An Analogue Life

This is not exactly a reminiscence, but that was the closest tag. I think I mentioned somewhere that I was becoming fascinated by sketching and planned to do a bit of it. And I meant art sketching, not music sketching. It has something to do with wanting more tactile in my life. I am also returning to using a fountain pen for writing in general, but of course, it makes you want to write a journal, so I am doing that. I am going to be doing more music sketching as well because I have come to believe that music software tends to put you in a rut, or tie you to a Procrustean bed. If you don't know the story of Procrustes, the Attican bandit, then it is worth looking him up.

The relentless crispness of our digital world is all very nice, but that crispness comes at a price and the price is the atmospheric, the tentative, the subtle, the vague, the crepuscular, the transitional. And we don't want to lose all that, do we?

I want to do a lot of musical sketching for a while, you know, like you see in a Beethoven manuscript:

Did you ever have the thought that if Beethoven was working in Finale or Sibelius, he would have written the theme from Star Wars instead of the Grosse Fuge? What about Stravinsky?

Mind you, I think that a lot of Stravinsky's compositional work was done banging on the piano, even more physical than Beethoven, so when he got to writing it down, it was already more organized.

I want to recover the tactile. For a long time I just delighted in the joy of writing on a computer. How incredibly straight everything was, how you could use all those groovy fonts,  the joy of adjusting margins or adding footers or, well, you get the idea. But after nearly thirty years of writing on computers, that thrill is gone and I realize it is still the content that is important, not how tidy the margins are. So I return to the fountain pen, the mechanical pencil--I got two new ones, Pentel GraphGear 1000s--they are magnificent pencils, but I also dug out my old Staedtler Mars 0.5 mm that I have had for at least thirty years and it still works just great. As opposed to the box of twenty Chinese mechanical pencils I got for five bucks from OfficeDepot that are all really horrible.

And speaking of fountain pens, oh my lord, how great they feel after ballpoints. Let's just admit it, ballpoint pens are the Taco Bell of writing. Cheap and filling, but the whole experience is just unpleasant. Fountain pens are not expensive considering that you just refill them with ink when they get down and they will last basically forever. Get a good fountain pen and bequeath it to your kids. Sign stuff with it.

Get some green ink for variety. It is a simple joy to write with a fountain pen. I like the Lamy Safari, a terrific pen made in Germany, available for around $18. Light, precise and a thrill to write with. And, like I said, it will last forever, though you will certainly have to buy lots of ink. Or the Hongdian Black Forest, a stealth fountain pen in all black:

For the maximum decadence, get some purple ink:

Pretty soon you will be writing your own In Search of Lost Time, or at least beautifully addressing Post-It notes to your fellow workers. Here's an idea, the next time you want to send a beautiful personal email, write it with a fountain pen on nice paper and then scan it and send it as an inline jpg. That's next on my list.

And now, for our musical exit, a little something from B. B. King: