Ditto

Being essentially lazy, not to mention old and decrepit, I often fall asleep robotically swiping various incarnations of social media up, down, left, right, and like Schrödinger”s cat, between live and Memorex. First, I discovered that this occupation is a massive waste of time, and second, that it is highly addictive. I watch Tik-Tok, like Playboy, for the articles: there is a lot of good education on TikTok … really. Unfortunately you have to rapidly flip through more titillation, questionable cooking tips, and universal garbage to find the good parts but they are usually worth the effort.

One bit that seems to get copied by most low-rent influencers is where Mom exposes her daughter’s generation by asking her to identify various items, mostly from the fairly recent pre-internet era. No button hooks or buggy whips, the new strange items are 8-track tapes, rotary phone indices, and Tang.

Although my first thought is to be personally insulted because I not only remember all the items but I actually remember items of a much more distance past.

As a boy I was often gifted a new pen whenever the family visited my rich (not really) uncle. Usually they were dip pens or occasionally an inexpensive fountain pen. Ball-point pens were very new and quite expensive. I didn’t get a ball-point until 3rd grade when we were provided with special industrial shaped pens to practice our cursive (RIP). I remember the teacher had to apply the heat of a match to each pen point so as to melt the wax that was used to protect it.

Then came the Lindy Pen (Biro) and a never ending skirmish with blobs of dark blue ink. I hated them and gladly switched to sharp felt-tip pens or rolling ball pens when they were introduced much later. However, I still maintained a few fountain pens, often with new fangled cartridges I could refill with a handy hypodermic needle swiped from my father’s diabetes supplies.

The real problem with fountain pens was not the pen nor the ink; it was the paper. Remember the Big Chief tablets back then where you could still see the aggregate of wood particles peeking around the thin green lines? Standard school notebook paper was hardly better, Blotter be damned: just the touch of a fountain pen nib sucked the ink out into a large blue-black puddle on the cheap paper that continued to expand until it dried. Later I discovered heavy bond paper and have almost exclusively used a wide variety of fountain pens and nibs ever since.

But fountain pens are not great for annotating books (use pencil) and besides, most of my reading nowadays is digital so the point is moot. However, I still have a robust reading list for this month.

A Coffin for Dimitrios — Eric Ambler
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook — Anthony Bourdain
Manhattan Beach — Jennifer Egan
The Cremator — Ladislav Fuks
The Thin Red Line — James Jones
The Lacuna — Barbara Kingsolver
Widow’s Story: A Memoir, A — Joyce Carol Oates
The New Life — Orhan Pamuk
The Poe Shadow — Matthew Pearl
Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages — John Cowper Powys
The 120 Days of Sodom — Le Marquis de Sade
Barefoot Boy with Cheek — Max Shulman
The Shadow Puppet — George Simenon
The Beginner’s Goodbye — Anne Tyler
S. — John Updike
Girl with Curious Hair — David Foster Wallace
Tipping the Velvet — Sarah Waters
Glue — Irvine Welsh
The Naked Jungle — Harry Whittington
Jacob’s Room — Virginia Woolf