Of pens and notebooks

Just when, like everyone else, I was about to give up on the whole idea that I would be able to write again without a computer, I received a traditional notebook and quill set.

It’s a gift from Norman Nimer, my balikbayan friend who, although he has been working with computers as graphic designer for more than half of his life, has gone back to using leather-bound notebooks and sketchbooks. He has become an evangelist in the global cult of “notebookism” and I am his recent convert.

In fact, with my new Victor Hugo brand set of goose quill and ink bottle is a ruled Moleskine, the legendary notebook whose claim to fame (and so, too, the price) is that it has been the choice of such artists and writers as Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway, and Chatwin.

It’s my second Moleskine from  Norman. My third is from my sister-in-law. Normally I wouldn’t buy such expensive notebooks. I’d rather go to a bindery and have a ream of eggshell paper bound into a black hardcover “idea book” similar to those of old Fernando Zobel, whose drawings I admire. Or I’d order from another artist-friend who sells his own hand-made leather sketchbooks using acid-free watercolor paper  bound in ancient ways he learned by watching YouTube videos.

He is yet another example of the paradox that goes with our nostalgia for old stuff: a classicist who disdains the glorification of the banal by contemporary art but gets most of his arguments from online readings.

Same goes with the current fad for the analog fun of keeping a journal or sketchbook among young graphic designers. I myself try to fill up several notebooks at the  same time. I have a Moleskine for watercolor, another for gouache and the new one that I use for collage or poetry (or “concrete poetry” where you  compose a poem out of random cutout texts).

Then I have sketchbooks in different sizes for pencil sketching. I usually carry two or three  in my bag along with a pocketbook. They’re handy when you feel inspired or get stranded.

I instantly fell in love with my new quill. It’s not just the steam punk kind of cool image that somehow matches my pointed beard, but it’s  the quality of line it creates so smoothly on paper.

I’ve used several crowquill pens before but they don’t hold the ink for long, resulting in crude short  lines. My new quill makes lines on paper as fluid as the arabesques of an ice skater in tutu.

I immediately used it (okay, showed it off) when my students asked my signature for their thesis proposals. One of them remarked that I looked like Jose Rizal writing “Mi Ultimo Adios.” “I have yet to find out why this country is worth dying for,” I replied. “In the meantime, I need to get a good suit and oil lamp.”

I’ve  always complained to my students that their penmanship was  making me cross-eyed. The kids are obviously doing more writing with their cell phones and computers so I cannot totally blame them for bad writing.

Even teachers like us rarely write on the board nowadays. There’s a projector permanently suspended from the ceiling of almost every classroom in our college so teachers can easily plug in to do PowerPoint slide shows.

Elsewhere in the world, educators are pondering whether to still impose requirements for students to write in good cursive in keeping with the tradition of good penmanship.  My own writing is no better. It looks like a  physician’s scribbling on a bad day and lines from talk balloons of a comic strip on a good day.

But even the latter still don’t qualify as cursive. In grade school, boys in our class thought that cursive was  for girls so we insisted on writing in a style closer to Mesopotamian cuneiform just to avoid the feminine curves.

Then in high school, we learned lettering with a nib pen. Our teacher was strict and gave so many exercises in German Black Letter, Old English and other ancient styles as if we were going to be Medieval scribes. The ultimate requirement was for us to make our own diploma completely in nib pen calligraphy.

It was tough but doing good in class eventually got me a commission to letter (yes, a verb, not a noun) names on the diploma of the whole graduating class in our school.

When I became a teacher, I eventually got to handle my own lettering class before the subject was phased out. Today, I have almost forgotten that I was trained to be a calligrapher and could actually write like Rizal if I wanted to. It’s just a matter of practice. In the meantime, let me finish this column by writing on my notebook. I mean, a small laptop computer.