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I’m in the middle of reading The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 on my Kindle and I just have to say part of the fun of these letters is names. No, not funny names but names I have come across in other settings. Like The Duke of Suffolk and the Howard family, both players in Wolf Hall. Walpole is writing in the late 1730s and early 1740s so Suffolk and the Howards are descendants from Henry VIII’s time. And then imagine my delight as I am reading along and Walpole mentions Lord Grantham! I thought Lord Grantham was made up for Downton Abbey! Guess not. Grantham doesn’t get mentioned very often but when he does I can’t help but giggle. Lord Sackville, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West, appears too.

Walpole also has much criticism for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an aristocrat and writer famous for her letters. Walpole finds her shabby, uncouth and not so witty as her reputation led him to believe. He meets her while staying in Italy and is somewhat distressed that his mother likes her quite a lot so he ends up seeing more of her than he’d like. I wonder though if he disparages her because he feels a bit threatened?

Walpole’s father is Sir Robert Walpole often considered the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. Horace, who enters parliament in 1741, includes lots of information in his letters on the wheelings and dealings of government and what turns out to be the end of his father’s career as Prime Minister. The politics are not quite so brutal as during Henry VIII’s time which is a relief. If you jump across the pond though and watch some fictional politics on the new Netflix TV show House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, it’s remarkably similar if slower moving due to the lack of cell phones and television.

It is all rather amusing how these things echo across history and through fiction and nonfiction. And it is rather delightful that they have happened to serendipitously converge in my reading (and TV viewing) at the moment. I love when this happens!

Filed under: Books, Letters Tagged: Horace Walpole, Wolf Hall

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Dear Barbara O'Connor:

You’re very good at first impressions. 

I like your ideas and I think you are very neat and organized. 

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A coworker asked me on Friday who I was rooting for to win the Super Bowl Sunday. I looked at her and said, “The Super Bowl is this Sunday?” Yup, that’s how much I care. I didn’t know when the game was and I have no idea who is even in it. Sorry sports fans.

Something I do care very much about is the United States Postal Service. Seriously. I mean, think about what an amazing system it is. I can post a letter to anywhere in the United States, including Hawaii and the-middle-of-a-glacier Alaska, for forty-six cents. Sure, last week it was forty-five cents, but just stop and consider how gosh darn amazing the whole enterprise is.

After you have thought about the awesomeness that is the postal service, take a gander at an in-depth and fascinating article about the mail at Esquire. It delves into the nitty gritty of how the system works as well as the P.O.’s current fiscal problems and the politics surrounding them. And then when you are really angry at Congress for screwing over the post office, go sign a petition demanding it be saved. Don’t wait on signing the petition, over 90,000 signatures are needed on it by February 18th and it hasn’t broken 3,000 yet.

Then to seal your love for the postal service, read Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal and/or watch the movie version (streaming on Netflix) which is almost as hilarious as the book.

I mentioned earlier in January that I am doing Melwyk’s Postal Reading Challenge. I have finished one book so far towards the challenge (about the letters of William and Henry James) and have begun a second (volume one of Horace Walpole’s letters).

And now I have taken up a second postal challenge: A Month of Letters. This means that I will attempt to send out twenty-three pieces of mail this month. That’s a letter a day excluding Sundays and one federal holiday, days when there is no mail delivery. I am a pretty good correspondent but even sending that much mail in one month is a stretch. I’m going to try though. At the moment I am behind with two mail days and only one piece of mail sent. But I like to send things out in batches rather than one at a time so I am not worried.

Today I spent some time making envelopes and I have some postcards I made up recently too:

Wouldn’t you just love something in your mailbox? If so, feel free to email me your address or add it to my Postable account. If you go the Postable route, don’t worry, all of your information is private, your address won’t be mined and sold. If you give me your address and I send you mail, you are not obligated to return the favor.

Who doesn’t like a card or letter? It’s only February third, still early enough in the month that you can take up the Month of Letters Challenge too. C’mon, what are you waiting for?

Filed under: Challenges, Letters

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Thank YOU for the conversation

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Due to vacations and the fall semester starting and the planets aligning – or not aligning as the case may be – I had to work today on a Sunday, something I haven’t had to do in years. I am a bit discombobulated, the schedule of my usual goings on all tossed overboard. On the plus side, I will get to have Friday off, something I never get to do unless it is a holiday or I take a vacation day which means since September 3rd is a holiday I will have a 4-day weekend next weekend to compensate for the one-day weekend I had this weekend. And I am rambling on merrily – see what happens when I get thrown off my usual?

At any rate, I did manage some reading this weekend on Saturday but none today. And since I am not at home at the moment, typing this at a very quiet library circulation desk (shh, don’t tell anyone!), I cannot post about Lolita which I finished last week. It will have to wait. No, today all I can do is ramble and now point you to a marvelous letter written by C.S. Lewis to a young fan in Florida, USA in 1956. What a generous and kind man he is in his letter. The girl must have sent him something she wrote and asked for writing advice. Here is his general advice:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite

Good advice for any writer of any age. Pop over to Letters of Note to read the entire letter.

And now I shall cease my rambling and get back to doing actual library work. As you were!

Filed under: Letters

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Spent a good part of today kneeling and lying on the garage floor painting...and repainting...letters.

I think I already mentioned that I wasn't excited about painting letters and, yes, I did overfuss it.  The more I tried to refine the letters, the less I liked them (and the more they seemed to draw attention away from the mural).  In the end, I went back to fairly loose letters (sans serif).  The title simply reads:  Celebrate the Harvest - Santa Maria Valley (across the bottom of 3 panels)


I also worked on detailing the leaves around the pumpkins and building a little more contrast in that area.


Now, I'm a little more excited about working on the mural again.  I will be moving some panels tonmorrow to (finally) detail the field beneath the wave.  There'll be a little bit of greenery and some dots of red (strawberries) to pull a teensy bit more color into those first two panels.

At least I won't have to lay on the floor for the next phase!

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Over at The Rumpus, middle-grade author Cecil Castelluci will coordinate the new Letters For Kids program–a subscription service giving readers mail from authors who write for kids.

According to the launch page, participants will receive “two letters a month written by middle-grade authors like Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler, Adam Rex, Kerry Madden, Natalie Standiford, Susan Patron, Rebecca Stead, Cecil Castelluci, and more.” The service will cost $4.50 per month for U.S. readers, and $9 international readers. The project will expand upon The Rumpus’ Letters in the Mail program for adults.  Check it out:

Some of the letters will be illustrated. Some will be written by hand. It’s hard to say! We’ll copy the letters, fold them, put them in an envelope, put a first class stamp on the envelope, and send the letters to you (or your child) … Six is pretty much the perfect age to start checking your mailbox for actual letters. And if you’ve waited until you were ten, well, you’re four years behind but still, it’s not too late. And if you’re sixteen, that’s OK, there’s still something of the kid left. And if you’re sixty, well… OK. You’re young at heart.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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May/June 2012 Horn Book

I want to thank you for publishing the piece by Hilary Rappaport (“On the Rights of Reading and Girls and Boys”). I really appreciated seeing some of my concerns about the gender divide in reading articulated so well. I have examined my biases related to literature and preferences, and have made adjustments in the way I think about them, as a result of the Guys Read movement. I’m glad for that. But I, too, am troubled by the push to further compartmentalize our young people by dividing the world of books into those for boys and those for girls.

I’m a huge fan of Jon Scieszka, but after hearing him speak at ALA in 2005, I was distressed to the point of writing him a letter, excerpted here:

I was troubled by your speech, especially considering that you spoke after a teenage boy who was gutsy enough to talk about how much he loves being in a book club and reading a huge variety of things. Not all boys (or girls, for that matter) fit the very specific gender roles you outlined. Not all boys like hockey, even if your son does. Not all boys are going to be satisfied with books that are pulled into a separate section for guys, and many girls will be less likely to pick up books if they are labeled as “guy” books.

It seems like there must be ways to validate and highlight a variety of reading while not pigeonholing people into behaving a certain way. Libraries have traditionally been a haven for boys who are not your typical “guy guys” (as James Howe puts it), and it makes me cringe to hear someone as charming and well-respected as you are implying that there is only one type of boy.

Please pass on my thanks to Hilary Rappaport for her column!

Leah Langby
Elk Mound, Wisconsin

 

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I was at a school recently where the students had read and analyzed my books for elements like theme, purpose, characters, etc.

They also noted what they called, "Hot Shot Words and Phrases" from the books. 

Here are some of the ones they noted:

the pearly gates of heaven
a tough nut to crack
a little tornado of excitement
say your prayers and kiss the earth good-bye
dern
jerked
bumfuzzled
whomper-jawed
hot-to-trot
bejeezus
chicken hair
rickety
yakking

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Dear Barbara O'Connor:

Thank you very much for visiting our school. 
I loved your poodle pin. It was very bling bling.
You are very funny.
You seem like a skilled dancer.
Thank you for visiting our school and shaking my hand.

Your Reader Forever,

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From a fan of How to Steal a Dog:

Dear Barbara O'Connor:


I like Mookie because of his three fingered hand when he waved with his three fingered hand.

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Danielle’s recent foray into PostCrossing and her blog post about it and letter writing sent me off to the Letter Writer’s Alliance website she linked and where I promptly decided to join. I now have my very own membership card and an LWA button and I just sent off today requesting a pen pal about whom everything will be a mystery other than that s/he wants to exchange letters with someone. I am very excited about it. It takes me back to when I was a kid and had several international pen pals. What a pleasure that was.

Poking around the LWA website I found reference to a book called Good Mail Day: A Primer for Making Eye-popping Postal Art. Lucky me my public library has a copy and I wallowed in this lovely book over the weekend.

It turns out I have been doing a sort of postal art for years since I generally decorate letters I send with stickers. But this book takes envelope decoration to a whole other level. Not that stickers aren’t okay, they are, but there is so much more possibility that I never thought of before. The best thing is, the authors stress over and over, that you do not need to be able to draw or consider yourself artistic in any way in order to create postal art. All you need to do is be willing to let your imagination go and experiment.

Collage is big in mail art and suddenly when I look around I see potential sources for collage everywhere – finally something junk mail is useful for! There is also great potential for rubber stamps and drawing and making abstract designs from things like string dipped in ink or drawing around interesting shapes in different colored crayon, ink or pencil. There are also people who make their own “postage stamps” from made up countries. It all sounds like such good fun I had a craving to go raid an art supply store. I have refrained, for now, as I requested a bunch of books from the public library instead. Much cheaper.

The books I requested are on calligraphy and lettering as well as one on making rubber stamps. I don’t know if this will lead me to join a mail art “network” or not, but it’s been so long since I’ve played with arts and crafts that I’m having fun just thinking about making stuff. And if I do decide to dive in, I already have an idea for my own “postage issuing authority,” the land I am so familiar with, Biblio Orbis. You can probably imagine for yourself what sort of theme those stamps would/ will have. But, I get ahead of myself.

If you want to learn more about mail art or glean ideas for sprucing up your envelopes, Good Mail Day is a good place to start. If you want to get an idea about how simple or elaborate mail art can be, check out the blog for The International Union of Mail Artists. Anyone can be a mail artist!

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