How to Sharpen Pencils

From The New Yorker:

“I see you have some very finely sharpened pencils,” a friend’s son remarked to me after staying in my apartment last summer.

It was true. The apartment was a little disorganized, because I had let David Rees and a crew use it to shoot a commercial for his book “How to Sharpen Pencils.” I play a woman frustrated by her inability to achieve the perfect pencil point: This pencil is too dull! This pencil is too pointy. David, who would film his part separately, played the late-night-TV guy whose pitch begins with some variation of “Has this ever happened to you?”

. . . .

I had to clear my desk and remove my pencil cups, which were also deemed too distracting. One is a souvenir of Greece that Kalamata olives came in; it is a dual-language pencil cup. Another, brassy with a honeycomb pattern, once held Greek honey (it is now stuffed with bookmarks).“Do you have a plain glass tumbler?” the director asked.

. . . .

When we were done, David offered to sharpen some pencils for me. I was thrilled. He got out a manual sharpener, green, that looked like my Carl Angel 5 (which I had taken to Rockaway and which, I am happy to say, survived Hurricane Sandy), and expertly sharpened a handful of assorted pencils: a Mirado Black Warrior, a Sanford, a Faber American Natural, a found Papermate, a few prized Palomino Blackwings, a red-white-and-blue giveaway from a patriotic supplier of home medical equipment (where did that come from?), a mysterious yellow-and-black striped Staedtler Noris with a green-painted tip instead of a ferrule and eraser—an émigré from Germany. The points were extra long and, especially on a long-stemmed pencil, elegant in the extreme.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

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