in praise of paper

I know there are a few  hold-outs there because you send me comments - people who love paper and the messages written on it.  I've told you about the granddaughter of a friend who taught herself cursive writing because it isn't taught in the schools any more, and who wrote her grandfather a LETTER that he posted on the fridge door. There used to be an expression, something like a promise "not being worth the paper it's printed on". Let me tell you, paper, good paper, is worth a lot.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Store issues awesome catalogues (online, though the mailed ones are nice, too). I have been buying Met cards (they used to be called hasti-notes) for a few years now and send special ones for special thank-yous.  The special ones are identified as "embellished cards"  and they are splendid. They end up on a lot of fridge doors. You can also buy beautiful postcards, not only with tourist pictures of lakes and mountains but also with art by famous artists or dazzling modern design.  Apparently the big card companies are not running out of customers as I feared.  They are producing more funky cards, and "embellished" thank-you cards and smaller, interesting paper good for just a few paragraphs.  Of course, people have to figure out what to say. One company, Hallmark, published a book, "On a Personal Note: A Guide to Writing Notes With Style" and it's a best-seller in its stores across the country.  It teaches people how to write messages worth keeping.  Twenty years ago now I won a fellowship at  The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe to work on a play about Alice James.  It gave me access to the Houghton LIbrary archives from which I was allowed to read the letters of Henry James to his sister Alice and hers to his.  The opening scene of my play flashed before me in that library as I read the words, still blood-warm, on the carefully preserved pages - well worth keeping. 

 

lines in the sand

 GK Chesterton said, "Art is knowing where to draw the line."  Ay, there's the rub.  Everyone is blogging these days, but is it art?  My blog certainly isn't.  But it is a cut above a diary.  I know that because I also keep a diary.  Now, there is banality in its lowest form.  I remember a New Yorker cartoon of a man standing in the waves on a shore talking into a tape recorder (it would be a smartphone now, I guess) and he's noting the time and date before he begins.  I do that.  So mock me.  I do.  But when I'm alone, which is most of the time and not only when I deliberately isolate myself like this, the only 'human' voice I hear all day is SIRI on my iPad Mini, giving me the weather.  So I need my diary with time and place noted to keep me centred and sane.  At least I know where I am, though not what i'm thinking, or if i am.  Thinking .  My diary certainly isn't art and neither is my blog.  I've been collecting bits and pieces, clippings and quotations and putting them in a blog folder for further consideration.  The folder is a portable commonplace book, or maybe a compost heap. I use it not for focus but for argument, discussion, development, yeah, well, maybe for some  focus.  It has good lines.  And it also keeps me humble.  McLuhan predicted that one day everyone would be artists, that is, would-be.  Wishing doesn't make it so.  His caution was that when everyone is an artist (or wanna-be) who will be left to appreciate it?  So everyone is blogging. So who is left to read the blogs? At least it doesn't use a lot of paper. Writing a blog on one's computer is like drawing lines in the sand.  Time will wash them away. Yeah, that's poetic.  Just press DISCARD.