R.I.P. ShakespeareReader

Getting a new desktop Windows computer is easier than it used to be. Windows does some handy migration and setup things from the old computer automatically. But for apps that do not have a home in the Microsoft Store, you have to find the installation files yourself.

One fave from the old machine was a snappy little app called the Shakespeare Reader. Allll of Shakespeare’s stuff, all indexed and linked. Select the play, the act, the scene, and boom, you’re there. The problem is, as time goes by, old apps stop working. The Shakespeare Reader was written in olden days and depended on an antique version of .NET. It won’t run with the current version of .NET. Now, you might be able to find and install a legacy version of .NET, but not me, not this time.

So what to do. Ah. Download the the Entire Shakespeare Corpus in one big .html file from Project Gutenberg (which is happily and completely linked and indexed: play/act/scene). Then download and install a light, limited feature browser (I chose K-meleon). Open the browser, turn off all the tool bars and extra menus. Drag and drop the big .html file onto it and you’re in business. Ctrl-F works to search for a word or phrase. Play/act/scene links are easy and snappy.

Put that browser in your taskbar, where the icon for the Shakespeare Reader would be. Then every time you open it, it offers the “last page visited,” which for you is the shakespeareall.html. Good enough.

Sheaffer School Cartridge Pen

As a recent fountain pen enthusiast (going on three years), I have made my way through several kinds of pens on the low end of the cost scale. The reigning favorite is the Majohn M2 with an EF nib, if you really must know.

A good part of my love for fountain pens is rooted in the nostalgic past. Through my school years in the 60’s and 70’s, I used many “Sheaffer School Cartridge” pens (SSCPs). They cost a dollar and came with a box of cartridges. My favorite ink was Peacock Blue.

Some time in college, or soon thereafter, my pen box (which included a syringe for re-filling cartridges on the cheap) got left behind. 

These days you can buy SSCPs on ebay for about $20. Very fun. You don’t need a cartridge; you can fill the barrel directly with ink “eyedropper” (or syringe) style. Problem is, the factory SSCPs have only (M)edium or (F)ine nibs. These days I have been spoiled, and for small printing and detail work, I really must have an EF. I am a nib swapper, so I’m not afraid of swapping an M out and replacing it with an EF. BUT, the SSCPs seem to have a unique nib size. Many pens these days use standard “swappable” #5 and #6 nibs, for customization. The SSCPs didn’t look interchangeable. So my SSCPs remained in the stable on the inactive list. 

Until I saw a guy on ebay selling SSCP “new old stock” XF nibs. Well! I ordered a lot of three, and like the result. Though the XF nibs are not as fine as my wonderful Moonman/Majohn EF’s, the XF’s bring the SSCPs out of the barn and onto the active roster. I love the pen’s slim, smaller size.

And yet. These XF nibs consistently write with a very wet stroke. That almost pushes the XF into F territory; plus I’m sorry for the loss of shading that goes with wetter, darker lines.

So I looked again. Are the SSCP nibs really non-swappable? Today I wiggled one of the SSCP nibs out of the section and compared it to the standard #5s and #6s. Top image is #5. Middle image is Sheaffer. Bottom image is #6. Clearly the #6 would never fit. But the #5 — maybe it is close enough. So I took a #5 EF from my inventory. … MMMMmmmm no, the saddle curve on the SSCP feed is wider than the curve of the standard #5. But c’mon, get a pair of pliers and very carefully squoosh the #5 just a bit flatter. Ah. There. There?

Result: with a “pretty good” fit, the squooshed #5 does work in the SSCP. Well, mostly. Some more fiddling may help, but the SSCP does write with an alien EF nib now. The strokes are not nearly as wet, so the shading of the ink does survive. 

And yet — an even better, snugger fit between the nib and the saddle of the feed is desirable. I’ll mess with it some more; probably until it doesn’t work any more at all.

Quoting C. S. Lewis

I’m a huge C. S. Lewis fan. Much of my life has been enriched and shaped by his writings, and I owe him a huge debt of thanks.

So when I saw this quote come through my facebook feed, I was happy: here was something I’d never seen before from him:

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

I was ready to like and share … but then I thought, “is this *really* C. S. Lewis?” Because online sources are filled with the inaccurate, the mythical, the false, and the fabricated. It *could* be C. S. Lewis, but what if I’m just giving jollies to some internet wag who wants to see how many shares he can get for his own clever Lewis-like turn of phrase?

So I asked Bing’s chat GPT, “did C. S. Lewis really say “whenever you are fed up with life, start writing?” and the answer came back, “no reliable source confirms …” And I almost gave up, but then thought I’d try my own search. Lo, there were some quotation sites that did have it. But still, no attribution, so maybe it’s just getting internet credence by sheer repetition.

But then I found a Kindle version of Lewis’ family letters, and was pleased to see that indeed, Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, who was sick in bed, in 1916,

… there I go on talking like a book again, and you a poor invalid who ought to be consoled. Seriously though, I hope you’ll be quite alright by the time you read this: I don’t like to hear of your being in bed so often, especially as it affects your spirits so. However, cheer up, and whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

In 1916 when he wrote this, Lewis was 17 years old, by the way. He and Greeves were corresponding about things they were writing: Greeves, a tale called “Alice for short,” and Lewis, his unfinished Arthurian novel, “The Quest of Bleheris,” which he eventually abandoned after seventeen chapters and 19,000 words.

Some Thoughts About Leontes

Shakespeare’s Winters’s Tale is one of his late plays. I’ve long thought it remarkable that at the end of his writing career, Shakespeare produced two plays that offer studies in long labors of Repentance (Winter’s Tale) and Forgiveness (The Tempest).

One great difficulty in the Winter’s Tale is the completely unlikable main character, Leontes, the king of Sicily. For his first hour on stage, it seems he does nothing but make us hate him. Do we even care if he repents?

Very early in the going, Leontes is completely consumed with unreasonable jealousy, believing — on the strength of nothing but sheer imagination — that his good queen Hermione has been unfaithful, and that the father of the child she carries is his life-long friend Polixenes, the visiting king of neighboring Bohemia. (Don’t bother looking on a map — none of the geography works at all.) Leontes will hear no correction, plea, or warning, and makes a rapid sequence of terrible decisions, trying to have his friend poisoned (though Polixenes escapes) and his wife condemned as an adulteress (and Hermione collapses, as dead, at her “trial”).

Of the five acts, the first three are taken up with the relentless path of ruin Leontes follows. F-i-n-a-l-l-y at the end of act three he finally must face how utterly mistaken he has been in everything. So he commits himself to a lifelong regimen of humbling, sorrowful repentance. The dramatic problem usually is: everyone in the audience just hates him by now, and has no pity for the ruin he has brought on himself and his kingdom. The many-headed who watch are of the mind, “he deserves all this misery and more.” No one is satisfied by this too-late repentance, and no one really cares if Leontes gets a happy ending.

That is a dramatic problem. You need sympathy for the main guy, or the story doesn’t work. Hamlet, we’re sorry for. Lear is pitiable. Macbeth — well, he at least wrestles against the dark ambition he finally indulges.

I wonder if some of this dramatic problem is local to our modern world. We don’t take adultery as seriously as they did in the world of Leontes; especially the adultery of a queen. In Leontes’ world, a king must have the loyalty of his wife because her loyalty is a picture of the loyalty of the kingdom. A queen disloyal to her husband pictures a people disloyal to their king. And to get all theological for a moment, marital infidelity ultimately pictures the unfaithfulness of a people to God. After all, God’s great quarrel with Israel through the prophets is that the nation kept whoring after other gods.

In our world, we have no cultural sense of a national duty to be “one nation under God,” and no cultural sense that there’s anything really all that bad about marital infidelity. So we are simply puzzled by the terrible alarm and panic Leontes feels at the prospect of Hermione’s unfaithfulness.

I once heard an actor (wasn’t it Steven Tobolowski?) who had to play a KKK character point out that in his own world, every character believes he is the hero of the story. Thus, to act the part of a Klansman, he had to understand how these guys could be so utterly convinced they were doing true, good, and heroic things. In the same way, I think the actor who plays Leontes needs to understand the extreme threat and consequence of a queen’s marital infidelity.

That might help. Still, Winter’s Tale is usually going to be a hard sell. How can you like this guy and care what happens to him, or sustain any hope for the best?

Screen vs. Stage

When a play by Shakespeare is produced for the screen, some bad things happen. The kind of story space a screen gives is fundamentally different than the storyland a stage presents. The story medium changes the way you can tell the story. The stage’s storyland can be abstract, sparse, and representative (yes, those are cardboard swords, fine, no problem). The screen is filled with real objects, side to side, top to bottom. The screen never expects its audience to imagine a storm, it always gives them real thunder and buckets of rain.

Shakespeare, of course, wrote for the stage, and some of the things in his plays are famously difficult to present in a movie or television version. The screen, because it is limited to visual “realism” simply cannot offer the imaginative story space that the stage does.

I illustrate this truth with a consideration of the soliloquy. From time to time, Shakespeare gives one of his characters a speech that he gives alone on the stage. None of the other characters are there to hear. These are typically speeches in which the character is working his way through a problem: making plans, considering options, and anticipating difficulties. The Shakespearean scholar Harold Blum, I think it was, said that the soliloquy is the one time the audience knows the exact truth of a character’s thought. Because of course in every dialog with another character, the man may be trying to impress, persuade, or manipulate, with shades of truth or outright lies. But in a soliloquy, the audience gets exactly what he is thinking.

And in the best stage soliloquies, the actor gives his lines directly to the audience. He looks audience members in the eye and explains his problem, his plan, and what he expects to accomplish.

This almost never happens in a screen version. Way too often, the soliloquy becomes a voice-over as the camera focuses on the character doing not much of anything (because he is thinking so hard) but perhaps staring into the fire. (Get it audience? These are his inner thoughts!)

But how different that is from the stage actor, who is trying to get the audience to understand his thinking. He paces. He turns from that person to another, gesturing, pacing, using the entire range of his vocal expression. The character not only must work out his problem in his own mind, he wants to make the audience understand his thinking and his reasons, why Caesar must be killed.

That works on stage with a live audience. There’s just no good way to do it on the screen.

Dying You Shall Die

In the beginning, God told Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, telling him that in the day he did eat of it, “dying you shall die.” Or as most English translations say, “you shall surely die.”

Then we are told that Adam did eat, and we wonder, “but it doesn’t look like he died. Oh, maybe that means *spiritual* death…”

There are lots and lots of terrific ideas about this. Here we are on page 2, and already we have big signals: “you’re going to need to think about some of this.”

So here’s what I think I think. God is life. From all eternity, Father, Son, and Spirit have shared life, love, giving, honoring, and glorifying between them. Our trinitarian theology tells us that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all three equally ultimate and equally eternal. At the same time, there is a dependence of some kind, so it is also true that the Son has life in the Father. Fair warning, precision is difficult and error is easy when finite humans stand to define the infinite God. Still, God has chosen to reveal himself to us in statements like, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” (Jn. 5:26 ESV) So the Son has life in himself AND that life is a gift from the Father. In my view, that helps us understand what’s going on in the creation and fall of man.

God determined to give to and honor the Son by creating a material universe for him, and the Son determined to enter that universe materially, glorify it, and give it to the Father. We are told that God created man in his image and likeness. Adam is created as a son of God. So, like the divine Son, the Adam son had life and was to enter into the mutual loving, giving, glorifying life of God.

Adam was created “plugged in.” The mutual, sharing, giving, loving life of God includes honoring and submitting one to another. God tells Adam that obeying is the necessary response of the creature to his creator. That’s how you stay plugged in to life. Be careful of that cord. To disobey is to yank it out of the wall.

Nib and Feed

I’m a long year into my fountain pen geekhood. I have Decided some things:

1. Ink ought to be permanent. (Many fountain pen inks wash off the page.)
2. I like Extra Fine pen nibs. (M)edium and (F)ine nibs don’t allow small detail, small lettering.
3. I like a “dry” ink. Wet inks can make an EF stroke look like it came from an F or M nib.
4. I want an ink that dries pretty fast. I had a beautiful ink that I loved. I took pages of notes with it at a conference only to see all the pages impress the pages opposite with their page image. Sticky. Smeary.

Pens are simple, but there are variables. You can’t just say “I’ll put a new nib into this pen and that will accomplish my goal.” Because the way the ink hits the page is a combination of the characteristics of the ink, PLUS the action of the feed, PLUS the action of the nib, PLUS the characteristics of the paper. The nib and feed combo especially plays a big part in what you get. You can get a beautiful fine line with a selected ink in one pen, put the same ink and nib into another pen but get a different line. Same ink. Same nib, but different feed.

My current favorite is the Majohn (a.k.a. Moonman) M2. A beautiful crystal clear acrylic “eyedropper” pen that shows the ink inside and writes with a smooth, crisp EF stroke.

Weekly Confession

Sometimes people question the practice of having a weekly confession of sin in the order of worship. After all, as Bible Christians, we believe that Christ died once for all on the cross, and his blood atones for all our sins, past, present and future. So our salvation does not depend on our careful enumeration and confession of every single sin. That would be impossible. Otherwise, people with sloppy memories and careless consciences could never be saved. While people with good memories and very tender consciouses would never get to the bottom of the pile.

So we do not confess our sins in worship every week in order to get saved, or re-gain a salvation lost by the week’s backsliding. Weekly confession (as our daily “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” confession) is not about ultimate salvation.

So why do it? What are we doing? If it is not about our salvation, what is it about?

It has helped me recently to think about confession as an act of practical relationship maintenance. Every human relationship needs maintenance. Offenses will come. Stuff happens. Everyone knows that a healthy relationship needs “short accounts.” In a marriage, the closest human relationship there is, offenses are inevitable. The wise husband learns to confess and repent without undue delay. Keep the air clear. Say you are sorry. Don’t let the clouds gather and the dark silence grow. Because you are human, you will offend. Because you offend, you need reconciliation and forgiveness. Stay forgiven and stay happy. But let offenses slide, and live unhappily.

In a healthy marriage, the husband confesses to his wife, not because if he doesn’t, the marriage is over and she will divorce him. No, he trusts her, he knows she loves him, and he does not worry that she will leave him forever. It is because he knows the relationship is solid and lasting that he confesses and says he’s sorry. Because he’s in the for the long haul, he is careful to maintain things.

That is at least part of what’s going on in our weekly, corporate confession of sin. We confess as individuals, and as the whole body, that “we have offended against thy holy laws.” We don’t do this because we worry that God is mad at us and will turn us away forever. We do this because we know he has loved us in Christ and we will be with him in glory forever. Relationships need maintenance.

Fountain Pen Geek – the Wing Sung 699

I’ve become something of a fountain pen geek in the last several months. After not using a fountain pen since college when I had one of the ubiquitous Sheaffer student cartridge pens, I got away from it somehow. Then in a recent Christmas stocking I got a Pilot Varsity, which is a disposable fountain pen. I set it aside, then after a long time found it again and started using it. And I was hooked. Ink, nib, and paper.

I found Goulet Pens online, a happy source of pens, inks, and all such. As a newbie, I have stayed carefully at the inexpensive end of the pen buying market. There are pens out there that cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. But in the shallow end of the pool, there are some really nice choices. Favorites so far have been Jin Hao 159 (replace the nib with a Goulet EF), Noodler’s Ahab, Noodler’s Konrad, and a nice Conklin All American (a brand endorsed by Mark Twain back in the day).

I swap nibs to get Fine or Extra Fine. My “handwriting” — I print in block caps that trend to smallish characters, which lose detail under Medium or Broad nibs.

I’ve also been working on a letter-for-letter copy of the Greek New Testament. That project begs for a fine nib, at least under my hand. Until yesterday, that project was under a Jin Hao 159 with a Goulet EF nib, and the Conklin All American EF.

Then yesterday, an inexpensive pen from China arrived. (Chinese sellers ship pens by Speedpak: Shanghai to my house in about three weeks). The Wing Sung 699 piston filler (not the 699 vacuum filler). Open it up, wash the nib and feed, ink it up … WOW: this could be my favorite pen ever.

(The 699 is a self-conscious knock-off of an expensive name-brand pen. That “cheap imitation” game is not uncommon among Chinese manufacturers, and the pen community is divided on whether this is a good thing or not. The manufacturers don’t actually counterfeit the pens, mislabeling them. So they all have their own name and model numbers. But side by side, the pens can be unmistakably similar.)

Well, the 699 has the things I have come to prefer. (1) A “demonstrator” model: the body is clear, showing the works and ink. (2) A “piston filler,” which has more capacity than the more common “cartridge converter” system. (3) #6 nib, which is a common nib size and easily swapped. (4) Not too small. For me, the old Sheaffer student cartridge pens, for example, are too small for long use comfortably. (5) Screw type cap. Many less-expensive pens have snap-on caps. (6) What else? I dunno.

What I do know is that I ordered this one with an EF nib, wondering if I’d have to swap it out for something from Goulet, my go-to nib store. But wow, this is theeeee finest EF nib I’ve ever used. I’ve never seen a fountain pen give such a nice, thin line, Plus it writes very smoothly, which is something you don’t always get in an inexpensive nib, especially at the F or EF end of the scale.

So. I may end up decommissioning both the 159 and the Conklin and using this 699 exclusively in the manuscript project.

Speaking of Chinese pens, the Kaigelu brand has a kangaroo logo, which, of course is what “kaigelu” means in Chinese. It’s not hard to imagine that when the Aussie guy said, “that’s a kangaroo,” the Chinese guy nodded and wrote down “kaigelu.” Of course the Aussie guy in his turn wrote down “kangaroo” when the aboriginal pointed at one and said, “gangurru.”

In Your Hearing

17 And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.21 And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Lk. 4:17-21 ESV)

One of the advantages of being a mediocre Greek student is that everything is a discovery and everything is a surprise. As I scribe my way through Luke’s gospel, I can follow most of the action, familiar as it is from years of reading and hearing it in English. But not infrequently I lose track of what’s being said due to unfamiliar vocabulary and my general ineptitude.

Thus it was in Nazareth, when Jesus, after the temptation in the wilderness, came to his hometown and read the lesson from Isaiah in the synagogue. He concludes the reading by telling them, “today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your … hearing. I wasn’t quite ready for “hearing” and it struck me as a bit odd, at least. All eyes are fixed upon him, but he does not fulfill the prophecy in their sight. Everyone recognizes him as the son of Joseph, but the fulfillment has nothing to do with what they see. The prophecy is fulfilled in their hearing. Why that detail? Jesus could have said only, “today this Scripture is fulfilled.” Period. Or, “fulfilled among you,” or “fulfilled in your presence.” So it is worth pondering why the scripture is fulfilled in their hearing.

Part of the answer lies in God’s preference for Word communication. One of my favorite teachers likes to say that God prefers the Ear gate over the Eye gate. Words have content and meaning. Visuals much less. The visual evidence of creation communicates imperfectly, it makes no direct claim, whereas the words, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” leaves no question. The Eye gate admits Eye-cons and Eye-dols, which are things to look at, but which communicate nothing that is not already in the viewer’s mind. But the Ear gate can communicate new truth, uncomfortable facts, different ideas, and challenging thoughts. When people saw Jesus, they were not impressed. But when he preached — “this man is not like our scribes, for he teaches with authority.”

It is always “thus says the Lord,” not “thus shows the Lord.”