I had a FaceTime call with my ex-wife in Germany yesterday--we are very good friends--and I was telling her about my new hobbies of writing with a fountain pen and journaling. I pull out my Lamy Safari, thinking to impress her:
I'm going to get the better of her, though, I have a Japanese fountain pen on order from Pilot.
Oh, by the way, I can heartily recommend the Lamy Safari. It is under twenty dollars, will last you forever and is an excellent pen.
Here is Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony with the Royal Concergebouw conducted by Bernard Haitink which Mozart wrote down with the predecessor to the fountain pen, the quill pen.
Some years ago I was dashing through the Rome airport on my way to a connecting flight to Macedonia when a colorful Lamy shop caught my eye. I didn't know the brand but took the time to try out a Safari then congratulated myself on my ability to resist it. No compulsive purchases for me. I obsessed about it during my stay in Macedonia then risked missing my connecting flight on the way back to stop and buy two Lamy Safari pens one in black and one in yellow. We should start a club. Great nib. Laurence Durrell, the English writer lived for years in Sommieres France. The local bookstore owner told me he wrote only with Papermate Flair pens. He'd buy them by the box. He probably didn't know about the Lamy Safari.
ReplyDeleteChristine, welcome back! We have missed you.
ReplyDeleteAs someone once said, "Me, I can resist everything except temptation!"
I love my Lamy Safari, but it has some serious competition from the HongDian Black Forest and from the Pilot Metropolitain.
Oh god, Papermate Flair. The very thought of it would provoke bad prose for me!
I don't comment often but I'm still here. I always turn to the Music Salon to help recuperate from the dispiriting news cycle. It's a great resource. I have a sentimental fondness for fountain pens but find writing in longhand arduous. I'm a fast touch typist. When I was in high school typing class was obligatory because the director of the school had typed his entire doctoral thesis with two fingers and he was determined to spare us that experience. The typing class was filled with giant Underwood mechanical typewriters with nothing printed on any of the keys. There was a poster of the keyboard on the wall at the front of the class. So I never got in the habit of looking down. Typing has turned out to be one of the most useful and enduring skills I learned in high school which is pretty sad when you think about it. I do have to give a shout out to Mrs Barrett who made us subscribe to a weekly news magazine and then proceeded to teach us every propaganda technique in the book and made us comb through the articles each week to identify them. Pretty amazing. At the time I was writing with a silver colored stainless steel Cross pen and pencil set that I still have and use.
ReplyDeleteChristine, I am so glad you read the Music Salon regularly. We do try to be positive.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, the thing that I learned in high school that seems the most useful was typing in Grade 9! So I too, can touch type pretty well. But I love writing with the fountain pen. And it is connected to my returning to sketching musical ideas in pencil before I turn to the music software.
It sounds like we need a few thousand Mrs Barrett's to teach the current crop of kids, who obviously are being kept ignorant of history as they are being propagandized to an inch of their lives.
I have a Staedtler mechanical pencil I have had for at least thirty years. Still going strong!