Shadow of Life

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to try to finish at least two poems and one short story a month. I've pretty much broken all my resolutions already, and this one is liable to be no exception...but I did at least manage to finish this one poem: actually one I kind of started writing around Christmas, and rather on the cynically morose side. Still, at least it means I've completed one third of my resolution for the month!

Vignette #6 - Spat (and now for something completely different...)

Total fiction this time around, and right at the edge of what I'm comfortable with writing.


I may expand this into a short story some day. I'd like to know who these people are, and...maybe not so much redeem them as set them off on the road toward redemption.

Fountain Pen Love: a Cautionary Rant

What with my feeling cranky at typewriters right now, I've had the fountain pens and pencils out more than usual this week.  I've also been reading back through some journals lately.  I just passed the five year anniversary of my move to Washington, and the five year anniversary of starting my current job.  Time really has flown!  When I first moved out here, my oldest niece was a few weeks old.  Now she's a little chatterbox of a five-year-old and has been joined by several siblings.  When did all *that* happen?

Anyhow, in reading back through my journals, I'm again made cranky (cranky seems to be my theme of the week) by certain inks, which include some of those *most* recommended to fountain pen newbies!  Yes, they flow nicely, are relatively easy to clean up if you spill, and are more readily available than most.  However, they fade like the dickens.  Now...considering a lot of people seem attracted to fountain pens as tools for keeping long-term logs and journals, because they seem sort of romantic and old-fashioned and intimate, this worries me.  I realize I likely can blame some of my earliest troubles on bad paper and low quality ink--for example, here's a page I wrote in the late 90s using a basic no-name fountain pen and the washable blue ink cartridges that came with it, in one of those inexpensive, gaudy journals you can pick up in drug stores and Hallmark stores everywhere:

Can you read it without some sort of digital cheating?  I can't.  Not except for a word here and there.  And unfortunately, I didn't catch the disappearing act until it was too late.  I'm guessing the paper is acidic as anything, and the acid acted as a slow-mo ink eradicator.  It makes me sad.

When I discovered it, I (for the most part) resolved to stick with high quality paper and decent brand-name inks.  But, I discovered, that's no guarantee either.  Take this entry--nothing too earth-shattering if I lose it, but it's the principal of the thing.  It's not even five years old, yet it has already faded.  Waterman Blue-Black.  Exactly what the fountain pen folk would probably recommend to a newbie, no?  It's on Moleskine paper, which isn't great for fountain pen ink just because it bleeds and feathers, but should be pretty acid free.  And yet...

I have similar examples written in Parker Quink Black, Waterman Black, and to a lesser extent, Waterman Havana.  Granted, this example is still perfectly legible, but what will it look like in five *more* years, or five years after that?  My guess is that while these inks are wonderfully behaved and very pretty at first, making them great for short-term notes, you shouldn't depend on them to stick with you for the long haul.

As a side tangent, while Waterman South Seas Blue fades maybe a teensy bit, but strangely (considering how much lighter it is) is far less affected--I used a basic Waterman fountain pen (a school pen not available in the states) for quite a few of my journal entries when I was overseas, and while the Florida Blue entries are faded badly, South Seas Blue is still pretty bright.  (Even if it did fade quickly, you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.  The stuff is world-rockingly lovely, though if you even *show* it a drip of water, it will flee the page without leaving so much as a shadow behind.)

Waterman South Seas Blue brush scribble--it's even prettier in person!

Now...I dunno that there are really any archive-proven fountain pen inks--particularly as most companies have changed their formulas over the years, and many of the big names today haven't been around much more than a decade.  You'll see lots of folks talking about family papers from relatively far back that are still perfectly legible though written in fountain pen ink, but my personal experience gives me pause.  Lately I've mostly been using pencil, though I admit, I've slipped a time or two into my fountain pen ways.  But I try to stick with inks that remain vibrant in my own older journals--it's not a *guarantee* of real longevity, but perhaps an indicator they'll be around at least awhile.  Most of the Noodler's colors are good, particularly their "bulletproof" or near-bulletproof colors.  I bought a few Private Reserve inks early on, and most of those look OK as well, though I found many of them more problematic than I cared to deal with on a regular basis (some colors are really hard to rinse out of pens, the inks take ages to dry on the page, and some ink colors faded or shifted in the bottle--Burgandy Mist, for example, turned to Industrial Sludge).  I keep wanting to try some other brands, J. Herbin and Diamine in particular, but it's hard to know (without risk) if their current inks will last a good while.  I'd be interested in the experience of others.  I don't expect my babbling to last centuries, nor do I want it to...but it would be nice if it at least lasted decades.

For the most part, I'm something of a Noodler's fan girl.  I've had good luck with most colors, and they seem to maintain their brilliance in my notebooks even after years on the shelf.  Right now, I'm really, really fighting the urge to order more colors: some Black Swan in Australian Roses (that color and the shading makes my heart go pitter-pat) and maybe some Zhivago (I'm a sucker for subtle near-black inks, and that one has been calling my name for years now--and speaking of names, I like the name of it, too!)

Bottom line: if you really, really want something to last, pencil is a great choice--even some of my journals written in ballpoint are faded quite badly in places, but my old grade school journals written in pencil have held up very well.  After all, they're pretty much written in stone, albeit stone in powder form.  Stone doesn't tend to change much over time, at least when closed up out of water and wind...  The paper will fail first.  Dip pens, with the ability to use old fashioned iron gall and pigmented inks, are also likely a great choice, and one I want to try out one of these days.

And if you (like me) are in love with the fountain pens and the wonderful rainbow of ink colors available, either assume your writing is likely to sneak away as the years roll by and just enjoy the present moments, or choose wisely, and (unlike me) think ahead a bit.

Cats, Curiosity, and Peurile Paranoia

1. Curiosity
Last night I went to bed way too late, after rigging up a temporary new drawband for the Lettera 33 out of beading wire stuff.  It sort of works, but the carriage still feels wobbly, the margins still aren't catching most of the time, and the carriage occasionally stops short and has to be pushed by hand.  It also isn't always locking into place...you can push it back and forth without releasing some of the time.  So there's obviously something pretty wrong.

This morning, after tossing and turning all night worrying about the thing, I got up early and started in on cleaning the stinky, stinky case.  I set the typewriter off to one side for the time being.  I'd set the damp case in a warm place to dry and was getting ready for work when I heard a weird sort of sound coming from the living room.  I went in to discover Halvah, who has never shown the slightest interest in my typewriters, mashing her head against the keys of the Lettera and purring.  She'd gotten some of the keys jammed.


Blurry cell phone photo of Halvah at work...

And then she *fixed the jammed keys*.  She was still poking at the thing when I left for work.  Considering I haven't cleaned it up yet, I suppose she can't do much harm.  It's already broken.  I'm a little perplexed by her fascination, though.

2. Paranoia
Given all the people who could have commented on my misadventures but didn't, the paranoid portion of my psyche is picturing the denizens of the typosphere around a virtual water cooler, gossiping about me behind my back and looking down their noses at my stupidity (as if y'all don't have better things to do...)

"What an idiot she is, huh?"
"...got what she deserved."
"I'd offer advice, but I'm speechless.  What a knucklehead."
"I'm glad *I* know better than to buy typewriters off eBay, even once every two or three years.  Unlike *her*."
"*I'd* never spend more than $7 for a typewriter.  They're everywhere, after all, no matter what she claims.  I mean, I picked up six last week for thirty bucks!"
"Taking typewriters to a repairman is a sign of weakness."

In my defense against these imaginary critics, in the entire last year, I bought three typewriters, and I sold one of the three.  I've taken a grand total of one typewriter in for repair, back in 2009.  As for why I risked eBay, in all my years of looking, I've found about four manual typewriters at local thrift stores, three of which were late-model SCMs (my Galaxie is the one of the three I kept--the others were scrubbed clean and received new ribbons, but ultimately went to new homes) and the fourth was the Olympia SM-9 I sent off recently.  I've never ever ever ever found an Olivetti Lettera of any kind locally, the closest to it being the Olivetti Studio I traded for at the type-in.  It isn't a Lettera, and it wasn't truly local.

And as for repairs, as I confirmed last night, I don't have the patience, the skill, and (perhaps most importantly) the tools.  There's only so much I can do with a five dollar mini-toolkit, a cheap hammer, and a pair of tweezers.  It'd probably cost me as much to put together a decent work bench as it would to pay to have someone with good eyesight and, you know, actual skill.

Also, I don't have the luxury of having x number of a particular model so I can compare the broken with the functional.

I did at least *try* to fix it.  Can I get partial credit for that, you faceless imaginary Internet naysayers??

Devastation (with updates)

To begin with, the Lettera 33 smells like Stinky.  But that, I expected.  Also, it was packed with *nothing* around it...a few folded pieces of brown paper that did nothing except maybe keep the shipping box protected from the dirty case.  And, though it may or may not have happened in shipping, it has several issues...and none of them things I feel hopeful I can fix on my own.  The biggest one is that the carriage feels sort of wobbly, and the draw band is off, and although the whatchamacallit the draw band winds around still feels like the spring inside is working, it doesn't feel...right.

*sigh*

I should know better than to go near eBay.

On the bright side...um...the bright side?  It came with a little Lettera 33 manual.  Yay.

I guess there's always Blue Moon.  Maybe this will have a happy ending after all.  In the meantime, I guess I can concentrate on cleaning the case.  I don't have the heart to work on the busted typewriter.

UPDATE (and this is precisely why I shouldn't work on my own typewriters): I fixed the draw band...sort of...for awhile...before everything went terribly south.  The first time, the tension wasn't high enough, I don't think, because it would go about halfway across and then sort of lose steam.  So I went to try again, and it was closer, but still too loose.  So I tried another time.  And *this* time, the screw I was using as a weight in order to lower the cord through the typewriter and attach it at the bottom of the carriage on the other side got stuck in the mechanism.  And I can't get it out.  At all.  No amount of jiggling and tapping and yelling at it makes any difference.  Neither did cutting the cord to it so the screw is in there all alone.  The carriage is jammed to one side with that screw in there, and so far as I can see the carriage will need to come off to remove it, and there's no easy way to remove the carriage when you can't *move* the carriage.  So not only do I still have to take it down to Blue Moon, but now I can't even take it in the case, and I have to admit what an idiot I am.   I spent the better part of the evening trying to get the darned thing out, so I'm tired and cranky and I smell like mildew and I want to cry and maybe punch something.

So there's that.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: I got the carriage centered again.  And I sort of rigged up a temporary draw band to let me play with it.  The draw band doesn't work quite as it should...I probably still have the tension wrong, or it's too short.  And the margins aren't working...maybe they weren't working to begin with, or maybe I busted 'em.  In any case, I'm not attempting any further fixes on my own.  On the bright side, from what little typing I can do...this is one comfortable, snappy little typer.  Maybe all will come out right in the end...?