Montblanc Resurrection

Last May I was chatting with my fellow fountain pen lovers Chito and John, and complained to them that the pen I had been given for my college graduation, a Montblanc Meisterstuck, had developed flow issues. The thought of sending it to an authorized service center was frightening, as I had no idea how much flow adjustments would cost. I've had this pen since 1990 and I definitely would not be able to afford this pen at present day prices. I've been careful with it and still have the box and papers. I couldn't understand why such a pen would NOT perform the way it's supposed to.

Chito and John mentioned checking the space between the tines, and the space between the nib and the feed. We discussed flossing the tines and soaking in an ammonia solution, what we normally do with our other pens. The discussion got really geeky, which I enjoyed a lot. I decided to do more research last weekend, and embarked on the safest course of home-based action.

(Along the way I discovered that what I thought all the while was a Montblanc 145 Hommage a Frederic Chopin was actually a 144 Classique. (See pictures of MB models throughout the years on the very informative German site Fountainpen.de). My papers and box (including the original price tag) did not indicate the model name. It has a push-in converter and also fits international standard cartridges. I selected it from the Duty Free MB Boutique because it seemed the right size for my hand.)

This pen was supposed to write a wettish Fine line. I cleaned it the usual way (repeated flushings with cold water using the converter) and filled it with Waterman Black, supposedly one of the "wetter-flowing" inks available. What came out was a grey line, with lots of shading. Ok, I thought, I know 14k MB nibs are supposed to be hand-ground so there will be variations in line, but getting grey instead of something darker made me very unhappy. I remember it writing much darker and wetter before. As I kept writing in my journal I noticed the writing getting alarmingly more and more dry, with some skipping. At a certain point I got really angry about why a much-hyped brand would perform so poorly, after previously writing so well.

If you could read the rant above, it's true I have some modestly priced vintage pens that write better than the MB 144. Heck, I even have a Hello-Kittyish Japanese plastic pen that writes better than the MB. That's downright embarrassing.

More testing: (Definitely not black ink, that.)

It took me two whole days to figure out what to do, being in a mild panic. I flushed out the weak Waterman Black. I replaced it with Pelikan Black. It wrote much darker, but was still drying out and skipping. After sleeping on it, I flushed it again the following morning, and filled it with some Pelikan Black which I had in a sample bottle, mixed with a few drops of dishwashing liquid - a solution for lubrication, suggested in the Fountain Pen Network forums. I then twisted the converter counter-clockwise to let about 3 drops fall back into the bottle, which allowed the enhanced ink to run along the feed (a flat feed with vertical fins, similar to a Pilot 78G). Then I tested it on my journal. SUCCESS!!!

Imagine my relief! Now I've decided to use it more regularly.

When I was in college all I used was a Pilot 55 with a cracked cap, bound with black electric tape. Pretty pathetic looking, but it wrote so well. I love my dad for giving me this MB 144, when I barely knew what I know now about using and maintaining fountain pens. I can't believe I've kept it safe for 20 years now. I'm glad I did.

[Edit: In September I sent the pen to nibmeister Mike Masuyama at Mikeitwork.com via my friend Caloy, and it came back to me a wetter, clearer writer. He adjusted the flow by widening the feed channel. I'm so glad I had it professionally serviced! I now have it in regular rotation. It's sooo good to be able to use my graduation gift more often!]

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(The journal pictured above is a red Scribe pocket-size journal with unlined off-white paper. The Waterman and Pelikan inks, if used with a fine nib, do not feather or show through the paper. Other inks and nib sizes may feather or bleed. Scribe notebooks are available at all Powerbooks outlets and at Scribe Writing Essentials at the Eastwood City Mall.)

FPN-P Meet at Conti's

We thought it would be a mini-pen meet with less than ten members, but the event was so well-attended it became a full-size one. Not in pictures: Caloy (late), Mona (took pix).

Those who were able to join us (we were 15 in all) included John, JP (TOJ), Butch (DOB), Beng, Clem, Chito, Joseph, and Caloy. There were also a number of new faces: Cesar, Tato, Raffy, Paul, Winston and Sonia. The Conti's function room could barely contain us as well as the waiters, hahaha!

One of the original reasons we decided to organize a mini pen-meet was that John needed help resaccing his Sheaffer 875 Balance. Fortunately I had a spare size 18 sac, shellac and some pure talc from Woodbin, and we very quickly put his pen together. (Since I started buying relatively inexpensive vintage pens on Ebay, I figured I would invest in a basic resac/polish kit. My order arrived in the mail early this year.) Clem's Eversharp Skyline also needed resaccing, as the sac it came with had fallen off for some reason. The cap of the copper Esterbrook SJ Clem bought from Cindy also had some dried up shellac marring its finish, so that was the very first pen I used my micromesh (also from Woodbin) on.

Pidoy arrived, bringing Adring Silverio with him. Mang Adring is an experienced pen repairman and vintage pen dealer from Sampaloc. He brought with him some items to show the group (mostly an assortment of Parkers). Despite the fact that we didn't have much time to look over the pens for sale, some of us were able to have a very interesting discussion with him over lunch.

We raffled off only 4 items this time because we didn't expect such a huge turnout. Winston won the disposable Japanese fountain pen, but Chito won a Japanese notebook from Saizen, Joseph won the Wality 69T eyedropper fountain pen and Clem won the Rhodia notebook. Caloy arrived after lunch, so Chito, John and I stayed to have dessert with him.

All in all, it was another very successful pen meet! We may meet again some time in July.

Memory Palaces

Sebastian Faulks writes in his novel Charlotte Gray: "When you reach the age 40 there is no cell in your body that you had when you were 18." You are the same person, and yet a new person, and yet an older person. And thus there are limited slots to be filled by new data in your short-term memory; there's always the need for things like a smart phone scheduler and directory and Post-its. Only the most significant or the most-repeated bits of data find a place in long-term memory as you grow. Memory and learning require will, and we are the architects of that process.

In the last couple of months I read a couple of books that mention the term "memory palace" - Daniel J. Boorstin's history book The Discoverers (a personal favorite), and Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. What an evocative, romantic term, I thought. Also called "method of loci", a memory palace is a mnemonic technique that involves assigning data to virtual place-holders in an imaginary structure in one's head. It's a mental map, a prompt. Associating a memory with an item located in a specific area in that map makes it easier to return to it and retrieve it, among the plethora of other related memories.

I believe high school students in the US who join geographic contests create memory palaces based on National Geographic maps they've studied. Even people who quote the Bible, chapter and verse, have a version. Teachers, students taking exams, craftsmen, professionals and performing artists need them too. I remember singer Christian Bautista being so nervous at Manny Pacquiao's boxing match that he forgot the entire second stanza of our national anthem and just repeated the first! Would you need a teleprompter just to sing the national anthem? We're human, surely we only need help when our senses are so bombarded and we are overwhelmed by information.

In Rushdie's fable the protagonist "Il Machia" (the erstwhile Niccolo Machiavelli) regularly visits a courtesan's salon in Florence to see an exotic noble-born beauty, recently freed from the Turks. He is curious about her identity, and why she knows a story from his childhood, and stories from the genealogies of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He coaxes the stories out of her, because he wants to solve a mystery to his potential benefit. She plucks them out of her prodigious memory like Scheherezade in The Thousand and One Nights. I suppose if you were a prisoner of war you'd rely on some type of mental discipline to keep going until you've achieved your purpose.

Lately I've been dreaming again of the house I grew up in, in UP Campus. I can remember the floor plan, even every significant tree that grew on the property, and I would remember details from when I was a kid. When I dream of "home", it's always of that house, not where I currently live. The stories and the personal details from 1970-1989 remain in my long-term memory. Beyond that period, I'm pretty selective. So yes, I've used the floor plan and furniture location of the UP house for my personal memory palace. It becomes helpful when I write.

Memory palace? Priceless. For everything else, there's Google... and possibly Facebook.