Word: ballpoint
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...desk, fiddling from time to time with the new dentures that are said to give him considerable discomfort. Just before he was due to speak, the Soviet leader mopped his face with a handkerchief, combed his hair and underlined a few more phrases in his speech with a red ballpoint...
...opening session, everyone is given a notebook and ballpoint pen and told to use them freely. "Thoughts" are to be shunned in favor of writing down "feelings," which are "neither good nor bad, they just are." As the meetings progress, the participants are told, they will be asked to write answers to questions ("What is the quality in us that I like best?"). These answers will be the basis of what, in the jargon of the Encounter, is called a "conjugal dialogue." It takes place when husband and wife are alone and have traded notebooks...
...they are almost dramatic in comparison with the works of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, the Frenchman Daniel Buren or the Australian Robert Hunter. Boetti's way of artmaking is to cover (or have his assistants cover) large sheets of paper with millions of tiny strokes of a ballpoint pen, thus turning all the paper blue except for some stray commas and capital letters which are left white. This laborious doodling produces now and again some pretty moire effects, like watered silk, but that is all, and the all is virtually nothing. It is, however, more than Robert Hunter...
Breslin was in town this week, drumming up support for his latest novel, World Without End, Amen. He was autographing copies of the book at the Coop. Before he took his stint on the ballpoint shift, I got on the Breslin firetruck. It was a helluva ride...
...Bich and his friend Edouard Buffard pooled their wealth-all of $1,000-and started making ballpoint refills in an old factory near Paris. Soon it occurred to Bich that a disposable pen that needed no refills would be more to the point. What his country needed, as Bich saw it, was a good 10? pen. Today the cheapest throwaway Bic sells for less than that in France-about 7?. In the U.S. the same pen retails for 19?, and it is the biggest seller on the market...