on handwriting at Powell's, as well.