Viva Snail Mail!

So my dad dug this letter up from his daughter archive. I have absolutely no memory of the situation that compelled me to send an illicit letter on my Catholic junior high school’s stationary. But I love it! I guess I had some Dadaist tendencies, even at the age of 13. It reads, “HI DAD! This is wrong. I shouldn’t be doing this. See you soon. Melissa.”

I do remember there being some good postal pranks documented in the RE/Search book, Pranks. If you have sent or received any postal pranks, do tell.

April is National Letter Writing Month. Its also National Poetry Month. Its also the month that tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service. And its the month that Spring is full on here in Brooklyn. Thank you perky daffodils, tulips, and Callery Pear tree blossoms. You have arrived just in the nick of time.

I don’t know who makes up these dedicated months and I wish letter writing and poetry didn’t need their own month to remain relevant. But enough grumpiness. My Viva Snail Mail challenge to you is to write a letter to someone and include a poem about spring or taxes or both. You can find poems about spring at poetry.org, an excellent website from the Academy of American Poets. Thank you to Tina Cane for that bit of information. Her poem, Butterfly Catcher, is included in the list. My google search for poems about taxes brought up a few rants so you’re on your own to find one or write one on that subject.

And here’s a little perspective to hopefully serve as a motivator. If paper and pen and envelope and stamp feel like work compared to email, here is a letter written and carved by an Ancient Egyptian on a clay tablet.

40 years ago today my dad wrote this letter to his dad from the island of Crete, where he and my mom were living for a few months while traveling around Europe in their VW bus. He found it amidst my Grandpa’s stamp collection, ostensibly saved there due to its interesting Greek aerogramme postage. Reading this letter was like being given a glimpse into my own history. You see my parents had decided to make me on Crete so I was a tiny fetus snug in my mom’s womb on March 29, 1970. My dad’s descriptions of Crete in Spring as a paradise of wildflowers, friendly people, and fresh oranges made me cry, mostly out of appreciation that I could read what this era of family lore was like for him at the time.

I also began to think, once again, about how much memory and history will be lost in this generation of digital transition. When my husband and I traveled in Europe for several months in 2003 my dad the graphic designer diligently saved and typeset all my emails to him. He gave them to me as a booklet when we returned to the States. How sweet to have those emails, those travel records, but who else does that?  I have followed my friends travels via email and Facebook but haven’t gotten a postcard or letter from anyone overseas in ages. We are losing out here and so are our kids and grandkids and those historians who will want to use our correspondence as primary sources.

Traveling heightens the senses and inspires me to write and share what I am experiencing. Travel writing, both in letters and diaries, is its own colorful tradition and genre. I hope that we can find a way to save these words, whether they are written on paper or pixels.

We’re having a cozy snow day with pancakes and bacon and valentine making. When I asked my 3 and a half year old son who he wanted to make a valentine for, he said Dan Zanes. So he did and we’re mailing it today. That’s love.

Speaking of love for famous New Yorkers,  The New York Times city room blog has published some Valentine’s Day inspiration with love notes like this one from Zero Mostel to his wife Kate. Enjoy. 

A week and a half ’til Valentine’s Day. Another valentine giving strategy is to buy some vintage valentines or, if you are a paper saver like me, raid your own childhood collection. Scan ‘em and print ‘em and send ‘em. I found these valentines at the Brooklyn Flea, which has taken up winter weekend residence in the most incredibly beautiful space, the former Williamsburg Savings Bank. The lovely woman selling valentines had her wares displayed on the marble table where many a Brooklyn resident used to fill out their deposit slips under a cathedral ceiling of mosaic and stone. Maybe you should go pay her a visit this weekend…

Have you been to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam? On our way there in 2003 my husband and I stopped by one of Amsterdam’s many cafes and partook in its herbal offerings so we had a GREAT time at the museum. Recently the museum published Van Gogh’s letters in digital and bound book versions. Apparently Vincent was an avid correspondent. The web site, www.vangoghletters.org, allows you to view over 900 letters to and from Van Gogh. Its pretty fascinating, if you like to read other people’s mail.

My love of snail mail has been influenced by many people but the reverence for postcards comes most directly from my stepfather, Biskit, who turns 56 today, and is the second from the right in the photo above. 

Viva Snail Mail: Biskit, how and when did your love of postcards start?

Biskit: My friend Doug Zwick, before going to college went out to work on a cattle feedlot owned by his uncle in Oklahoma. He would send us back great classic postcards. The first I remember was “Saddling up Big Jack”, a cowboy riding a jackrabbit. And then a “jackalope” card.  We then got into the most mundane we could find as well, Pennsylvania Highway Interchanges and the like. Our group of friends, the Pastafarians, used postcards like a sort of precursor to email to stay in touch, with postcards being short poems as opposed to the prose of letters. I lived in rundown houses at college and would just pin the cards to the walls of my house. Anyone that came in my house would admire them and would of course send me postcards from their travels, whether far away or right nearby.  We also got into making cards from found objects, etc.

VSM: Did you and your friends see your postcard exchanges as a nod to any art movements or were you making it up as you went along?

Biskit: Short answer is no. We were not self-consciously giving a nod to anything, we just thought the cards were funny/interesting. We were both mocking the cards and genuinely appreciating them and then artists and great-grandmothers joined into sending us postcards.

We were definitely influenced right then by the Beat Generation poets we were reading and that not only influenced our writing on the cards, but in a way the visuals on the cards are poetry too. 

Those early exchanges in the 1970’s continued for many years, pretty much until email came along. That’s when Biskit’s postcard commitment dropped off a bit. He still had a huge postcard collection however, and so, due to my inquiries about the origins of his postcard love, Biskit was inspired to re-ignite the flow of postcards amongst his vast network of friends, the Pastafarians. He sent out an email, asking whoever wanted to take part in the Summer of Postcard Love to send him their mailing address. He then sent this mailing list to everyone interested. About 40 people participated and as a result, my husband and son and I received 67 postcards this past summer. 

This idea could be easily adapted by you and your friends. 

Here are some highlights from the Summer of Postcard Love:

Chocolate chip production at Hershey Foods Corporation from Abe.

Homemade card for my son from his aunt Allison. 

 

A few years ago I saw Ramak Fazal’s show at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan. In 2006 Fazel, a photographer of Iranian descent who is a US citizen, set out in a van to photograph state capitols and mail himself handmade postcards along the way. He used his childhood stamp collection as collage material for the postcards, sending them general delivery to the next stop on his route.

I went to the show for the postage stamp related artwork but there was so much more to Fazal’s story and experience of making the work, that the documentary film-maker in me was quite fired up by the levels of visual, cultural, and political content. Stamps! Road Trip! Photography! Being mistaken for a terrorist! Well there IS a film about Fazel’s trip, quite beautifully made from still photographs and voice over, which I hope gets expanded into a larger piece. Watch it here.

Remember how I posted a few months back about the upcoming Triboro Postmark? The one that would replace the individual neighborhood postmarks in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island? Well I have some new information. According to Bob Twombley of the USPS Triboro District’s customer relations office, outgoing mail dropped in blue boxes, started to get phased in with the Triboro postmark on August 24th. The postal service hopes to complete this transition by October 5th.  As of October 5, 2009, any outgoing mail that is placed in a blue collection box within the confines of Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island, will get the new “Triboro District” cancellation. However, Mr. Twombley assured me that every local postmark will remain available at the post office. If you want to have a local postmark with the town name and zip code, all you need to do is bring your outgoing mail to the post office of your choice and request it. Now who has time to stand in line for that, I do not know but it somehow takes a bit of the sting out of losing our neighborhood specificity on our outgoing mail.