In hybrid heaven

As you folks know, I’m interested in anything having to do with the technology of writing. In this — as in other things — I have an analog and a digital side, the legacy of my graduating from the Philippine Science High School only to finish an English degree in college.

You can find the analog side in my obsessive collection of vintage fountain pens and typewriters; there’s nothing more pleasurably old-fashioned than dragging a wet nib across blank paper, leaving a line to last for the ages. (This reminds me of that recent movie Letters to Juliet, to which I took Beng as a special treat, knowing I’d rack up major points I could cash in some other time. “We’re going to see a movie,” I told my disbelieving wife, “and no one’s going to die or get his head bashed in it.”) So along with my pens, I have bottles of ancient inks — some of them unopened since they were put away when Dwight Eisenhower and Ramon Magsaysay were signing proclamations with Parker and Sheaffer desk pens — in colors like my favorite blue-black and brown.

The digital side is manifest in my little trove of Macs, BlackBerries, and other blinking beauties that won’t survive for too long without batteries. For sheer writing efficiency, let’s face it, nothing beats a laptop, and my MacBook Air is just about the most ideal writing machine you can think of — lightweight, with a full-sized screen and keyboard, and able to go online for quick access to Google and to e-mail.

It’s not easy to reconcile my affection for a 1935 Parker Vacumatic with my fascination for a 2010 iPad, but I think the words “affection” and “fascination” pretty much describe the thrall in which these objects hold me; I like one but love the other. Unfortunately, practicality dictates that I spend more time these days with a computer than with a pen.

Some people on the global Fountain Pen Network that I subscribe to still fantasize about writing novels on their Moleskines with their Watermans or Conway Stewarts — and why not, since that’s the way novels were written for a long time — but I know that, for myself, that’ll never happen. Sad to say, for all my lovely pens, my fingers have forgotten how to write for longer than a few lines; as if they were children all over again, they tire easily, make grudging gestures, and sulk at having to make loops, until the letters get uglier and uglier.

There’s no such strain with the even-tempered keyboard; the emotion isn’t in the writing itself, but in the communicated thought. You can produce masses of words in a minute, and you can reject or change any one of them without compunction. True, it looks and feels impersonal, which is at once its merit and demerit. The “processed” word (a horrible idea, but a useful one) will look the same to all readers in 12 points Times Roman, unlike unique but barely legible penmanship.

I was thinking all these when I met up with a new friend, an engineer named Edwin Sybingco, a few weeks ago, curious to take a look at something that promised to bring my analog and digital sides together. Edwin works for a company that markets what they call the Pulse Smartpen, and he rang me up to ask for an hour of my time to demonstrate what they had.

I’d never heard of the Pulse Smartpen before, and frankly I was in such a harried state at that time that it wouldn’t have mattered to me if I never saw one, but my natural curiosity prevailed, and I agreed to met Edwin over a late lunch in a burger joint. He took out the pen and the special pad of paper that came with it and soon we were laughing like long-lost brother-geeks.

So what’s a Pulse Smartpen? It’s a big, fat, silver pen that looks like an ordinary ballpoint (which it also is), except that it has an infrared camera at the tip that works when you use the pen on the accompanying paper, and what it does aside from write is to remember and record every stroke you make. When you hook it up later to your Mac or PC (yes, it works with both platforms), it copies everything over to a digital file you can now view and review. In other words, it’s a pen that writes on (special) paper, which also makes an exact digital copy of whatever you write, draw, or doodle.

The bonus is that the Pulse pen is also an extremely sensitive digital voice recorder. You can set it up so that it also listens to and records whatever’s being said at the moment you’re writing — so you can either make voice notes to accompany your write-up or your drawing, or you can record, say, a lecture while making your own annotations on that same lecture. Then you can play them all back together on your computer. (I tested the pen’s recorder, and was blown away by how clearly it picked up our voices over the din of the lunch crowd, even from the table.)

How neat is that? I could imagine the kind of people a pen like this would be perfect for — doctors, lawyers, journalists, architects, designers, students keen on catching the prof’s every word (indeed, the Pulse Smartpen’s tagline is “Never miss a word”). Edwin told me how students for whom their parents had bought the US-engineered pen (it isn’t exactly cheap, folks — think in the neighborhood of $200) had seen marked improvements in their grades, and I could see how that could happen.

I was never much of a note-taker myself — I was an arrogant fool who believed that sheer genius and dumb luck would carry him through exams — but my sister Elaine was the tireless scribe of her law-school class, and I can just imagine how much higher Elaine’s (or rather her classmates’) scores would have been, with her neat notes instantly available to everyone else digitally. (Notes can be shared online through an account you can set up at www.livescribe.com, where you can also find tons more information about the Pulse pen and its accessories.)

You can find the Pulse pen — which comes in 2-gigabyte and 4-gigabyte versions — at high-end computer shops like PowerMac. It connects with your desktop or laptop via USB, and the built-in rechargeable battery should last for years. My only beef about the pen is that it doesn’t come with a pocket clip, although it does have a leatherette sheath to protect it from a fall.

So if you see me one of these days toting what looks like a silver cigar instead of the usual Pelikan M800, that’s just me playing with both my analog and digital sides. Now if the Pulse Smartpen people could just invent a version that spits real fountain pen ink from a flexible nib, then I’d truly be in hybrid heaven.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.