http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanJan07.html The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint. Sun, 13 May 2007 13:08:06 +0800 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanJan07.html#rrt191648248

LAST WEEK I made mention of a pet peeve I’ve nursed all these years: the practice of some publishers and graphic designers of superimposing text over graphics to the extent of rendering the text barely legible. It’s something that’s been done by professionals and amateurs alike; I’ve seen it in both glossy coffeetable books and high-school papers, perpetrated with a blithe indifference to whatever the words may be saying.

You can forgive it in high-school poetry, where the artists (if not the poets themselves) try to invest the poems with more gravity than they possess by setting them against silhouettes of trees and waves rolling on the shore. (We’ve all read—or maybe even written—those cheesy poems, the ones that go: “When you left / I was bereft / and tried to remember / that day in September / How we laughed in the rain / and forgot all the pain / etc. etc.”)

But in coffeetable books and glossy magazines meant for a more discerning readership, it’s inexcusable, although again I can see how it happens. The art director and maybe even the editor fall in love with a certain look and forget that the publication was meant to be read more than it was meant to be seen. In these instances, unless the magazine or book is specifically devoted to images, editorial judgment should prevail in favor of the primacy of the text, and therefore to its readability.

The plain honesty of black letters on white or off-white paper is hard—if not pointless—to improve upon. Call me an old fogy if you will, but when I write something I expect the reader to respond to it not because of some graphic sleight-of-hand but because of what the words say and mean. Appropriate illustrations and sensitive or even sumptuous layouts should enhance, but not overwhelm, the reading experience. This brings to mind a few other peeves I have with regard to publishing (and here I’m talking about print, not online, publishing, about which more, later).

Another sure sign of the addled amateur is the proliferation of fonts and font sizes, especially in a book that isn’t even trying to challenge the conventions of typography and design, as a cutting-edge magazine like WIRED might. I can remember, again from high school, what fun it was to pick fonts and typefaces from a catalog at the letterpress print shop and to throw Bodoni, New Century Schoolbook, and English Gothic into the same page; later, we had those Letraset rub-on letters to play with, at a time when a font like Arnold Bocklin seemed the coolest thing to use. I can imagine what it’s like when a young author or designer (or just as likely not young but an old, unknowing one) discovers that his or her computer has 1,000 fonts stored in its memory, and decides to use half of them all at once.

There are fonts meant for body text and fonts designed for titles; fonts for more traditional material and fonts for avant-garde publications (including those scratchy “grunge” fonts that were all the rage a few years ago, now thankfully out of favor with all but the most juvenile designers). The best use of fonts, I think, will present the text neutrally, so our minds can decide how to interpret it, rather than incline us—except in very subtle ways—toward an opinion or an attitude. Printing poetry in italics (except when they’re being quoted within a longer work of prose) lends the lines a preciousness they might neither need nor deserve. In other words, trust the art of your words, not the artiness of how they look.

Also, if I had my way, all magazines would lie flat when opened. If I put it down on the table so I could read it or glance through its pages while taking a call or working on my computer, it should comply forthwith and bare its inner pages to me without even trying to snap shut like a clam or resisting to lie on its spine. (Incidentally, this is one of the chief virtues of Moleskine notebooks, which I extolled in a column some time ago; there are notebooks aplenty in the stationery market, and many far cheaper than Moleskines, but few—if any—will open like Moleskines just the way you want them.)

Too many magazines today are stuffed with subscription cards and other promotions. Most of these cards won’t even come free when you try and shake them out of the magazine, which I used to do with every new copy I got of, say, Macworld or the Smithsonian Magazine; instead, they’re wedged or sewn into the binding, obliging you to yank them out with deadly force or to live with them as artificial, semi-permanent bookmarks.

That brings me to the inevitable observation that many of today’s magazines are thinly disguised catalogues, profusely illustrated with advertisements for the latest and greatest in clothes, cars, computers, watches, lipstick, and what-have-you. The articles? Well, let’s call them extended captions, breakers between one advertising section and the next. (Like someone said of ice hockey, “A hockey game broke out in the middle of a brawl!”)

Speaking of these glossies—whether they’re published in Manila or Manhattan—don’t you get the impression that there are really only 24 people or so on this planet or in our little corner of it worth writing about? Don’t you ever get tired of seeing the same names and faces hopping like bejeweled bunnies from one cocktail party or product launch to the next? Some of them aren’t even particularly pleasant to look at, which would’ve been my excuse for parading them in new clothes on the same pages from week to week and month to month.

Thankfully, a few truly good magazines still survive, even within this vapid ethos of celebrity-mania; Vanity Fair, for one, can always be depended on for good, sharp reads; even Oprah’s O magazine offers pages of sensible advice (and at least there’s only Oprah to contend with in it).


I GUESS I’m just in a sensitive mood because, last Tuesday, we put to bed the last print edition of Newsbreak, a gutsy political newsmagazine I was proud to have helped edit and to have occasionally written for these past six years. Over that time, Newsbreak built up a reputation for hard-nosed, impartial reporting that left no one in high public office untouched. My friends in the diplomatic corps often remarked how Newsbreak was obligatory reading for them because of its trustworthiness.

That reputation came at the price of death threats and lawsuits for some of the staff; ultimately, the murderous economics of print publishing overtook even our publisher’s best intentions. Newsbreak isn’t dead; it’s living on online at www.newsbreak.com.ph, which is probably the best solution for a magazine in its situation. Online is where most of its readers are at, anyway, and bandwidth is a lot cheaper than paper and printer’s ink.

I won’t be a part of that edition any longer, but I wish Newsbreak’s practically all-female editorial staff the best. They’re first-rate journalists who could teach their male counterparts more than a thing or two about standing their ground and maintaining their integrity in a profession fraught with danger and temptation. With the May elections coming up, they have their work cut out for them.

Speaking of online ventures, I’m glad to announce that I’ve joined some tech-writer friends in a jointly written and edited blog called, ahem, PWIT (that’s for “Philippine Week in Tech”; there’s another story behind it, but go read the blog at www.pwit.wordpress.com). I share bylines with familiar tech names like Adel Gabot (the site’s boss chief), Jason de Villa, Art Ilano, Bernie Janda, and Gary Mercado, among others. All these guys (what, no gals?) are busy people, and what about me, teaching four classes, writing a weekly and a monthly column, and working on four book projects all at the same time, not to mention my own blog?

But tech-blog writing is one of those things that’s turning out to be fun to do as a posse of computer-crazy guys. Like politics, high-tech wars take no prisoners, but unlike politics, nobody dies in them; everything just moves on to version 2.0.1. PWIT is platform-independent; Mac, PC, and Linux geeks are welcome all alike. If you can’t get enough about computers, phones, music players, and other digital doodads from the usual tech magazines (and obviously, we can’t), take a gander at our PWIT. Well, sort of.



THE OPENING took place last Friday, but it isn’t too late to put in a good word for painter-architect Joven Ignacio's third one-man show titled “Aruga: Handog ng Sining sa Agham” at the North Court of the Power Plant Mall, Rockwell Center, Makati City. Co-sponsored by Rockwell Land, Inc., the exhibit will benefit the scholars of the Philippine Science High School Foundation, Inc.'s (PSHSFI) Godparent Program. That program allows PSHS alumni and friends to support poor but deserving students at the high school.Young art prodigy Myra Ruth Picart, a junior student and scholar of the Godparent Program, is also showing some of her acrylic paintings in the exhibit.

Ignacio is known for producing paintings of flora and fauna in their unspoiled environment and is a staunch advocate of environmental awareness at the forefront of the emerging field called “green” architecture.

Trained in the UK and in Sweden after his undergraduate studies at the University of the Philippines, Ignacio is involved with the Green Architecture Movement of the United Architects of the Philippines and with the UP College of Architecture where he teaches topical design and rendering techniques. For more information, contact PSHSFI at 921-0655. The exhibit runs through February 2, 2007. (photo above courtesy of www.artesdelasfilipinas.com)

]]> Sun, 28 Jan 2007 11:37:28 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanJan07.html#wcv191078055


IT'S A good thing we’re 7,000 miles away from San Francisco, California, where magical things were popping out of boxes a couple of weeks ago that would have summarily wasted my newfound resolve to divest myself of what the Egyptologist Howard Carter, upon peeking into Tutankhamen’s tomb, called “wonderful things.”

I’m speaking, of course, of the Macworld Expo where Steve Jobs, with his usual modesty, announced that “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything….” And then he went on to introduce “an iPod, a phone, an Internet mobile communicator.... These are not three separate devices!... We are calling it iPhone!”

Now, you all know me as Apple’s chief unpaid evangelist in this country—although, last year, they were nice enough to fly me out to San Francisco for Macworld, where I promptly fainted upon entering the hallway, having achieved one of my life’s grandest ambitions. In other words, when I die, my soul will fly to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA, to be locked there in a vault along with the Aquafied spirits of thousands of other dearly departed Mac freaks. So again in other words, you don’t have to believe what I say, which will surely be tainted by my irrational worship of anything stamped with a half-bitten apple (the forbidden fruit, get it?).

But you know what? (And this is what I have to say.) That iPhone rocks! It makes everything and anything we’re holding in our hands look like some Neolithic tool. Imagine a phone that’s a giant, intelligent, full-color touchscreen that unlocks itself when you slide your finger across (something you can’t do by accident when it’s in your pocket); you run commands by tapping icons; when you turn it on its side, the picture follows—voila, landscape mode! It takes pictures with a 2-megapixel cam, stores songs, movies, audiobooks—up to 8 gigabytes of them—syncs with both Macs and PCs, surfs the Internet and sends e-mail by wi-fi, and did I say it makes phone calls as a quad-band GSM phone? And that the thing runs OS X? And that it’s less than half an inch thick and weighs just 135 grams? (Excuse me while I pick up my tongue.)

What’s the price tag, you ask? About $600 for the 8-gig model. But don’t hold your breath. It won’t be out in the US (and exclusively on Cingular) until June; it will be available in Asia only in 2008.

That’s an eternity, and it seems rottenly unfair for us noodle-eating people to be left out of the picture, but come to think of it, a year’s just long enough to save up for this yummy bit of digital dimsum, which—I fearlessly predict—will be in its second revision by that time, its specs upgraded to include at least a 4-megapixel camera, 16 gigs of flash memory, and a full suite of bite-size OS X applications.

Meanwhile, I better free up some space on my desktop for the iPhone charger. And didn’t Steve say something about an Apple TV?


SPEAKING OF wonderful objects, among the things that greeted me when I got back from the US recently was a copy of a slim booklet titled The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, which was sent to me by a young new publisher named Kenneth Yu.

Kenneth had written me earlier to announce this venture, and frankly I felt doubtful that he could pull it off. He was well aware of what he was up against. “I have little or no credentials to my name, but then, being small and with limited finances, I can't afford a professional or name editor as yet. So I'm pretty much the sole mover behind the Digest.”

I’m always amazed when people go into literary publishing. Of course I admire their faith and fortitude; but some will suggest another “F” word, folly, given the carcasses left behind by many noble but ultimately futile efforts to make money off—or at least break even on—a good read. There was JOSE in the martial-law days, then Chimera and Pen & Ink many years later. Today we have only Story Philippines, bravely soldiering on to a third issue (I do have a quibble, though, with its yielding to the artsy temptation of superimposing text on imagery, making things just plain difficult to read; this is a no-no in my book, where readability rules over everything).

Kenneth’s project, while decidedly modest, has the advantage of its focus on what’s been called “genre fiction.” “Genre” means category, and genre fiction involves specialized categories like sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, historical fiction, and detective and crime fiction. It’s a kind of writing that, perhaps ironically, used to be mainstream fiction, or the stuff everyone loved to read, before “highbrow” fiction pushed it aside and relegated it to the entertainment book bin as second-class literary fare. That’s an unfortunate misimpression. There’s no doubt that genre fiction is entertaining and often aims to do little more than give us an hour’s escape from the drudgery of daily living, but we forget that much of the kind of “classic” fiction we discuss in graduate seminars today started out as popular fiction, written to thrill the ordinary reader and to pay the writer’s rent. That’s what Poe and Chekhov were doing. That they wrote some memorable masterpieces along the way is for us a happy bonus.

Kenneth came into the picture not with a PhD in literature but a printing business and a keen interest in genre fiction, particularly sci-fi. “Since my high-school years in the mid-80's,” he writes, “I've enjoyed US magazines like Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Ellery Queen, Analog, and the like. I would scour second-hand bookstores in Manila looking for back-issues of these publications because I enjoyed their kind of genre-fic.”

What moved him to publish, he says, was “a talk I had with some of my wife's nephews and nieces, all of varying ages. They are all smart, and I'm proud to say that some of them are readers. However, when I asked them about their English classes and their knowledge of local literature, they were very blase about it. I asked why and they said, to my dismay, that local authors were ‘boring’, ‘not exciting’, and ‘not interesting.’ Those are their actual words, sadly. It made me wonder whether their English teachers were selling the local writers the right way. So I asked them, especially the readers among them, what they found exciting. They perked up and they began talking about Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. I attributed this to the Hollywood effect, that they would not be reading these stories at all if they hadn't been made into movies, but then they surprised me by mentioning books like Artemis Fowl and The Amber Spyglass and even Dune, and that got me thinking: what if there was a venue for Filipino writers to showcase their talents in writing genre-fic? I asked them if they would read stories like the ones they mentioned if Pinoys were the ones telling them and they said ‘Sure! But where are they?’”

And thus, the Digest, for which Kenneth cold-emailed some writers he’d heard of, eventually gathering enough material for the first issue, talking to a number of distributors and store owners, and putting out Issue No. 1 last December. (For more info, you can check out the blog at www.philippinegenrestories.blogspot.com).

The maiden issue contains five stories headlined by speculative-fiction stalwart Dean Alfar, plus works by Vin Simbulan, Andrew Drilon, Joseph Nacino (the STAR’s own online editor), and Alexander Osias.

For his next issue, Kenneth would like to see more submissions from women writers, and more work beyond horror and fantasy—especially mystery, crime, and suspense stories. (I’ve always argued myself that we need more blood—literally—in our fiction, given what a violent society we live in.)

In sum, Kenneth writes, “I hope that the Digest will be a venue where Filipino storytellers can showcase their storytelling talents in the genre field. A secondary but no less high priority is to increase readership among Filipinos. With more choices, maybe more Filipinos, especially the younger ones (the Digest is targeted mostly for those in their mid-teens to early-thirties), will pick up the Digest and read the work of their fellow Filipinos and see that we can tell as good a story as anyone else in the world. I feel that with increased literacy, we're bound to get smarter in the long run, and reading stories is one way to do that.”

Bravo, Kenneth, and all the best to you on this brave new venture.

]]> Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:14:15 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanJan07.html#lkt190456988

IT'S GOOD to be back home—the predictable aggravations of life in Arroyolandia notwithstanding—and to be resuming old routines while starting a few new ones, most notably four undergraduate preparations. We hadn’t been away that long for anything to have changed too radically, but here and there the tell-tale signs of time passing would emerge: the price of gas, yet another mall in Ortigas, trees lost to one typhoon or other, the cost of a taxi ride from home to courthouse. “Parang tubig ang pera!”, I lamented to no one in particular, observing how quickly a wad of hundreds in my wallet thinned out to a pale purple memory.

I thought we were supposed to be enjoying a spurt of growth in the economy, the same paradoxical way that the American economy is booming under a hugely unpopular president, but I couldn’t feel any kind of happy lift where I was standing; instead I had the sinking sensation that I was in the eye of a storm and that something dreadful was around the corner, like a bloody, crazy, and perhaps ultimately pointless election where wives would replace husbands and sons replace fathers, bringing us exactly where we were 35 years ago, except that in 1972 you could get a ride in a “UP Ikot” jeepney for 10 centavos versus today’s P6.50. Six-fifty! It’s not as if I still take Ikot rides (maybe it’s worse that I have to buy my gas), but I can’t imagine going to school with a bulging bag of coins at my waist, like some footloose Judas.

My depression got worse as I settled back into my study at home—a small squarish room I had commissioned to serve as my workspace, entertainment center, warehouse, museum, and general hermitage. We’ve only been living here three years, but even before we left for the States my study had already begun to resemble a junkyard conceived by Hieronymus Bosch, cluttered with the dusty carcasses of old PowerBooks and Macintoshes, constrictor-like cables and wires leading to even more tenebrous extensions, shelves of books, CDs, DVDs, and floppy disks dating back to the days of DOS 3.3 and System 7.0.1, and innumerable boxes of crusty old pens, dried-up ink bottles, loose coins from half a dozen countries, microcassettes of voices long silent, mummified watch straps, operating manuals for hollow-block-sized cellphones, checkbooks for closed accounts, exotic Torx screwdrivers, and adapters and chargers for an assortment of digital doohickeys, many of them now absent or misplaced. This creeping tide of jetsam had bubbled up to my desktop, which was positively frothing over with calling cards, staplers, bent-out paperclips, paperweights, and insurance and credit-card bills.

I came to be convinced that I was drowning in this quagmire of junk, and that I could do nothing, write nothing, until I was free of it. And it was true: the first few days upon my return, all I could do was stare at the massed and seemingly motile army of everything that I had coveted and acquired for the past couple of decades, which now trapped me in its closing grip, like Macbeth besieged by the trees of Birnam Wood. (“As I did stand my watch upon the hill,” says the messenger to his King, “I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought, the wood began to move.”) Finally, with a great sigh, I resolved to fight back, and commandeered our housekeeper Jenny’s cleaning cloths—all the rags she could muster, and a bucket of soapy water—and began scrubbing away at the thick dust and the impacted grime, only to realize, of course, that the dust on books and hard disks wasn’t the enemy, it was the things themselves, the sheer accumulation of them. I would wipe a box clean and move it from one corner to another, but it was still there, as immutably concrete as a playground hippo, taking up space, sucking on my psychic energy, inviting a fresh coat of dust as soon as I had set it down. Pretty soon my room was even more disheveled than ever, and I was holding fistfuls of filthy rags, screaming to the heavens for guidance. (I was, of course, intent on accomplishing this mission all by my noble self.)

I revisited my suki, Anisa, at the Natural Spa, hoping that her unforgiving fingers would knead the agony out of my system; I frolicked with Chippy, scratched his chin, and fed him special cat food I’d handcarried from Virginia; I slurped nilagang baka and scarfed down a heaping plateful of pancit palabok in Cubao; I did all sorts of things I knew would make me happy; but as soon as I re-entered my room to work, I felt instantly paralyzed, engulfed once more by a wave of despair: this beast in residence was just never going to go away; I could smell its breath, hear the clink of its armor plates as it shifted its weight around the room, as if teasing me to draw a sword and take one lunging stab at wherever I thought its wandering heart was.


Professing defeat, I left the house for a brisk walk around the campus, thinking that blind fatigue would buy me some peace. It was on a turn around the Sunken Garden that it hit me: take it one corner at a time. Clean up the small table with the fax machine and the printer first, and then the computer table, and then the desktop, and then the shelves, and so on. And of course the corollary was, I had to let go of whatever had to go—ruthlessly, decisively, irreversibly.

As soon as I got home, I asked Jenny for trash bags—big ones, industrial-strength ones that could be tossed onto the shoulders of dump trucks, never to be seen again. And then I began my methodical assault on the source of my torment: objects I had dragged around from one address to another, keepsakes I had meant to tinker with in my old age, souvenirs from barely remembered and indeed perhaps perfectly forgettable travels.

Out went boxloads of floppies from the ‘80s and CDs from the ‘90s containing software for ancient computers (I’d copied the most important files onto my hard disk); analog cellphones that hadn’t rung in ages; bluebooks of exams written by students long graduated; a shoebox full of calling cards, some of them from quite important people, but not one of which I’d really looked at again after I’d taken the numbers down on my PDA; instruction manuals for various gadgets and appliances in Spanish and Japanese; music CDs I’d bought or made but never really listened to; and large brown envelopes containing smaller brown envelopes containing yet smaller white envelopes.

To up the ante, I took another huge breath, went online to my favorite grazing grounds (www.philmug.ph, among others), and announced that I was giving away to fellow tinkerers and enthusiasts many if not most of my Apple computers and peripherals from the pre-USB days (you remember those, don’t you?—SCSI drives, serial cables, 14.4K modems, ADB mice, installer floppies, Zip disks, docking stations, etc.). I was holding on to my best museum pieces—the PowerBook 100, the Duos, the Mac Classic, the 2400s—but the rest would go to whoever yelled “That’s mine!” I wasn’t even going to bother with a yard sale, which would only make me fret again about price tags and such.

And so it went, and so it goes, this great cleanup and giveaway that’s not only yielding me more working space and breathing room, but also the sense of a life reclaimed from the brink of abject surrender to the Junk Monster—a fellow whose shadow I’ve seen slinking behind me in the bathroom mirror, from time to time, hissing, “Keep it.”

]]> Sun, 14 Jan 2007 16:43:07 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanJan07.html#wme189848546

I'M TYPING this up on my laptop somewhere far above the Northern Pacific midway between Detroit and Tokyo, on a New Year’s Day that happened somewhere, sometime, somehow; when we boarded the plane about seven hours ago it was just past noon of the 31st, and now it’s nearly 10 am Tokyo time on the 1st of January. Nobody even told us where or when we crossed the International Dateline; nobody took to the PA system to holler “Happy New Year!” and to warble “Auld Lang Syne” like they do in those disaster movies that always begin on a note of mindless cheer.

I’d expected something odd like this to happen—strangely enough, I also completely missed out on my birthday almost a year ago by flying home from the Macworld Expo in San Francisco via Honolulu the night before and landing in Manila on the morning of the day after. I don’t mind losing important dates to flying—I’m a sucker for travel, especially if someone else is paying for my ticket—but perhaps I was expecting fireworks on board, or some Homeland Security-approved version of it, or at least some free champagne, or bonus mileage credits, or a box of sweets—something, anything to compensate us for the foregone holiday, but I suppose the airline read the boy in me and figured that any day I’m flying is a holiday, is holiday enough for me.

Given all the dates on the calendar, why am I traveling on New Year’s Day, anyway? I remember calling my travel agent to rebook my ticket just so this would happen, because of, uhm, a legal emergency. Originally I should’ve been back home a couple of days ago, but an interesting complication came up—I’ll spare you the nasty details, which you can pick up on my blog—creating the possibility, however unlikely, of my being arrested upon arrival at the airport for having failed to post bail in that case that I shall, for the time being, willfully ignore.

It’ll all be history (or, to put it more modestly and more accurately, a footnote in 6-point Times Roman—heck, I’m no Ninoy, like I told my friends) by the time you read this, but it seemed ridiculously dramatic when I first heard about it (or again, more accurately, read about it online, just before giving my final exam in the American Short Story to my students in Wisconsin). Even online it was just a passing mention, but having made the news without having won the lottery, I of course let my Walter-Mittyish imagination parlay that tidbit into a headline screaming, in 72 points, all caps: PENMAN DUCKS BAIL, DRAGGED OFF TO JAIL. Or some such rhyme, never mind the reason.

A flurry of online and phone consultations with legal-minded friends established that I most likely wasn’t going to be arrested or murdered at the airport—trust the Pinoy’s partying mood to divert everyone’s attention to more pressing matters, like the doggie roasting on an open fire—but it was still possible to be served the warrant by a rogue cop (or worse, by a truly conscientious one) before I even got to baggage claim, and so therefore the more prudent thing to do—short of vanishing into the Black Hills of South Dakota—was to arrive just as soon as I could post bail after the holidays and not any sooner, or risk being detained a few days until the judicial system recovered from its gin-bulag hangover. Since I prefer to spend the New Year in the air, 36,000 feet above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (not to mention the Batang City Jail), here I am, tapping away on a keyboard in semi-darkness above blue-veined tracts of polar ice. I do not know what fate awaits me, as Tex Ritter put it so tremulously in “High Noon,” but I’m enjoying the pretzels and the Christmas jazz music on my earphones (“Frosty the Snowman” in bebop, no less).

Maybe I’m in denial, but it’s not like I don’t know what prison is; and maybe that’s why I’m in denial, if I am. On another January morning—lemme see now, 34 years ago—I was picked up by the military and “detained” for seven months, having gone home for the holidays like a good Catholic boy and having chatted up a neighbor who turned out to be a snitch. But that’s another story—in fact, it’s a novel, so you can read about it there; of course I wrote it up to make it sometimes sound like I was clapped in irons on Devil’s Island, but while it was never that bad for me, it most certainly was for many others, and I can attest to the fact that prison, in general, may be an edifying but never a pleasant experience for anyone. Been there, done that, don’t care much for seconds, thank you very much, even if it’s only for a night at the precinct station.

I spent my last few dollars in Detroit on some magazines, among them a copy of the latest Details; it’s a mag meant, as the advertising spreads make it abundantly clear, for younger and more raffish men, who can wear a Hugo Boss suit with an open shirt and a lantern jaw, three days unshaven—in other words, the kind of guy we potbellied profs wish we were, or yet could be. I was attracted by the titles on its cover, which to my mind beats anything written by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville in buy-me-and=read=me points: “The Return of the Yuppie: How Gen X Became What It Hated Most”; “The Computer Geek Who Broke into the Pentagon”; “Why the Sexual Fantasy Has Been Ruined by Internet Porn”; and “The Ultimate Guide to Black-Tie Dressing.” These guys know guys; maybe they missed out on mentioning cars on the cover, but I noted with approval that it carried an ad for the Land Rover (one of my dream drives, alongside the Mini Cooper) and a feature on the 2007 Ford Shelby GT inside.


In his “Letter from the Editor”, Details bossman Daniel Peres bemoans how “If my 20-year-old self could see me now at 35, he’d want to kick my ass.” He goes on to chronicle a typical day when “Dressed in Levi’s, a white Turnbull & Asser button-down, and a YSL navy blazer (circa Tom Ford), I climb into my black BMW SUV and head off for the first meeting of the day…. 3 P.M. Back at the house, I change into a pair of James Perse drawstring pants, Tod’s moccasins, and a Ralph Lauren cashmere V-neck and sit down in the office to write my ‘Letter from the Editor” on a wafer-thin laptop.”

Hey, I thought—how self-obsessively familiar. Of course Peres is being playfully parodic—it’s almost all we can do these days, isn’t it?—but it strikes a chord in me. I can’t say that I had the same sneering dismissiveness for what would have been our yuppies during the First Quarter Storm; I got sidetracked for a while and favored Ho Chi Minh rubber-tire sandals over Hush Puppies, but I caught on quickly after my release from martial-law prison and was sporting Polaroid sunglasses, four-inch-wide neckties, Tar-Gard cigarette holders, waffle-pattern double-knits, and the obligatory attaché case and clutch bag by the mid-‘70s.

Some days I might wish I were 35 and not the 53 I’m going to be pretty soon, but I’m certainly happy, at least sartorially speaking, to no longer be 23. I can dress sedately and sensibly (read: in the corniest clothes money can buy). I’ve thought about that on this trip home, of course; if I was going to be arrested at the airport, then I was going to be arrested in style—in a navy linen blazer (didn’t I just read that in the magazine?), gray button-down pinpoint oxford shirt, cuffed khaki slacks, and boat shoes, toting an Eddie Bauer messenger bag. Taking things more seriously as mothers always do, my mom gave me new pajamas for Christmas, to wear at the precinct station, or wherever I was going to be detained. I feel like I’m going to a country club.



FAST FORWARD: As things turned out, I got uneventfully past immigration, stood for a full hour unmolested at baggage claim awaiting four huge pieces of luggage stuffed with thrift-shop treasures, beef jerky, old pens, and other souvenirs from Toyland, USA. Two days later I posted bail.

The story gets a little longer (and, so far, funnier), but something tells me I better shut up and save my reportage for later, when I can chuckle in the safety of proven innocence. In the meanwhile, for the record, I’m biting my vagrant tongue, and I humbly submit myself to the kindness of the court and the majesty of the law. Affiant further sayeth none, so help me God!

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LIKE MANY specialized interests, the world of fountain pen collecting can be a little strange. In dimly lit corners of the Internet and in annual conventions that take place in suburban hotels all over America and in a few other spots around the world, “stylophiles” (as some pen lovers might prefer to be called) gather to discuss the advantages of converters over piston and lever fillers, rare 1929 Wahl coral Deco Bands, an over-the-top, diamond-studded modern Montblanc that sells for $160,000, and “school pens” that went for a few dollars each in the 1950s and 1960s and which people tend to remember with an affection reserved for childhood candies.

In one of the two or three fountain-pen message boards I belong to on the Web (www.fountainpennetwork.com, or FPN), one of the hottest discussions has had to do with the relative merits of vintage and modern pens. Like watch collectors, pen fanciers tend to divide themselves into those who favor old things versus the new. (The term “fancier,” by the way, is a throwback to Victorian times, when it was deemed fashionable and smart to take a fancy to something—in other words, to develop some esoteric expertise, leading to devotees of “the dog fancy” and “the cat fancy,” and so on. In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, for example, Sherlock Holmes declares: “I am somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a better grown goose.”)

New pens and pen makers abound in the market these days, spurred on by the recent revival of interest in fountain pens—often less as actual writing instruments, sad to say, and more as personal jewelry, status items meant more to convey a message than to write one. But aside from fogeys like me, fountain pens hold a genuine appeal for some new young romantics who—growing up in a digital age where one might spend whole days at the keyboard without ever touching a pen—find the act of committing pen to paper a refreshingly tactile, even sensual, experience, with one’s penmanship becoming an assertion of one’s individuality in a sea of ones and zeroes, in blooming royal blue or mocha ink.

New pens have some obvious advantages. Theoretically at least, they should’ve worked out all the problems of the past, as far as durability of materials, stiffness of nibs, and filling mechanisms are concerned. They shouldn’t bubble over and create a sudden blot on your shirtfront when you go up in a plane, like some old pens were known to do; they shouldn’t gunk up within in a sludge of caked ink and crumbled rubber, if you leave them be for too long; and they should be refillable from cartridges you can buy at the nearest book store, instead of forcing you to dash home for that bottle of ink.


You’ll find a good range of these new pens, too, in terms of style and price, from the ultra-modern, Hummer-like Rotring Core to my current Holy Grail, the Japanese sword-like Waterman Serénité. There are also cheap but functional modern school pens you can get for a couple of hundred pesos—the Chinese seem to have mastered the art of, shall we say, reproducing the best of ‘50s and ‘60s pens like the Parker 51 under the Hero and Wing Sung brand names, among others.

In a strange twist I’ll explain later, new pens made up to look like old ones cost a whole lot more than the originals they were modeled after. And here’s that explanation: sometimes it’s a matter of styling, and people seem to agree that retro looks are better and retro looks are therefore back—but at 21st-century prices. Revived classic designs include those for the Parker Duofold, the Parker 51, the Sheaffer Triumph Imperial, and the Faber-Castell and Yard-O-Led pens whose lines and materials evoke the hard-rubber pens of the 1920s.


(Their beauty can make you weep, but so can their prices, which start at around $200. Still, that’s nothing compared to so-called “limited editions”—numbered, often way-too-fancy modern pens whose prices make you want to reach for the nearest Bic: say, $15,500 for the Krone Tutankhamen Magnum fountain pen. If you think that’s outrageous—as I do—don’t run for comfort to the world of watch collecting, where $5,000 won’t get you far beyond a bling-y Franck Muller, and the truly, gorgeously classic Patek Philippes start in the six figures, in US dollars.)

On the other hand, there’s a hard core of vintage pen enthusiasts for whom the best in penmaking came and went about 50 to 60 years ago. Typical of these sentiments were those expressed on FPN by some members (names in parentheses, below):

(rosey) “I like vintage fountain pens because I love most things vintage. Houses, furniture, housewares, cars, etc.... I think what attracts me to the Parker 51 so much is its reliability every time I pick it up to use it. My pens are 50 years old and write better than a lot of moderns. I also like vintage pens because they have had previous owners and I like to think about what they wrote with their pens. The appeal, I think, is mostly the history of the pen.”

(FrankB) “I suppose I must join those who love the sense of history derived from using a vintage pen. I like vintage firearms, too, but shooting most of them is an invitation to disaster. Yet I can write with an 80-year-old pen and enjoy the experience very much. I always wonder where the pen has been and what messages it has written over the years.

“I also like to get a feel for how fountain pens have evolved. The technology might be essentially the same, but the pens of yore are different in some interesting ways from contemporary pens. One example that comes immediately to mind is the flex in some of the older nibs. It is a type of nib that I cannot find in modern pens, although some come quite close to replicating that vintage flex.”

(psfred) “I can get a top of the line, very nicely working pen for a small fraction of what a nice pen costs today. Vintage pens were sold as workaday tools, by and large (with the exception of the 14-karat gold-bodied ones). Most of the development money and effort went into the actual function of the pen. They are lighter (very few metal bodied pens) and usually a very nice diameter. In other words, [they were] tools, not pocket bling to show off how much money you can spend on ‘fashion accessories.’ A Pelikan 1000 may write OK, but I'm willing to bet not better than any of my Triumph-nibbed Sheaffers or Parker 51s.”

(jirish1957) “Bang for the buck is certainly one consideration. It's hard to find a gold-nibbed new pen for less than $100 nowadays while plenty of vintage pens are available…. As for durability, any pen made of plastic (1930s forward) is at least as durable as a new one, and the gold plating on clips, bands, etc. tends to be thicker than that found on new pens. Chosen wisely a vintage pen will outlast you and, as long as there are folks out there who enjoy restoring them, will probably be used by your heirs in the 22nd century. Incidentally, while I don't use my Leica M3 as often as I'd like, it's one thing I'll grab if the house catches on fire.”

Which brings me to my thesis, which really doesn’t just deal with pens old or new: even as we rush to embrace the new—especially in a global culture that extols the latest and greatest, or the latest as greatest—we naturally seek and find comfort in the old and the familiar, even to the extent of romanticizing or exaggerating its virtues.

We might think, for example, that old pens are much more durable and write better, because the ones we’ve retained are the restored survivors, the Parker Vacumatics that have had their diaphragms replaced and their nibs straightened out and smoothened. From our vantage point—walking through museums, pawing through display cases of antiques and collectibles, leafing though illustrated histories—the past could look more well-ordered and benign than it actually was, preserved in objects of great and enduring beauty. We see little or nothing of the dross, the garbage that defines cultures and civilizations as well as their finest products, and so the past becomes a kind of Eden when people and things were more sensibly made and honestly sold.


Maybe it was, back in the days when things like pens were made by craftsmen working with hard rubber or celluloid blanks and lathes, and when pen salesmen were obliged to serve each customer with an individual finetuning of the nib for smoothness, flex, and angle. Today, we imagine, computers and machines turn out and assemble nearly everything we use; we buy things online, and speak to a faceless someone with a foreign accent from several thousand miles away if the new gizmo we ordered breaks down. Maybe it’s that lost personal touch or signature that we hanker for.

It’s that homespun familiarity—and the ageless design of vintage pens—that modern pen makers are cashing in on, by revivals that mimic classic models. Younger buyers eager to buy tradition without having to deal with the arcana of vintage pens (and the perils of eBay) can walk into a department store, plunk down a wad of money, and go home feeling as fulfilled (or at least as ink-filled) as their grandfathers.

Myself, I keep a fair balance between old and new, and try to make sure whether I’m getting a pen (or a hat, or shoes, or a watch, or an umbrella) for the sentiment, the shape, or the sheer practicality of it. Like many others, I love old things—I have a fondness for art deco pieces, in particular—because of the smartness-cum-simplicity of their design. Most of my favorite pens either come from or hark back to the ‘20s and ‘30s; I think the most beautiful watches, on the other hand, were crafted in the ‘50s, when gold, round, and thin was in, as opposed to today’s tank-like stainless-steel behemoths.


On the other hand, I’m a sucker for digital gadgetry, the newer the better. As I’ve often said, getting your hands today on something that most people won’t be using for another four to five years (think of smartphones a few years ago) is another way of cheating time, just as using 100-year-old furniture is. I easily get smitten by the newest computers and digital doohickeys—I can’t wait for whatever Steve Jobs comes up with in next week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco (the bets are on an Apple phone and a subcompact MacBook)—but I keep a soft spot for early computers, and, yes, tend a small museum of early Macs around the house.

Whenever I visit the Smithsonian, I pay my respects to the geek’s equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling—the late-‘40s ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator to you), a collection of about 20,000 vacuum tubes that made up the world’s most powerful electronic computer of its time. (The Smithsonian houses just five of the original 40 panels, with each panel the size of a tall bookcase.) It’s charming to think how they must’ve used fountain pens to write down all those early codes.


So even with the new, we drift back to the old, as F. Scott Fitzgerald closed one of my favorite novels: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

A Happy New Year to all!

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