Word: nibs
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...bulbous baroque autos, all-leg girls and cowboys teetering on their high heels like stilts. Never vagrant or fussy, always economical, his line described conundrums that were at the heart of an artist's identity concerns: a little image, for instance, of a man with a pen whose drawn nib is drawing himself. To Steinberg, each drawing remade its author. It was both a mask and a card of identity, and a proof of existence as well. Never an expressionist, he liked, he said, "to make a parody of bravura. I wish to create a fiction of skill...
...begin fourth grade, I was incredulous that I had to learn italic writing. Thanks to your article, I now know why we practice this so endlessly. I am now doing fairly well, but on the first day I couldn't even get the ink to flow from the nib...
Modern italic can be written with any instrument from a simple crayon to a 24-karat gold fountain pen (if it will write). But it looks best when written with a broad-edged pen. If the nib is crisp and the ink flow and paper are just right, italic writing gives its practitioners an almost sensuous pleasure...
...artist finds his scale?the size of gesture proper to the image and medium he uses. "The scale of the drawing," Steinberg points out, "is given to you by the instrument you use," and pen drawings, being governed by the radius of the hand, cannot be very large. "The nib has an elasticity meant for writing, and that is why I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing. But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can't be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned...
...nature of space exploration is necessarily profoundly different from that of Lindbergh's solitary flight. It costs billions of dollars, as against the $15,000 that Lindbergh spent. Astronauts, however highly trained, are nonetheless essentially cargo as they are flung out of gravity on a rocket's nib. The astronaut, says Sir George Greenfield, a literary agent who has specialized in accounts of explorations, "is more like a bus driver than an adventurer." The Viking spacecraft investigating Mars are made of thinking metal. The only humans aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft are the little sketches...