The Wit’s Guide to Sharpening Pencils
Or, hastening the ethereal void
When you’re sharpening pencils, get to the point. So here it is: There’s no better metaphor for the creative process. Where do ideas come from? Why, they flow directly out of that cedar cylinder you’re gripping between your fingers. It’s not even a metaphor, really. Yellow, they must be flowing!
“Every decent man carries a pencil behind his ear to write down the price of fish.”
— J.B. Morton
You know who understood the pencil as metaphor? Vladimir Nabokov, that’s who. In Pnin, the frustrated professor finds joy in his hand-crank sharpener that he has screwed to the side of his desk, “that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.” To create, we must be consumed.
“When I went to high school, I’d do anything to keep from doing my homework. Mostly I’d sharpen pencils. You know the yellow kind that says Ticonderoga on it? Well, I’d sharpen it to the Ticonderog, and then to the Ticonder, and then to the Ticond, and then to the Tic, and then to the Ti, and then to the T. And then I’d have to start on another pencil.”
— Ella Peterson (Judy Holliday) in Bells Are Ringing (1960), screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, sourced by Michael Leddy
The undisputed number one #2 pencil sharpener is David Rees, who ran artisanalpencilsharpening.com for a few years in the Obama era. He wrote an excellent book on the subject called, rather directly, How To Sharpen Pencils. This 2012 volume is classified as “Humor / Reference,” which for my money is the best section of any bookstore. Aren’t all reference books jokes, in a way? No! To quote the title of the episode of the pencil nerd podcast Erasable that featured Rees: The Joke is There is No Joke. Rees seriously explains how to sharpen pencils, and he seriously asked a sommelier to recommend wines that smell like pencils. (Portuguese reds, “especially those with the touriga nacional grape.”)
“The man who invented cat’s eyes got the idea when he saw a cat facing him in the road. If the cat had been facing the other way, he’d have invented the pencil sharpener.”
— Ken Dodd
But being completely serious about sharpening pencils is sort of funny, just as every finite volume that purports to be a definitive reference is a very dry joke. (See Schott’s Significa, GWQ No. 346; or my ReccoMention for A Smile In the Mind; or The 6 ½ Reference Books Every Library Needs, GWQ No.95) Rees admits as much to the Eraserheads, saying that his goal was to “make simple things strange again so that you appreciate all the science and anthropology and humour and aesthetics that go into everyday activities, and kind of make it a big celebration of how interesting the world is.”
“’Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
― Nora Ephron
Who still uses pencils? Kids, that’s who. And so pencil sharpeners will always remind us of both our personal histories as well as capital-H history, back when people had desks in offices without computers on them. Rees has a lovely bit on how using a hand-cranked wall-mounted sharpener may evoke “sudden flooding memories of a childhood optimism that saw the future as a sunny unfurling and a limitless expanse of possibility and wonder in which you would always be the center of attention.”
“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”
— Margaret Atwood
And there, like graphite in cedar, lies the real point: Life is better with enthusiasms. Exactly what to be enthusiastic about, as longtime readers will recognize, is something of an Arbitrary Stupid Goal. Humorous quotations? Heat pumps? Sharpening pencils? Sure! Whatever turns your crank.
“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
— Roald Dahl
If that’s true about breakfast cereal, then what about lunch cereal? And I shudder to think of what they’re putting in dinner cereal! Microplastics? Macroplastics? Or is that just the toy in the bottom of the box I’m chewing on? Oh, I have a Weetabix bit too!
Who can forget Riposte Card No. 12, a Saul Steinberg quotation doodled into existence by Isaac King? The perfect celebration of the pencil, and an analog artwork I have mailed/will mail to paid subscribers.
Get Wit Quick No. 347 didn’t dare weigh in on favourite pencils. In the competitive world of B2B salesmanship, when a client rejects a proposal that’s too expensive, the correct course of action is to see if you can “go back to the team and ask them to sharpen their pencils.” This works because people love sharpening pencils. Another Rees bit I liked: He keeps $5.25-$5.80 in his sharpening kit, specifically because it’s “enough to buy a sandwich if I feel lightheaded, but not so much that I’ll be tempted to go to the theatre instead of attending to the task at hand.” This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Using the perfectly honed tip of your writing implement, please tap the ❤️ below.
My wife is too serious about crosswords to allow pencils in this house : /
My vote is for sprezzatura as next week's topic. Why? Because GWQ always makes the art of something difficult look easy.
A bit obsequious