February 15, 2023 - Calligraphy - Real World #1

Of course, WU doesn’t actually exist. I mean, it exists in my imagination, but it’s not a real country or planet we could travel to or see with a telescope. But a lot of the things in it are real. Like emeralds and ladybugs. Like art. Like doing something that you love. Like wanting to live in a perfect world. Like the discrimination between the Mainlanders and Apets getting their ROT papers. Like people having secrets. 

So here is a new series called Real World, my connections from WU to, you guessed it, the real world. These will vary in seriousness and dramatic-ness, and because these will require ✨research✨, they might take a little bit longer to come up. 

Nora’s Talent is calligraphy. I explained a little bit about it in her intro post:

“In my history class, we’re learning about China. [....] And in China, the writing system is characters that, in traditional Chinese, each mean a singular word [...]. Being able to write these characters is/was [...]  a pretty good thing to know how to do [....] The art of pretty Chinese writing is called calligraphy.”

Firstly, editing this - many other languages and countries feature culturally significant calligraphy, but Chinese writing was my example in this scenario. I brought up "Chinese" because people in WU write in characters, but they don't speak any form of “Chinese” because, well, they’re not Chinese, obviously, and they can't speak “Chinese” because I don’t speak “Chinese” and I can’t make my characters speak a language other than English, Latin, and French because Google Translate can’t be trusted.

I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to learn more about calligraphy - traditional calligraphy in East Asian countries (ie. Japan, China, Korea, etc) is often done with pure ink, a brush, and an inkstone. Inkstones are these Chinese palette looking things carved from rock that people use to mix ink by rubbing (?) a stick of solid ink onto the palette and mixing it with water to make fresh ink. 

Quills were very popular writing utensils back in the ✨old days✨, and you’ve probably seen or heard of one - they’re basically feathers that you can dip in ink and then write with. Pretty basic. You can also use an ink brush, which is literally exactly what it sounds like. I actually own one because I used them at my STEAM camp when I was, like 9 and I kept the brush because it’s pretty. Maybe I can try calligraphy some time. Don’t hold me to that. There’s another thing I saw in my Wikipedia rabbit hole called a reed pen, which is similar to a quill but made out of bamboo. The tips of these are wider and flatter than quills, but also less durable and more difficult to craft. 

And of course, there’s the fountain pen - probably the most modern of all these examples. One moment while I read this 6,000 word long Wikipedia entry about fountain pens.

Okay so basically there’s ink in a reservoir (mmm I really love that word, it’s so satisfying) in the main part of the pen and it flows out onto the paper or whatever you’re writing on via “capillary action” aka just moving along the line on the back of the nib. Apparently they were made so that people could have pens that wouldn't leak when held upside-down. I’ve always liked the idea of a fountain pen. I really didn’t need to read this article because it’s just a little too detailed - like I could make my own fountain pen by now, I know all about the design and manufacturing and components…

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NOTE: I put “Chinese” in quotations because throughout China, there are a lot of different dialects (that can’t really be called dialects because they’re all basically their own language, as opposed to slight variations on the same language). Mandarin is the official language of the country, but apparently there’s something called “Standard Chinese” which is a dialect of Mandarin but used by, like, government officials and such, not really for household use. You might have heard of Cantonese, which is supposedly the most similar to Ancient Chinese, but not intelligible for Mandarin speakers. There are many more, but those are some of the most well-known ones. [article]