Cross Pens

 Dec 10

CNET is the new Consumer Reports, except a lot better. Look at all these reviews: the best cheap wine. Frying pans. They're not just electronics anymore. CNET is where I found these awesome blankets. Check this out: 7 pens, $14 to $575.

I'm surprised there aren't any Cross pens on CNET's list. Maybe that just shows I'm out of date. I got a Cross pen around 2005, about $20 or so I think. I still use it every day. It's basically indestructible. 

So, you know: don't give me a pen for Christmas. I'm set for life, and if a young person inherits my Cross, they're set for life.

 

Dec 31

I told you that I had had my Cross pen for decades and that it was pretty much indestructible. Which was true. So, naturally, about a day or two after that I lost it.

Got a new one from Amazon, but I didn't realize that not all Cross ballpoint pens are identical. Far from it, turns out! So the refills I had for the old one won't fit into this one. Also, the old one rolled open and shut, silently as a ninja. This one clicks.

You're thinking: it clicks. What, is that actually a problem?

Yes it is. A first-world problem.

And now, suddenly, I'm wondering about all sorts of things. There are some very wealthy literary families. People whose great-great-grandparents had Henry James and Turgenev over for dinner. Are their homes filled with veritable piles of Cross ballpoints, the way there were piles of Bic Stics at home when I was a child?

And this thought takes me a step further: would the thought of Cross ballpoints give brain-nausea to some of the economically-elite among the literary, because they still refuse to convert from fountain pens to ballpoints?

Dec 31

I know how important this topic is to you, so I'll be keeping you updated. 

I lost the old Cross pen, the one I'd had for decades, somewhere between Kroger and home. In Kroger I used it to cross items off my shopping list. And when I got home, it was gone.

My best guess is that it slipped out of my right front pants pocket, where I keep the Moleskine notebook, the pen and the phone. Hopefully it's somewhere here on the floor in the house or on the floor of the car, and I'll find it again.

I'm hoping to find it again, not expecting to. More likely it fell on the floor in Kroger, or on the ground in their parking lot, and it's gone.

So I was thinking: would the pen fit into the pocket of the Moleskine notebook?

It does. I wonder whether Bruce Chatwin kept a pen in the pocket of his Moleskine?

Bruce Chatwin was the douchebag over-rated travel writer who is responsible for Moleskines being known as Moleskines.

Moleskines are actually very good notebooks, and the Cross fits right into that pocket, so when I went to Kroger today, I wasn't so worried.

And I know that makes you very happy.

Some American Essays Judged "Best"

In The Best American Essays 2004, In his essay "Against Cool," Rick Moody spends 32 pages making it absolutely clear that he doesn't even know what cool is. Not counting 2 pages of footnotes.

Moody begins his long essay by assuring the reader that he himself is not and has never been cool. But I don't think a person can judge his or her own level of coolness. One doesn't say, "I'm cool!" or "I'm not cool." One recognizes it outside of oneself, and says, "She's so cool!" or "Hey, man, that wasn't cool." In his song "Life's Been Good," Joe Walsh remarks, "Everybody's says I'm cool." But he gives the impression that he definitely considers the possibility that "everybody" says that to him just because he's a rock star. The whole thrust of the song is Walsh saying that he knows that he is lucky, that he doesn't claim that he has earned every penny he has by good old American hard work and grit, or by being a genius. He may be tremendously hardworking, and, at least in my opinion, he is a musical genius. But if the impression given by "Life's Been Good" is correct, he doesn't go around patting himself on the back for his success. He just gets on with it. Which is pretty cool.

What is cool? It's kindness, openness, quiet gentle awareness of whomever or whatever is beautiful or touching or edifying or otherwise cool in the moment.

In his Introduction to this 2004 volume of essays, guest editor Louis Menand says that an essay is good when the pain of not continuing to read it would outweigh the pain of continuing to read. It was around that point that I stopped reading Menand's Introduction. I found Moody's "Against Cool" quite painfully bad from its title to the very last word of its very last footnote. Moody says we should abandon the use of the term "cool" -- with the exception, I assume, of continuing to use it to describe ranges of temperature.

I think that's just not cool.

In The Best American Essays 1994, guest-edited by Tracy Kidder, Cynthia Ozick has an essay entitled "Rushdie in the Louvre," in which she, ostensibly, describes meeting Rushdie in the Louvre, after Rushdie has been elected a member of the Academie Universelle des Cultures. But only a handful of fragments of sentences spoken by Rushdie during that meeting held in the Louvre in his honor make their way into Ozick's essay, which has much more to do with the Louvre and terrorism and Henry James and Zola and Rushdie's security detail, which was extremely extensive at the time, than with Rushdie. I don't mean that all of those other subjects added together are given more space than Rushdie, but that each of them is given more space. I feel cheated by the title of Ozick's essay, which is pretty dull except when those few fragments of Rushdie's sentences light it up the way lightning lights up a dark cloudy sky.

Perhaps Ozick would have come up with a better essay if she'd concentrated on terrorism, given the essay a title such as "Terrorism," begun it with a short paragraph about how she met Rushdie at the Louvre, and then gotten on with the actual subject on her mind. At least then the reader wouldn't have been disappointed by an essay with a thoroughly misleading title.

By stark contrast, in the same 1994 volume of officially best American essays, Paul Theroux's "Chatwin Revisited" is actually above all about Bruce Chatwin, Theroux's deceased friend and fellow travel-writer, and it's actually quite good.

Writing

I've been writing a lot of stuff since the age of 11, if not longer. I believe that was when I wrote my first short stories. I turned 11 in 1972. Not much more than a decade ago, I was still writing mostly with a pen on paper. Then, in 1997, I started to become curious about this Internet thingy, and everything changed... In January 1st of this year, I started writing with pen on paper again, in Moleskinenotebooks with a PilotGS-2 Pro, on pretty much a daily basis. I enjoyed that. I found out that it was Bruce Chatwinwho had given Moleskines their name; I browsed through one of his books and didn't think it was for me, although that remains a very cursory first impression from which no-one should draw conclusions. Anyway, in May of this year I pretty much stopped with the Pilot and the Moleskines, because I had started with this blog, and I'm doing here very much the same thing that I was doing in the Moleskines, except that I'm trying to be more careful here, more polished in my prose style and more reserved with my judgements, and more discreet, because this is going public right away and that wasn't. Some of what I've written here I've copied from the Moleskines. I miss writing in the Moleskines, they and the GS-2 Pro have aesthetic qualities which this keyboard and monitor completely lack, but this blog has pretty much replaced them, whaddya gonna do. After this blog makes me a multimillionaire, I will have the option of writing in nice notebooks with nice pens again, I will be able to pay someone well for typing and data entry, right? Right. Since starting the blog, I've written a page and a half in the Moleskine. A page and a half in a month and a half, noting when I started using a new disposable razor, when I set a new personal best in the number of reps of the Upward Dog I could do in a set, and not a whole lot more than that. [PS, 15 March 2022: I thought they were called Upward Dogs, but what I was doing was going from laying flat on my back, going to a fully extended bridge, then all the way back down. That was one rep.] A page and a half. I was averaging more than that in a day. I used to be downright hostile toward computers, in a way which seems to me, in retrospect, quite neo-Luddite. I used to say that I wanted to chisel my writing into granite, rather than enter it into a database via a keyboard. (I never have learned to chisel granite, despite those repeated blustering pronouncements.) It is clear, in retrospect, that my hostility was based in ignorance, and in the frustration of having tried a few times to use computers, and failed, a frustration familiar to many of us not that IT has spread so wide. I eventually learned to do a few things with computers and with the Inner Tubes, as have so many of us. I can't be objective about the quality of my own writing, I never have been able to do that. It's very often painful to look at things I've written. Kurt Vonnegut'scomment about how he felt lousy about all the books he'd written, and Samuel Beckett'scomment about how to write is to fail, both resonate strongly with me. So I just get through each piece of writing as best I can, hope that it's not too much of an affront to my readers' taste and intelligence, and then get on to the next one. I can say of myself with some confidence that I'm a good reader, and I think there's often a connection between that and writing well, and so that gives me hope that it may not have been fully futile, all the time I've spent writing so many different things, two unpublished novels, large chunks of several more which I may or may not ever finished, who knows how many short stories, essays, letters, journal essays, emails, Internet forum posts, blog posts. Queries... Reflections on the pleasures of well-made notebooks and pens, on the frustrations and ironies and trade-offs of life.