Errors Poststalled: "The Correction of the Alphabet" (qbdp # 92)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Today, on my mother's birthday, I spent the day out at Caroga Lake. I had more time than I usually do in hotel rooms during my travels, so I created a new typoglyph for my collection, Out of Character, and I also created an errata sheet for those people who had received one of the five misnumbered qbdp's. Strangely, since I sent these cards primarily to the same few people over the course of my vacation, I needed to make only eight copies of this mailing.


I entitled today's typoglyph "The Correction of the Alphabet," partly to commemorate the corrections I included on the errata sheet. I printed these glyphs off with my in-laws' computer printer.


The errata sheet itself is part of qbdp # 92, the first correctly numbered issue in a while, and it is the only part of the issue that includes the qbdp number at all.

The recipients of "The Correction of the Alphabet" (qbdp # 92) were

1/8 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/8 Bob Grumman

3/8 Roy Arenella

4/8 Ruud Janssen

5/8 Karri Kokko

6/8 Jassy Lupa

7/8 Angela Genusa

8/8 qbdp

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A Concatenation of Aspirations: "2½ Aitches" (qbdp # 91)

Courtyard by Marriott, Room 414, Erie, Pennsylvania

Trying to get as close to home today (since our daughter's twenty-first birthday is tomorrow), we drove as far as we could and ended up in a nice (but pricey) hotel in Erie, Pennsylvania. After we had a nice meal in the hotel, I sat down in the hotel with a collection of unique cards from Special Collections of the Louisiana State University Libraries. I picked these cards up at the Society of American Archivists conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Upon these cards, I wrew a simple calliglyph I created tonight.

[Finally, the last of the misnumbered qbdp's.]


The recipients of "2½ Aitches" (qbdp # 91) were

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

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The Dragon of Everything: "A OMN e" (qbdp # 90)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

Yesterday, I took a night off from qbdp work, my only concession to fatigue so far. Tonight, I used a few pre-stamped cards (graced with my stamplage, "A OMN e") to create a mailing. But I was so rushed for time that I didn't even write personal notes on each card. Instead, I added nothing but the phrase "Deliver always" as the message for each card.

[The misnumbering of the cards continues; I incorrectly numbered this car # 90.]


The recipients of "A OMN e" (qbdp # 90) were

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Karri Kokko

6/7 Angela Genusa

7/7 qbdp

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Sweepings of Ink: "The Dream of K." (qbdp # 89)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

After the nine-hour drive back to Tennessee, I didn't feel much like creating a big qbdp mailing, so I took my last four Krazy Kat postcards and added a colorful fidgetglyph (wrawn tonight) to those. A mailing of four cards is as small as I ever go.

[Again, this card was misnumbered (as # 88). I had not yet discovered my error by this point.]


The recipients of "The Dream of K." (qbdp # 89) were

1/4 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/4 Bob Grumman

3/4 Roy Arenella

4/4 qbdp

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Eyestalk Flower: "iiiiiiiiris" (qbdp # 88)

Hilton New Orleans Riverside, Room 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana

Another long day at the Society of American Archivists conference, followed by another night closed in the restroom of our hotel room with a set of pre-stamped cards.

[All of which caused another misnumbering!]


The recipients of "iiiiiiiiris" (qbdp # 88) were

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Karri Kokko

6/7 Jassy Lupa

7/7 qbdp

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Celtic Dragons: "mn/mn" (qbdp # 87)

Hilton New Orleans Riverside, Room 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana

We traveled to New Orleans today so I could attend the Society of American Archivists conference here. I had a very busy day after our nine-hour trip, but I closed myself in the bathroom as my family slept and put together this small issue that consisted of a set of cards I'd stamped while still in New York.

[Note: I misnumbered this card as # 86--certainly caused by my late-night work on this--but it's true qbdp number is 87.]


The recipients of "mn/mn" (qbdp # 87) were

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

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Punctuation without Sentences: "~" [tilde] (qbdp # 86)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

While sitting at a Nashville Sounds game today, up in the air-conditioned restaurant and protected from the horrific noonday sun, I created a simple punctuation poem that I then copied onto ten brown cards.


The recipients of "~" (qbdp # 86) were

1/10 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/10 Bob Grumman

3/10 Roy Arenella

4/10 Ruud Janssen

5/10 Karri Kokko

6/10 endwar

7/10 RF Côté

8/10 Angela Genusa

9/10 John M. Bennett

10/10 qbdp

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Simple Pwoermd Placed in a Note: "psilence" (qbdp # 85)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

Tonight, the simplest of mailings. I took a set of cards inviting people to a meeting of the Labor Temple Association, and I added the pwoermd "silence" where I was supposed to insert the date of the meeting. I saved money on this mailing, since the postal cards came with two cents of valid postage.


The recipients of "psilence" (qbdp # 85) were

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

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The Colorization of Words: "afRO dITes (Homage to Bill Keith)" (qbdp # 84)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

A little while ago, I created a simple homage to one of the few black American visual poets, Bill Keith, who died last year. Tonight, I colorized this visual poem of mine and mailed it off to a few people.


The recipients of "afRO dITes (Homage to Bill Keith)" (qbdp # 84) were

1/10 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/10 Bob Grumman

3/10 Roy Arenella

4/10 Ruud Janssen

5/10 Reed Altemus

6/10 Dan Waber

7/10 RF Côté

8/10 Karri Kokko

9/10 Jassy Lupa

10/10 qbdp

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Slats through Words: "message" (qbdp # 83)

Breakwater North, Hendersonville, Tennessee

Once we made it to my family's home in Tennessee, I had a little more time for creation, and I sat down with a few cards I'd picked up during our recent trip to Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York. This one is a simple asemic fidgetglyph.


The recipients of "message" (qbdp # 83) were

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

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A Strike through the Heart: "aRroW (qbdp # 82)

Hampton Inn, Room 129, Columbus, Ohio

Today, we made it from Caroga Lake, New York, to Columbus, Ohio, where I went to meet John M. Bennett for the first time. Once back at the hotel, I put together this little homage to Bennett, which made a little (and modified) use of his calligraphic techniques.


The recipients of "aRroW" (qbdp # 82) were

1/9 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/9 Bob Grumman

3/9 Roy Arenella

4/9 Ruud Janssen

5/9 John M. Bennett

6/9 Dan Waber

7/9 Jassy Lupa

8/9 Angela Genusa

9/9 qbdp

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A Pair of Hands: "HH&s" (qbdp # 81)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Before leaving on vacation, I took a few of my old stamplages and stamped them on sets of cards. ("Stamplage" is one of the worst neologisms ever; my creation, it means a collage that is then fashioned into an eraser carving rubberstamp.) With such postcards in hand, I thought I'd simplify the process of sending out mailart during our vacation.


The recipients of "HH&s" (qbdp # 81) were

1/8 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/8 Bob Grumman

3/8 Roy Arenella

4/8 Ruud Janssen

5/8 endwar

6/8 j0llyr0ger

7/8 Dees Stribling

8/8 qbdp

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A Stiller Point Multiplied (Rec'd Today)

The minimalist poet endwar (who is hitting the blogwaves elsewhere as we speak [see the entry for 7 August 2005) sends me a simple card, one side of which re-examines the minimalization of "Still Point," the name of my in-laws' camp (that is, cottage) in the Adirondacks. His first attempt at this minimalization appears at dbqp: visualizing poetics, but this one improves upon the latter by replacing the central i with a raised (or almost raised) period. (I think I suggested this idea last year, but maybe not quite; regardless, the idea of this has been in my mind, since it is a more perfect solution. Instead of looking at "still point" as typed onto a postcard by the last of the typewriter poets, we will look at the other side of the card, which includes a greater number of still points.


endwar, The Opposing Side to "still point" (5 Aug 2005)
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The Dream of the Golden Ocelot

Returning home tonight, I found this beautiful collage in my mailbox. On the back, j0llyr0ger includes his normal cryptic message and a dramatic (and humorous) rubberstamping: CONFIDENTIAL.


j0llyr0ger, "The Dream of the Golden Ocelot" (Aug 2005)
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A Collection of Turns: "The Character Symbolizing 'to Be'" (qbdp # 80)

Before leaving Caroga Lake this evening, I added a little calliglyph to the back of a set of cards illustrated with a photograph of a fine home near Saratoga Springs, New York. I wrew the calliglyph with my favorite walnut ink.


Geof Huth, "The Character Symbolizing 'to Be'" (7 Aug 2005)
The recipients of this card were as follows:

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Ruud Janssen

5. John M. Bennett

6. Ficus strangulensis

7. Angela Genusa

8. Troy Thomas

9. A.A. Berry

10. Karri Kokko

11. RF Côté

12. Nadja Sayej

13 qbdp

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Today's Events

Today, I spent way too much time entering little notes about all the mailart I've received or created over about the last month. It's been hectic, but it's also incomplete. I still need to add illustrations for all of these entries, which I'll do next week, so return sometime soon to see the whole story about these pieces.

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Getting it Almost Wright: "s / l / wRIGHt" (qbdp # 79)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

For the second time, I've taken nine numbered labels from a Moleskine notebook (each with a different quotation about writing), affixed them to large and colorful Krazy Kat postcards, and created a little fidgetglyph about writing on the spot.



The lucky recipients of this issue of qbdp are

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Ruud Janssen

5. Dan Waber

6. Luc Fierens

7. Angela Genusa

8. Jonathan Stangroom

9. qbpd

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mail art art mail

Jonathan Stangroom, whom I met last month at a reading in Somerville, Massachusetts, and who is himself from Somerville, sends his first mailing ever to me (that is, the first mailing he's ever sent to me). He starts off with a perfectly rendered rubberstamped address, the best I've ever seen. Inside, he includes a little add-and-pass sheet and an interesting collaged booket by Mark Greenfield and him entitled "mail art."

Mark Greenfield and Jonathan Stangroom, mail art, center spread (2005)
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Mailart is Not Dead

There has been some talk about the death of mailart (or its conversion into something else--why, for instance, am I typing all of this right now?), but I don't think I've contributed to that discussion much, since mailart seems pretty lively to me. Luc Fierens sends me a card thanking me for "the inspiring postcards." Then he adds this note:

mail-art is not dead, it is changing form(s) and architexture

And he may well be right, but for now let's just enjoy his collage.


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The Dive from Schnabel's Studio

A.A. Berry, who has sent me a card for the first time, and identifies him- or herself as a member of the Kurt Schwitters Fan Club, sends me a painting/collage. Swirling out of black to blue-black comes a green lightening to white. But one large black form block part of the progress of this painting. And a bit of text describes the scene for us:


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thumbpr(I)nt

Dan Waber--taking a break from his alphabet at the delta point--sends me the first of a six-card edition. This card is red, and on the back is a simple retelling of the i-poem.


Remarkably, there have been many i-poems over the years, so many that I once had planned to put together an anthology of these with Bob Grumman. But this one of Dan's is a little special, because it pushed the I-ness just a little bit further than most. He had made the poem, but sticking his finger into a big ball of black paint and painting it onto the red page.

And because of that, we can still read his fingerprint in the poem. This poem is no-one else's. The I is Dan.

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The Edge of the Photograph

Roy Arenella is back producing maximaphilately. He sends me a card congratulating me on qbdp # 77, and tells me he has to buy himself some of those "W I D E brush pens" I use. So he illustrates his pseudo-cancellation mark with rubberstamp printings of two pen nib, he used a "public education" stamp (which includes a quill in its tableau) to send me the card, and the photograph on this photocard is strange, hard to make out: Entitled "From Street Level," we siee what appears to be finishing marks in concrete, lines that remind us of pen lines, but the photo breaks off into black suddenly, and we can see the sprockets of the negative, and there is in the corner what appears to be a little bit of perforated paper, the serrated edges of which I'd swear have been traced with a pen.


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John Evans Incarnate (Wait, He Already is Incarnate!)

Angela Genusa send me a "larger collage out of which came" the first postcard she sent me, and I immediately recognized "La Mujer 'X'." But I also recognized that Angela is very definitely--and intentionally--copying the collage-cum-painting style of the collagist John Evans. When I visited her blog (the deliciously titled "Chopped Livre") recently, I noticed that she is making a number of these collages. I'll be interested in seeing where she goes with this project.


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The Wisz

Ruud Janssen sends me one of his most beautiful word paintings.

Strangely, only just now have I realized the similarity between Ruud's paintings and the word paintings of the more famous Ed Ruscha. But Ruud's I appreciate more. They are more playful, in general, than Ruscha's--certainly verbally, but also visually. Their use of color is much more pleasing to me, and that is certainly the case in this painting, which is one of my favorites. The orange and the light-green complement and compete with each other quite well.


In his note, Ruud says he's glad to hear that I had visited Roy and Martine Arenella last month, and he also told me that I might have heard of his recent marriage, which I had.

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The Rednecks'll Have To

In his latest mailing, Ficus strangulensis (AKA Fike) sends me thanks for my last card to him. His note this time is a classic:

Finally . . . rain here (AND . . . not a flood!) so the rednecks'll have to find some other pastime than torching the woods.

Of course, Fike also includes a handful of his cards: pictures of shopping lists, a daisy (this time in b&w), a found message, and a bicep with a button ostensibly sewn to its side!


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Mail Art Blog Anxiety (MABA)

Angela Genusa lost some of the postings to her mailart blog, so she's sent me a card that discusses the serious issue of "mail art blog anxiety" (or MABA). One side of the card catalogs the signs of MABA: irritability, difficulty concentrating, muscle tension, restlessness, sleep disturbance, and easily becoming fatigued. Then the back explains what to do if you find you have persistent MABA.


This has come to me just in time!

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Two Tacky

John M. Bennett sends me a thanks for my last card to him, and he includes two of his tacky little pamphlets (TLPs). Each TLP is a single sheet of paper folded twice and stapled to form a small uncut booklet: to see half the pages, the reader has to pull open the pages and peer into a cone of darkness or the reader must cut the top seam to separate the pages.


One of the pamphlets is "Singularity," with Andrew Topel collaborating, and the other is "Dad Dying Haiku." The latter John wrote in memoriam of his father John W. Bennett, and it includes classic Bennettian haiku like

dad ,dog ,gore
ripe snap ,
crust
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Assuagement

Roy Arenella has taken a postcard advertising a short exhibit near him (it ran from July 1 until July 3, 2005) and modified it into a message, I assume, to me:

Transporting crumbs
across mind borders is
satisfying work
to only a few

Damaged goods

Low morale

Poor pay

"Keep on Truckin'"

I like how he has erased through the image of the photograph to the paper below, so that we see the messages "beneath" the images. This card is number 135 CCA, and I'm stumped by this code. I know 135 means its the 135th numbered mailing, and that one of the C's means "card" but what about the remaining C and the A? Maybe "altered"?


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To Plotz from Lox

Suddenly, I've realized how strange it is that the famed Dutch mailartist, Ruud Janssen, creates all these painted cards with words on them--and that all the words are English or seemingly so. Certainly, English is a commonly used language in all of mailart and all of visual poetry (regardless of the point of origin or citizenship of the artist), but it is interesting that Ruud is even making of words in English--or maybe English via Yiddish. This time, the word is "plox." Almost, "lox" (smoked salmon), almost "plotz" (to be greatly annoyed), we could claim this is a Yiddish word, though these Yiddish words made it to fame via English.

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Deltas of Paint

In the modern world of office etiquette, the delta (usually represented as an isoceles triangle, the capital rather than the minuscule form of the letter) represents the minus sign, only it is is not supposed to. As the participants in a meeting review what they've done they list the plusses (what went wrong) and the deltas (areas for improvement) in the meeting. By not allowing negatives, the participants are not supposed to focus on problems but look to solutions.

All of which is meant to introduce Troy Thomas's postcard, where the veins coursing through the areas of paint on his card remind me of the Mississippi Delta--or a dozen or so of them. This effect gives the painting a wonderful 3D quality.

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When I received this card, the sender identified himself as "Mail Art," but by going to his weblog, I discovered his name.

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Ants Move Sand

Fat Red Ant, from whom I've never heard before, sends me an interesting three-dimensional collage--though I must admit that all collages are three-dimensional in actuality. In this one he (or possibly she) has glued a card with a window cut out of it onto another card. Within that window is trapped within a few strokes of dried glue a bit of sand that spells out "Hi!" and which Ant labels as "100% Genuine Street DNA." The obverse of the card includes two strange pieces of information: a Vermont return address and evidence that the postcard was mailed from Canada--evidence that Ant is taking advantage of living on the border!

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A Part of Three Voices

Scott Helmes, whom I met last month in the Boston area, sends me a postcard illustrating his "alphabet haiku for 3 voices" from that exhibit. I prefer seeing the whole of this piece, but this detail of the piece shows you how the interlocking washes of color move from letter to letter spelling out a poem.


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Completing a North Texas Collage

Angela Genusa sends me a simple but beautiful collage on glossy paper, which she has glued to another card. The image I have of the collage has been amended by the post office, which assumed that Angela's original required a few postmarks to complete it.


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Color Study with Stamps

In a corrugated cardboard envelope, Jassy Lupa sends me a letter on brown paper, in which she asks me to explain verbo-visual artwork (which I usually do daily at dbqp: visualizing poetics), talks about the Tour de France and Lance, mentions her search for new work, discusses her problems with her computer, and explains her new "colorful 'originals only' campaign":

They've fascinated me if no one else. After putting down some watercolor/acrylic washes I then start layering with originaal carved stamps....just giving it depth. They look more like fabric design than paintings....but hey it's fun and this is the bottom line...FUN.

The enclosed example is wonderful. Swirls of color are augmented by small hand-carved blockprints that provide depth and texture to the painting. She also enclosed a couple of stamps based on that design.



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Keep on Blogging

Angela Genusa sends me a simple card this time: a reproduction of a poster for bloggers' rights, which she also reproduces on her own blog. She also congratulates me on "being named Cool Site for Nescape's Open Directory." Thanks.



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A Deck of Cards from the Valhalla of Cowpats

Ficus strangulensis, Fike, Resident Lark of Valhalla of Cowpats, responds to my card by sending me an envelope stuffed with stuff. As usual, Fike includes a sheet from his spreadsheet of mailart comings and goings and a note, which is backed by the usual crazed and dense collage work of Malok (the Maalox-named mailartist of Waukau, Wisc.).


The rest of the mailing is a baker's dozen of his usual cards, an assortment too large to mention in full, but they include

a closeup of a bullet home through a piece (taken on my birthday)

a short fiction collaged over a visual background

s still from a Superman cartoon from 1942

reproductions of advertisements

a photograph of a daisy

a clipping from the 1930s or '40s in which Republicans are blaming FDR's policies for the predicted lack of canned fruits and vegetables in the comming year. (Somehow, I bet there still was some canned food.)

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One Drop at a Time

Dan Waber's serial alphabet book continues with the letter D. This time the D in "gumdrop" is made large and purple and almost-dropsical (if only it was drooping into a sack rather than rising into a mound). Again, the purple of the D is meant to resemble the item at hand, just as with the inchworm. We await the other 22 installments of the alphabet.


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Notes from the Arkhive

Roy Arenella has moved to Greenwich, New York, about an hour by car away from me, and he's now getting his home in order and his mailart activities back in gear. He's really back on track with this plump mailing from July 11th.

In an Arenellan envelope covered with stamps, he has placed more pieces than I could easily discuss:

An introductory page that tells me that enclosed are "Scattered / Scraps & Notes / Gathered / for Geof / from our New Arkhive (= HOME) / in Greenwich"--and to which he has stapled a note about my then-recent qbdp mailing, and to which he has paperclipped a postcard map of the village of Greenwich (to which he has added his Arkhive) and a few plastic-sleeved pieces from his collection of found and made items: three half-seedpods, a small rubbing, and a little folded fidgetglyph of his own)

A note attached to a Pressed Wafer postcard illustrated with a photography by Roy of Robert Creeley reading in New York City on 10 October 2002

A drawing/note about the "village visualist at home in the Arkhive, T(H)iNKERINg"

A found and altered Real Post hip art sheet

An illustrated letter about his consideration of the term "optical writing" (which he has reduced to "oppo" or "ollo") in place of "visual poetry"

A wonderful colored fidgetglyph entitled "TOTAL"

This is another one of Roy's great mailart letters: a collection of pieces, art, and thoughts; correspondence that is serious and fun; letters that are essays on esthetics.


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Tactile Art

RF Côté always mails out the most beautiful cards, and the beauty starts with the wonderful collection of stamps he uses to illustrate--and propel--the card. The front of this card is almost totally covered with cards, but he's also stuck on a bit of a share certificate to fill the space.


The back of the card includes (somehow) the letters "aD" in pliable plastic, along with shades of pink, an interesting scrap of text in French ("corps en mouvement pour crocheter l'erotisme" and "le pouvoir et la mort."), and yet another scrap of tan Braille.

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Le Tour de Lance

On a small postcard, Jassy Lupa has attached a simple logo for "Le Tour de Lance" based on the logo for "Le Tour de France." It's so perfect, I wondered if she'd found it somewhere rather than created it herself. The other side of the card she illustrates with a closeup blockprint of Lance Armstrong riding his bike in the Tour de France, on his way to his seventh straight victory.


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Je suis l'art

I don't know why, but as I was typing in this little posts, I said to myself, "Je suis l'art." Usually, I never would have noticed that I had said this; I often say words aloud when I'm alone, simply because I like the sound of them. But in this case, I was typing in my in-laws' camp, and my mother-in-law was passing me at just that moment, so she asked me,

"What did you say?"

After rewinding my words, I said, "Je suis l'art."

"What?"

"Je suis l'art."

"What?"

"JE SUIS L'ART."

"Ohh."

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The All-Seeing K

Scott McDonald has taken another yellowing 2-cent postal card and adding text to it, but this time it is not a note. This time he sends me the picture of a giant K (entitled "The Expansion of the K") expanding to the right and right off the page. The K has, atop its thick stem, an eyelashed eyeball that is looking up and to the left, away from the expansion.

To the left of this K, I find this note from the original user of this card:

That book I don't like to be read out of up for. --That is something up with which I will not put. WC

The first sentence here is supposed to be horrible English--a sentence ending with lots of prepositions, a hobgoblin of the grammatically stupid. But what bothers me is that I cannot figure out what the "up" or the "for" are supposed to mean in this sentence. The second sentence is a famous quotation from Winston Churchill, but our author here appears to believe that he is complaining about sentences that end with prepositions; instead, he was complaining about the stupidity of reworking natural English sentences so that they wouldn't end with a preposition. Note that his sentence's natural form would be "That is something I will not put up with," which ends in two prepositions.

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Texas Chickadees

Angela Genusa, a member of IUOMA, has created a charming little card replicating the handiwork of a small child. Either side of it, she has illustrated with a cutout of a black-capped chickadee (her "favorite bird in the whole world"). The cutouts are intentionally rough, and she has added (or found? or commissioned?) childlike scribles in pensil to the card. Altogether, this resembles a gift from a child, innocent, intent, and precious.


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Let's Play Lotto, Vol II

Nadja Sayej sent me (this time four steps beyond independence, but still on July 5th) a long envelope that held a single sheet of letter sized paper (an American and Canadian size). A couple of other smaller slips of paper are stapled to the back of this one, all of which are folded into a weird little booklet entitled "sick of post- modern ism vol.II."

If we open the flap of the booklet, we see dense lines of typewritten text that seem to be automatic writing: "A SPEEDOMETER IS A RULER FOR AIR. ITS AN AUTOMATIC RESPONSE, BUT NOT AUTOMATISM. THATS TOO SUBCONSCIOUS, LEAVING SOME TO THE UNPREDICTABLE. BUT ALL RULERS ARE FIXEd, SEQUENTIAL, CODED, PREDICTABLE IN THEIR STRUCTURE."

etc.


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There's Gonna be Words Splattered on Them Walls

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (who has signed this latest card JPK) always works with words or letters, but he is a visual artist at his core; he can, somehow, create remarkable visual beauty with the smallest bits of color and form. On this card, he has scattered a few bits of paint almost haphazardly (or maybe definitely haphazardly), then he added the text in a strange way. The text he has lifted off Finnish newspapers--I recognize it orthographically--in swaths, and then he stuck them to this small panel. We are left with a hurried-looking but delicate little mise-en-page that seems as perfect a wordscene as we could hope.


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Inching through the Alphabet

Dan Waber (also one step beyond independence) continues to mail out views of the alphabet one letter at a time. By this point he has reached the letter C.


As he moves through the alphabet, Dan is figuring out different ways to make each leg of the trip interesting. This time the word presented to us is a normal word: "inchworm," or what is called the millimeterworm in Europe. And the yellow-green C in the word mimics the inchworm in color and apparent movement--as the worm inches from--and closes the gap between--"in" and "hworm."

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Interlinear Additions

Scott McDonald wrote to me on the fifth of July, one step beyond independence, to tell me that his search for a new job in a new state worked out quite well. He has written this note, as is his regular practice, on a used postal card. Scott bought a load of this all at once and he reuses them for his mailart. This time he has written his note to me between the original note on the card--but he has turned the card over, so his writing is upside-down and moving in the opposite direction from the other messages. Both messages are still readable, but it is a dizzying process to read them.


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Corrugated Mailart

frips is the only mailartist I have much contact with that uses corrugated cardboard as a medium to any great degree. It's quite wonderful to hold in my hands a weirdly tactile piece of handcut corrugated cardboard to which frips has machine-stitched a digital print of some kind. These are her photocards.


This one (from June 29th) illustrates a city tree (it looks like a sycamore from my vantage point) surrounded by a metal grate, upon which rests a small red bundle that seems suspiciously dangerous and obviously not. frips finishes the card with a little note to me written in mirror writing. She wishes me a great summer at the beginning of that season, and I write about this card half-way through the season.

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Wet with Rain

Sometime around the end of June or beginning of July (okay, I'm a bit behind), I received a piece of mail from frips during one of our extended periods of monsoon rains. The envelope includes fripsian stitchings holding pieces onto it, along with pastings and writings. It was a soggy little mess, but eventually it dried and I opened it to find an olla-podrida of mailart pieces:

Breast Cancer Awareness ATCs

A contribution to the Five Million Copies Project

Bundles of images of cats (little cut-outs, drawings, one beautiful orange blockprint of a woman with her cat)

Announcements for frips' ongoing mailart call for "NO MEAT!! TODAY"

Many little bits of paper with her addressed stamped upon them
Additional blockprints

And a "NO MEAT!! TODAY" add-and-pass booklet, the first entry into which is supposed to be from me

Unfortunately, I haven't added anything to the booklet yet, so there's no passing yet! I'd better get on that.

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