Sunday, August 15, 2004

the Letter A (qbdp # 20)

My pattern now, during our overnight trips to the family camp in the Adirondacks, is to construct my mailart mailing after the overnight stay, meaning during the day on Sunday. Then I leave the mail for my father-in-law to take to the post office, so he can ensure that each receives a Caroga Lake cancellation.

So today I created a different mailing. I took a handful of my Goff Group envelopes (surplus that someone gave me when I used to live in Horseheads, New York), and I modified them into Geoff Huth Group cards (ignoring, for the moment, the extra eff in Geoff). Then I wrew a multi-part fidgetglyph about correspondence onto the back of sheets of letterhead. I used three sheets of paper from each of four different organizations, but each piece of paper is different in color or paper type from all of the rest.


Geof Huth, "the Letter A" (28 Apr 2004)

Since this was a mailing about correspondence, I wrote a letter to each recipient on the front of the letterhead. This self-imposed requirement actually persuaded me to write letters to a few people who have been waiting for letters from me.

I decorated each of the envelopes (except for the one going to Belgium) with the recent R. Buckminster Fuller stamp showing Bucky with a geodesic skull (or dome, if you prefer). I enclosed in most of the envelopes copies of my pwoermd sequence “forkèd lake” put out by Anchorite Press as a give-away for my reading in Boston this month.

These are the recipients of “the Letter A”:

These three received copies written upon letterhead for Turtle Rock Summit, Irvine, California:

1/12 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/12 Bob Grumman

3/12 Roy Arenella

These three received copies written upon letterhead for Slightly Tortured Music, Van Nuys, California:

4/12 endwar

5/12 Luc Fierens

6/12 Reed Altemus

These three received copies written upon letterhead for Basque Ball, Houston, Texas:

7/12 Arnold Skemer

8/12 Guy r. Beining

9/12 Carlos M. Luis

These three received copies written upon letterhead for Ansewn, Bangor, Maine:

10/12 Joseph Keppler

11/12 John Byrum

12/12 qbdp

un violon d’ingres

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So on the copy that you sent to yourself did you write yourself a letter? What did you say to yourself? You mailed it out. When you received it, did you open it and read the letter as though it were from someone else?

endwar

Geofhuth said...

endwar,

Actually, you have hit on the quandary I've found myself in. Should I write myself a letter for those qbdp's that require a letter to be complete? Should I mail each qbdp to myself?

I've decided "no" on both counts, but I don't like my figuring quite perfectly. My main idea is that the copy for the qbdp archives is just to give an idea of the true copies, those mailed out to people not me--so neither mailing nor a letter is required. Also, I don't want to mail myself a copy because there's some chance one of these will be lost in the mail (as has already happened), leaving me without a copy for the archives!

But it'd be more fun (and more appropriate in a mailart sense) for me to write myself a letter and mail myself a copy.

Geof