Welcome to It

On April 25th, Reed Aletmus sent me one of his small packages of mailart. Inside were an announcement for his Copyartistamps show in Portland, Maine (which ends today); a postcard noting advertising the small press fair in Mainz, Germany (the city being just a letter away from "Maine"), and the following little visual poem.

Reed Altemus, "I T La" (2002)
Since Reed likes making poems that hint at, rather than use, words, this poem and others remind me of the scores for Dada sound poems. A wonderful little piece full of Reed's sure grasp of the printer's fist.

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In Contradiction with the Sky

The illusive Gustave Morin sent me the postcard below, which reproduces an old Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, one I released back in March of 1988, the year before my son was born, when I still lived in Horseheads, New York. I love to see this recontextualization of my work--and to be reminded of the rough-hewn methods I used to create some of my micropublications in the past.


SJRC # 7, Postcarded by Gustave Morin (26 April 2005)
On the back of the envelope, Morin writes a note that covers every available open space. He writes quite a bit in this space and included everything except his address. My response to him has been delayed because of this, but Ross Priddle has kindly sent me this contact information for Morin, which I reproduce here for the advantage of anyone who has received mail from him but no return address.

Gustave Morin
COMMON GROUND
c/o Mackenzie Hall
3277 Sandwich St. West
Windsor, ON N9C 1A9 CANADA

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The Body as Creation

Luc Fierens sent me a nice little package back on April 24th along with quite a few of his little booklets. For now, I'm dealing with this as mailart posting, but I could just as easily have dealt with this a visual poetry. Fierens is a collagist and often works in concert with others to create his long-time series of Postfluxpostbooklets (now up to at least number 70), but most of his work is a kind of collage writing. He produces heavily visual collages with scraps of defining text: shards of dictionary pages, bold clippings that serve to entitle or direct the collage, and occasionally bits of text he's created himself.

His recent book, Living Sculptures is a good example of his technique. It is an insistent book, taking images of the human body torn from pages of magazines and newspers, and glueing them together in seemingly haphazard ways. But a direction is apparent. This is a book about the human impulse to modify one's own body in a vain search for a constant beauty. Mixing some French text with a bit of what I assume is Flemish (a dialect of Dutch) and much English, this book makes an interesting multi-national point about this tendency and its ultimate destructiveness.


Luc Fierens, Living Sculptures (2005)
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Say What You Feel

R.F. Côté sent me one of his series of collaged and painted postcards of women speaking in Braille. The concept is quite interesting, and it is striking how a simple concept so simply but effectively presented can suggest a number of readings. Note in this card, for instance, how small the mouth is in comparison to the come-hither eyes.



R. F. Cote, [Woman Speaking Braille] (23 Apr 2005)
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Smoke Gets in Your I's

I forgot about this little piece of emailart from Mick Boyle, which I received back at the beginning of April! A cute little piece, but I'm more apt to "misplace" emailed than a piece of paper mailart--which I keep in piles until I'm ready to mention it. Mick reports, by the way, that he's not sure if he thinks the smoke is exiting a smokestack or the bowl of a pipe.


Mick Boyle, "Geof-Smoke" (4 April 2005)
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The Day's Unevents

Today was another day for catching up with mailart. I scanned bits of every piece of mailart I had received but not yet documented. I added new photos of my mailart creation stations to earlier blog entries. I foldered--it's a term in archives!--my qbdp mailings. And I added nine new entries to the top of this blog. Sorry for the delay, but I almost believe I'll catch up sometime this week.

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Traces of Think under Local Clouds

Roy Arenella's letters are often an essential element of his mailart. They are quirky, intelligent, and human. I often think that I know Roy (whom I've met just once in a rush of activity between work assignments on one putative holiday in New York City) just from his letters. What he usually does in his letters, without even knowing it, is put me to shame with his knowledge of verbo-visual and other art. Reading his letters is a learning experience.

In the letter I received this time, he talks about a series of narrative visual poems of mine called Traces of Ink and makes references to Bob Brown's 1450-1950 (which I do know), Cendrar's "jolie page," and a book by Robert Pinget (who?) that goes by the title Traces of Ink. (I wonder if Pinget created his name from the same source as I: bokuseki [trans. "Traces of Ink" or "Ink Traces"], the term for Zen brush calligraphy. And now I've given away my secret.)

In this mailing, Roy sent me his letter, sections of Pinget's Traces of Ink copied onto a single page, a list of his photographs (entitled "Local Clouds") recently shown at the 55 Mercer Gallery, a poster advertising a show of his from 1974, and this wonderful "pretty page":


Roy Arenella, "He Wanted to Make" (13 April 2005)
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Like Spun Copper

This card of Ruud Janssen's is one in a series of visual poetic word paintings he has created. All the words, so far as I remember are English or English-sounding, but all are not "real" (or are not intended to be real). This one is my favorite of all these word paintings (though I like them all), so I was thrilled when I'd received it (having seen it posted earlier at Ruud's blog).

The yellow and copper paint on this painting make the piece dazzle. (I love the feel of paint on Ruud's cards, by the way, so I'm a little sad that a tiny bit of red has chipped off the S). The scene we see is the sun almost obscuring the sky, but Ruud has labeled the sun for us, in case we didn't recognize it. Along with this, we see the word "pun," though it's difficult to suggest a meaning for this word: maybe that the words we use are somehow puns for the objects and concepts they pretend to be. But what I like most is that the S and P can also work together to create "spun," suggesting the spinning of gold (in this case, copper) out of the sun.


Ruud Janssen, 05-105 (17 April 2005)
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The Pataphysician Writes before He Leaves

In his standard brown vlope, Reed Altemus sent me a sheet of pataphysical postage stamps (okay, artist's stamps), a brief note of a small press fair he was about to attend in Mainz, Germany (one of my favorite German cities), and a beautiful copy of his visual poem, "LVIFED," which I've written about elsewhere. So instead of showing you something Reed sent me, let me show you Reed himself.


Reed Altemus, Litsa Spathi, and Ruud Janssen
I'd like Reed and Ruud to exchange vowels for a day to see how it changes them. Or maybe they should develop a Reed-Ruud mailart collaboration.

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Postcard from Grenada

Now, it seems strange to me that this painted card of Ruud Janssen's (this one either an abstract or an extreme close-up on an impressionist painting) comes to me with a Grenadian stamp affixed to it--Grenada being in the Caribbean not too too far south of Barbados. To increase the weirdness, the stamp is a half-cent stamp (obviously, created for stamp collecting more than postage) that commemorates "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (ditto).


Ruud Janssen, 05-098 (14 April 2005)
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Nutbutter on Bread on Board on Tiles on Card on Corrugated Cardboard

What I love about frips' mailart is that she frequently fastens pieces to her cards and envelopes with thread rather than the more usual glue. She uses a sewing machine to do this--a machine I much love, though I don't have much of one anymore, so I'm unlikely to follow her lead. I find this little fripsmailartphotocard quite wonderful in ways I cannot quite express. The simplicity of this tiny domestic scene, and the muted colors, and the bites taken out of the bread all make this a successful piece of art.

Either that, or I'm hungry. (Which I'm not.)


frips, [Nutbutter on Bread on Board on Tiles on Card on Corrugated Cardboard] (11 April 2005)
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The Crab's Eyes of Barbados

This wonderful little painting of Ruud Janssen's suggests to me something that it probably should not: the crab's eyes of Barbados. The crab's eyes is a plant that grows on that island, and this little painting reminds me of those red-eyed plants. The glossy seeds of the plant would entrance me when I was a boy, and I would collect handfuls of them and consider how similar they were to the eyes of crabs themselves (which were all around me: land crabs living in holes at the upper ends of beaches, fiddler crabs living in the brackish waters of estuaries, sand crabs living at the very edge of the water, and various nameless crabs living safely under the Caribbean sea rolling out like an aquamarine carpet to the horizon). Strangely, I had no idea until tonight that the seeds of the crab's eyes were so toxic.


Ruud Janssen, 05-089 (9 April 2005)
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The Woman Inside

Jassy Lupa sent me a long thin envelope she had constructed out of the stiff glossy pages of a fashion magazine. Inside of this envelope, she has inserted a long white sheet with four self-portraits--the first three on paper vellum glued along their top edges to the page, and the last being a carved stamping. She did a series of these mailings (apparently eleven of them), and I saw one on the Web someplace, but I can't remember where.

An interesting (intentional?) message here: that inside each glossy young woman there resides the old woman she will become. But what is our assessment of beauty?

Oh, she also chastises (admonishes, maybe--that's a bit milder) me not to disparage the mailart I send her. I will endeavor to do so!


Jassy Lupa, [Woman, Inside and Outside] (April 2005)
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Petroglyphic Imagination

I'm not sure I should speculate too much on this asemic bit of writing by kiyotei, because I'm so often wrong (but, boy, are those guesses of mine interesting!), but when I look at "de Shay" (which is the pronunciation of the "de Chelly" part of "Canyon de Chelly"), and when I look at kiyotei's wonderful photojournal (part of which documents the petroglyphs at Canyon de Chelly National Monument), I feel compelled to insist that this bit of asemic writing--wavering between script and pictogram--must be an homage to the peoples who created those petroglyphs.


kiyotei, "de Shay" (April 2005)
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Squares Fastened to Rectangles

I can't tell for sure who sent me this card stapled to another card. But the card comes to me from Toronto, the home of Nadja Sayej, so I'm guessing this Albersian card is from her. I collected the title for this piece from the card underneath the one in view.


Nadja Sayej, "Joseph Albers meets Hilton Kramer meets Rosalind Krauss meets" (April 2005)
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A Hard Card to Hoe: "A Selection from the Museum of Modern Writing" (qbdp # 56)

Best Western Golden Arrow Motel, Room 310, Lake Placid, New York

I'm in Lake Placid for a meeting with staff from work, so we end up talking until late into the night, which makes it difficult to produce anything. Luckily, I'd begun preparing these cards before arriving here in Placid.

The lucky recipients of these cards are as follows:

1/12 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/12 Bob Grumman

3/12 Roy Arenella

4/12 Ruud Janssen

5/12 R. F. Côté

6/12 Carol Stetser

7/12 kiyotei

8/12 Reed Altemus

9/12 Nadja Sayej

10/12 Luc Fierens

11/12 Nancy Huth

12/12 qbdp

Geof Huth, "A Selection from the Museum of Modern Writing"
(18 May 2005)


View from Room 310, Best Western, Lake Placid, New York
(19 May 2005)


Mailart Station, Best Western, Room 310, Lake Placid, New York (19 May 2005)
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The City Card and the Country Card: "leafves foleads" (12 May 2005)

Southgate Tower, Room 1902, New York, New York

While in Manhattan, and staying in a room with a good view of the nearby Empire State Building, I took a few postcards about life in the countryside and created a small fidgetglyph about leaves. I was so lazy that I produced only five cards.

The recipiencts of this mailing were as follows:

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

Geof Huth, "leafves foleads" (12 May 2005)
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A Grand Beginning: "ovo" (qbdp # 54)

The Poughkeepsie Grand, Room 617, Poughkeepsie, New York

I've returned to this hotel in downtown Poughkeepsie, because I needed to stay somewhere where I could walk to the train station tomorrow morning and get myself to New York. I have a view of the Hudson and the tall FDR Mid-Hudson Bridge from my window.

Always looking for ways to create quick mailart, I created a simple fidgetglyph upon a simple postal card. The following people received copies of "ovo" (qbdp # 54):

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Reed Altemus

6/7 kiyotei

7/7 qbdp

Geof Huth, "ovo" (11 May 2005)


Mailart Station, Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel (11 May 2005)
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Another Five

Ruud Janssen knows of my attraction to fives, which has to do with many things: the date of my birth, the number of my siblings, common forms of counting. So he sends me the fifth envelope in a series of seventeen. The outside of the envelope is pretty much a traditional painted envelope of Ruud's, but not quite; it's a bit different, not as representational, and not covering the whole envelope.


Ruud Janssen, 5 of 17 (24 Mar 2005)
Inside the envelope Ruud includes a stiff sheet of paper entitled "Repetition." One bit of text appears three times on this page:

Some mail-artists seem to be doing the same things year after year.

I think Ruud's figured me out!

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Object Becomes Subject

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen created a small scrap collage on two sides of a postcard, but he made it a little different that usual. He inserted my little fidgetglyph "ObJecT" in the collage as well. The glyph is half-obscured, but clearly evident, even under the tape he uses to hold the pieces down.


Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, "peck decal bisect wreck recess" (Mar 2005)
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Not Writing, but Drawing

Have I lost, I wonder, all control over my life?

(Okay, an exaggeration.)

I discovered today a large envelope from Reed Altemus that contained a folder that held the seven photocopies that made up the collection, Two Copy Art Series. I'm impressed by the simple abstract beauty that Reed can capture on the white rag paper pages in this collection. And here's just a sample.


Reed Altemus, from Two Copy Art Series (2001)
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A Veil of You (or U)

Reed Altemus, "A U" (16 Mar 2005)
Reed Altemus sent me, on 16 March 2005, a simple found card, upon the face of which he has created a stylish scrap collage. I keep trying to read the text, using the hole in the pasted-down card as an O, reading the embossed R, trying to determine the letter-shapes the paper scraps have bee torn into.

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Alas, Biafra

R.F. Côté is a mailartist of prodigious imagination, sending me card after card that resembles the others only tangentially. This card opens with a gentle dreamy front. A single 55-cent stamp, and its surrounding border, take up more than half the side of the card


R.F. Côté, Obverse of Number 10 of 18 (13 Mar 2005)
The back, however, is another story.Upon a textured and painted surface, there sits a deflated plastic bubble, yellow-orange in color so that it obscures the image it ostensibly protects. If we push the bubble around, we can detect a few thin black African boys, apparently thin, and the sadness of their faces and the deflated and stomachlike bubble remind me of my memories of pictures of the Biafran 1960s.


R.F. Côté, Reverse of Number 10 of 18 (13 March 2005)
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The Long Trip to the Present

I have spent a good part of the day trying to catch up with this blog, not planning to catch up, just hoping to make a dent. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, I added seven entries about mailart received (all dated today), six entries about mailart sent (each dated the date of the original sending but currently without illustration, which I'll add later), and one entry explaining what I've done (this one). All fourteen of these entries appear on the top webpage of this blog as of 1 May 2005, but as soon as I add an entry later than today, the pages will begin to slip into the lower pages and out of sight.

So if you want to catch up yourself and want to do it in the easiest way possible, do it soon. By the way any entry after April 4th, I added today.

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Roy Dances to Music without Sound

As he is wont to do, Roy Arenella responds to a dbqp blog entry of mine with one of his photocards. The front of the card consists of a labeled photogram, "The Visualist Mind Dances Best to Anechoic Music." On the back of the card, Roy includes one of his insightful micro-essays in further response.

The back of the card also includes further support to the entire enterprise with the usual Arenellan maximaphily: His pseudo-cancellation stamp includes a rubberstamping of a dancing teenage boy, and one of the stamps he chooses is a 13-center illustrating American folk dancing. Roy has numbered this card # 70 p/c: the seventieth card of the year, and a photocard.


Roy Arenella, "The Visualist Mind Dances Best to Anechoic Music" (1 Sep 2003 and 15 Mar 2005)
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The Pataphysician Writes

Reed Altemus sent me a sheet of pataphysical postage stamps, which you can see peeking out of this envelope


Reed Altemus, "Postes Pataphysique" (Mar 2005)
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The Fruits of Spring

To celebrate the arrival of spring, Mick Boyle has sent a number of different types of radishes to his mailart correspondents. (See, for instance, Ruud Janssen's IUOMA.) Mine was this simple and stylish drawing:


Mick Boyle, "Radishes of Spring" (21 Mar 2005)
With the arrival of this card, there appeared the brief flowering of my garden's sole crocus.

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Lizard-Bird-Dragon-Marmoset

From Jassy Lupa, there arrived in my mailbox last March another wonderful card. On one side of the card is this image of a neo-post-Victorian man, a Phillipine stamp illustrated with a marmoset, and some gene-spliced beast that appears something akin to a bird with talons for horns.


Jassy Lupa, Talon-Horned Birds (21 Mar 2005)
On the reverse, she includes one of her detailed carving prints and a brief note. Both sides hold together (image, carving, postage stamp, and pseudo-cancellation mark) as one.

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The Size of Visual Poetry

Mick Boyle sent me, via email, a tiny little visual poem that seems to be about itself. Or maybe not.


Mick Boyle, "Estrangement at the seventh precipice" (12 Mar 2005)
But think about it. The poem seems to read 7kb, the possible size of a small textual image. At the very least, it is an example of the steady use of the printer's fist. Mick, being a designer, has a good grasp on this skill.

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Japanese Mail from Holland

So here's the deal: Last March, Ruud Janssen carried out an experiment. He put Japanese postage on correspondence and posted the mail (presumably in the Netherlands). He wanted to see if the mail would make it through to his correspondents, and it did. In my case, this mail (postmarked) 11 March 2005 (or, more precisely, "11. III. 05-22") arrived last March, without any indication of the sender.


Ruud Janssen, "Today is almost gone" (12 Apr 1996)
Inside, however, I found a note from Ruud and a couple of pieces of paper, including this interesting little visual essay, which I find a bit more wistful and delicate than most mailart.

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Vial Sounds

On March 7th, almost two months ago now, Nadja Sayej mailed me a small package that held the following vials filled with music.


Nadja Sayej, "Eight Notes Sang into Bottles," with Explanation (March 2005)
Also included in the package was a sheet explaining her techniques:

A B C D E F G. Alinear alphabet, the vocabulary of music. How can infinite sounds be produced from such a limited palette? Each not captured in time (recorded or not) is a unique statment [sic] in time.

This is a wonderful conceptual piece, each vial holding the remains of a note Nadja had sung into it.

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The Cheeks of Our Typefaces: "wiimmy faces" (qbdp # 53)

Marriott Trenton Lafayette Yark, Room 532, Trenton, New Jersey

Breaking with the pattern of including Ruud Janssen in each of my recent mailings--sorry, Ruud!--I created a mailart mailing with the smallest list of recipients ever: four. The ostensible reason for this was that I had only four of the same size of 140lb Canson Montval Watercolor paper cards. But it took me a long time to create each instance of the fidgetglyph for this mailing. I used my fine-point retractable fountain pen to outline and fill in each of the letters on these cards. I took at least twenty minutes per card just to wraw the glyph. Because of this, I wrote only very brief notes on each card.

Here are the few and fortunate recipients of "wiimmy faces" (qbdp # 53):

1/4 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/4 Bob Grumman

3/4 Roy Arenella

4/4 qbdp

Mailart Station, Trenton, New York



Geof Huth, "wiimmy faces" (28 Apr 2005)
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A Night in an Airport Far from Home: "starnight" (qbdp # 52)

O'Hare International Airport, United Terminal, Chicago, Illinois

I created this entire mailing, from conception of the content on, while sitting at a tiny round table at a Starbuck's coffee shop in Chicago O'Hare. I had just finished dinner, and I cleared the table and pulled out my mailart supplies. (I later described the creation of this card here, so I won't repeat it here.) Because these cards were simple to create, I spent a good deal of time providing calligraphically interesting recipient addresses on the cards.

These are the people who received "startnight" (qbdp # 52):

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

Geof Huth, "starnight" (27 Apr 2005)
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A Simple Wrawing: "hubrise" (qbdp # 51)

Wyndham Chicago, Room 1021, Chicago, Illinois

I brought with me to Chicago a handful of fidgetglyphs I recently created. From that collection, I chose a glyph to recreate tonight. On a set of three pair of different Pressed Wafer postcards (9 Columbus Square, Boston, Mass. 02116), I wrew "hubrise" in red, added the colophon in blue, and finished with the recipient's address in green.

The recipients of "hubrise" (qbdp # 51) were the following:

1/6 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/6 Bob Grumman

3/6 Roy Arenella

4/6 Ruud Janssen

5/6 Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

6/6 qbdp

Geof Huth, "hubrise" (26 Apr 2005)
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The United Colors of "ExElEncE" (qbdp # 50)

Best Western, Room 228, Monticello, New York

An unexpected trip to New York's Sullivan County led to a simple card adorned with a multi-colored visual pwoermd. I designed the pwoermd tonight and added it to six cards. Because I was in a rush tonight, I didn't add a true message to the back of any of the cards; I just held three pens together, and wrote a set of parallel blue, red, and black squiggles.

The fortunate recipients of "ExElEncE" were as follows:

1/6 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/6 Bob Grumman

3/6 Roy Arenella

4/6 Ruud Janssen

5/6 Jassy Lupa

6/6 qbdp

Geof Huth, "ExElEncE" (11 Apr 2005)
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My Celtic Past: "A OMN e" (qbdp # 49)

The Brae Loch Inn, Room 17, Cazenovia, New York

I'm now a corporate mailartist, planning out my work before I head off on my business trips.

Today, I took a selection of my found cream postcards (upon which I'd already stamped an image in red), added a sticker to the back celebrating the New York State Archives's twenty-five years of excellence (as of 2003), and added a small note to each correspondent, and I had myself a card to mail out.

The image I stamped on the front was a "stamplage" (an eraser carving carved out of a collage of an image and added text). I made only a few of these ever, but they are some of my favorite visual poems, especially since I ca, n stamp out new originals of the poem at will.

Here is a list of the recipients of "A OMN e" (qbdp # 49):

1/8 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/8 Bob Grumman

3/8 Roy Arenella

4/8 Ruud Janssen

5/8 Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

6/8 Nancy Huth

7/8 Erin Huth

8/8 qbdp

Mailart Station, Brae Loch Inn, Cazenovia, NY (8 Apr 2005)


Geof Huth, "A OMN e" (8 Apr 2005)
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An Envelope of Poem: "all of it of now" (qbdp # 48)

Hampton Inn, Room 369, Victor, New York

When I wasn't reading Robert Lax tonight, I was working on this mildly complicated little mailart mailing. I'd planned it sometime last night, so I arrived in Victor with some of the pieces prepared, but I had to figure out what to put on the card.

Starting from the outside, I began used a small cream envelope made out of laid paper, and with the premlip on the side instead of the top edge. I added a stamping of my return address in black on the premlip, the recipient's address in red, and a giant Native American crafts stamp (for US recipients). Inside the envelope, I added a card, folded in half, and made of blood-red laid paper. I added the colophon in pen to the back of the card. On the front of the card, I drew a title doodle followed by a small barely-visual poem I wrote tonight.

The poem is barely visual because I left the tittle off every minuscule i, except for the i in the word spring. Welcome to the warmer season.

Every envelope also include a little mailart announcement or enclosure that I'd received in multiples from one of my mailart correspondents.

The recipients of "all of it of now" (qbdp # 48) were the following:

1/12 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/12 Bob Grumman

3/12 Roy Arenella

4/12 Ruud Janssen

5/12 Jassy Lupa

6/12 Mick Boyle

7/12 Nadja Sayej

8/12 RF Côté

9/12 Reed Altemus

10/12 Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

11/12 Gail Fischer

12/12 qbdp

Here's a view of my mailart-creation station in the hotel in Victor, New York:


Mailart Station, Victor, NY (6 Apr 2005)

Geof Huth, "all of it of now" (6 Apr 2005)
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The Rights Thing

Today, I finally finished the week-long process of adding to a card and sending it back. I have no idea why things like this take me so long, but they apparently do. I added stampings and drawing last week sometime, and today I covered over the address to me with labels and addressed it to Frips. I'll mail it off tomorrow.


Geof Huth, Additions to Frips' Card (3 Apr 2005)
Since my mailart is usually made in editions, this is one of the few pieces I won't retain a real copy of--though I do have this scanned image. To see the stark beauty of this card before I added to it, go here.

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Peeking through a Postcard

The front of this card from R. F. Côté (a green surface decorated with stamps and stampings and writing) includes the note "if i could only run away...too much snow!" Ah, but the snow has been disappearing from our part of the world, and I bet the R. F. is free from its grip by now.

The back of the card is where much of the action is. Apparently, R.F. has glued down the captured face of an eyeglassed woman to the card and pasted a glossy-paper image of a Canada Post mailbox over the face, allowing but the eyes of the woman to peer out through the mailslot. The card also tells me to write a message upon a postage stamp glued onto the surface upside-down. Lots of mailing and mailart references bundled into a simple card.


R. F. Côté, "Write your message here" (5 Mar 2005)
And, hey, I got around to writing about this card before it was even a month old!

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Going Snowshoeing? Dutch or Not?

Once again, Ruud Janssen sends me one of his wonderful painted postcards. I am so attuned to snow and snowmeaning that (even though all the snow has disappeared from my area until next winter) I cannot see the two objects on this card as anything but snowshoes. Maybe they are snowshoes walking through the mud, and we have plenty of that around here after these last couple of days of snowmelt and rain.


Ruud Janssen, 05-059 (6 Mar 2005)
On the back of the card, Ruud leaves me a note that includes the following:

Notice the new postage-stamps..... Are they Dutch?

Well, two of them are Dutch (Netherlandish?) 39-Eurocent stamps, but the third is a Japanese stamp. Now, what is Ruud doing here? More on this issue when I catch up a little more on my mailart receipts and announce the successful arrival of a certain (and ostensibly anonymous) envelope from Ruud.

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Making Me an Honest Mailartist

Ruud Janssen sent me a red-, white-, and blue-striped painted envelope last month (number 1 of 10 in a series, so I'm doubly blessed). Inside the envelope, he included a number of add-and-pass pieces (which I will collect together with my other add-and-pass stuff and send out in some qbdp mailing soon). But he also included this certificate, which formalizes my status as a member of the International Union of Mail Artists. (I hope we've negotiated better working conditions and higher pay, because I can always use both of those.)


Geof Huth's IUOMA Certificate of Membership
(21 Feb 2005)
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Extendended to Mayberry

Scott McDonald has left Georgia and is now based in South Carolina. His change of venue has allowed him a chance to visit Mt Airy, North Caroline, which is apparently the real Mayberry, the fictional town where the US TV classic, "The Andy Griffith Show," took place. A lucky man, Scott.

Scott sends me a quirky little pwoermd, which he has deftly placed within that part of an American postcard reserved for the US Postal Service's barcodes. The postal service realized that art was being made in this case, so it declined to mar the poem with a barcode.


Scott McDonald, "extendended" (26 Feb 2005)
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Mothnight

Jassy Lupa sent me a little card a little over a month ago. On the front of the card is a dark and stylish Olmec-like statuary head signed by Jassy in gold ink (so I assume that Jassy both created this image and printed it onto the card). On the reverse of the card, she includes an accomplished block-carving print (of a luna moth seemingly at night), which reminded me of the late-1980s and early-1990s when eraser-carving was prevalent in the mailart world and I used to trade carved (not "craven") images. Jassy's note on this card refers to my last trip to New York City.


Jassy Lupa, "Luna Moth" (25 Feb 2005)
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The Sound of Reading Color with a Woodwind: "read" (qbdp # 47)

Wingate Inn, Room 521, Garden City, New York

This second card of the week has two features in common with the first: 1. I created the card the morning I was leaving the hotel, rather than during the traditional night before; and 2. I extra-illustrated the card with a sticker celebrating twenty-five years of excellence at the New York State Archives. (No-one at work seemed to appreciate my joke that twenty-five years of excellence wasn't too bad for an organization fifty years old. [No, no, we were only twenty-five years old at the time, but that was two years ago. The reason I'm using the stickers is that we have no continuing need to celebrate a two-year-old anniversary.])

The postcard I used advertised the "Campaign for Fiscal Equity," which promoted equitable school aid across New York State. I inserted the Archives sticker as the middle panel in the triptych on the front of the card, then I wrote a simple two-color, four-word fidgetglyph on the back of the card.

The recipients of "read" are the following lucky people:

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Scott McDonald

6/7 Mick Boyle

7/7 qbdp

This entry includes a special feature: A photograph of my mailart-creating station on the fifth floor (take heed, Ruud!) of the Wingate Inn in Garden City, New York. I took this picture the day before I created the mailart, but this is where it happened. You can see my pens on the desk.


Geof Huth's Mailart Station, Wingate Inn, Room 521,
Garden City, New York (31 March 2005)

Geof Huth, "read" (1 April 2005)
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