The Core Intentions of Our Project:
To stimulate discussion,
questioning, excitations. To learn what people want to learn about. To incite interests, passions, and concerns.
To give these words, agency, life, reality. To sharpen our own thinking through
discussions, challenges, inter-disciplinarity, symphilosophieren (Friedrich Schlegel’s term for inter-related
philosophizing among a group of thinkers devoted to shared causes).
To take what is good and useful
about academic learning and appropriate it for our own neighborhood
purposes.
You Might be Interested in
Participating if:
You are or would like to be a writer: One intention of the project
is to provide people who might be inhibited or blocked in their writing a
non-threatening medium for putting their thoughts in order and inviting
responses.
You are or would like to continue your studies outside of the academy:
We would like to create a community of auto-didactic scholarship outside of the walls
of the university or institution, for people who crave deeper study and
discussion.
You are an inventor, experimenter, crafts person: We would love to create a venue for people to
share their expertise, their skills, and their knowledge of traditions and innovations
for new practices in art, craft, building, scientific tinkering, world-making.
You are an utopian, an activist,
a reformer, a concerned citizen: We
hope to encourage thinking that is directly related to the continual
improvement of our lives and our world and any discourse which engages in
creative critique and explorations of social practices and possible new modes
of living.
HOW WE ENVISION THIS ALL HAPPENING:
We are looking to stimulate and be
stimulated by an exchange of letters which explore the interests and concerns
of our wider community. In the tradition
of dialogic, open-ended inquiry, we are not looking for finished, perfected
conclusions or completed works of art, but rather IDEAS IN PROGRESS. The
letters can be as sketchy as you like, and need not be typed or even proofread,
but we are hoping that you use the process of writing to synthesize and take
your ideas to the next level and that you do include some measure of research into your own ideas. We want to know what you
are reading, and hope in this way to widen the chorus of voices and ideas beyond
our local scope and to pay tribute to everyone everywhere who has cared enough
to deeply investigate some idea, some occurrence, some phenomenon, some dream
and to put it into considered words.
WHY LETTERS, WHY WRITING, WHY
THROUGH THE MAIL?
We have chosen to limit the discussion to letters through
the mail for a number of reasons. For one thing, letters are personal and
suggest a connection to our lives. They tend to link whatever abstract thoughts
we are having to our everyday concerns and experiences. Letters have traditionally been written widely outside of institutions and are often not regulated
or controlled by old boys’ networks, by marketplace concerns, by publishers,
governments, etc.. They require very little in the way of overhead,
electricity, machinery, technology. Letters have traditionally been means of
subversive, peripheral, underground communication, utilized particularly by
women to spread ideas and share experiences.
We believe that the act of writing a letter on paper and putting it in
an envelope to mail off encourages a different level of reflection and focus
than an electronically-generated missive (email). We want to encourage this
sort of concentrated quiet in all of our lives.
Writing (as opposed to group discussion, lectures, etc), also encourages
a depth of responsibility, personal exploration and depth of thinking. There are special kinds of
insights actuated through the difficult act of putting ideas into sentences and committing them to paper; the process
demands a sort of honesty of thinking, a struggle and commitment, a level of
clarity and self-examination not to be matched by the looser, more chaotic
process of communal conversation (as important and beautiful as conversation
is).
We are also committed to doing our part to make sure that
our postal workers have something more noble to carry than junk mail.
IN WHAT WAY MIGHT YOU PARTICIPATE?
1.
Answer a letter in writing, through the
mail. Respond to the ideas presented in
a letter you receive, provide further resources or information that might add
to or challenge the writer’s premises, ask the writer some questions.
2.
Send a copy of the letter you receive to someone
else who you think would find it interesting or have something to say about it.
Keep the discussion moving!
3.
Request a letter from a particular person on a
particular topic or question. Does someone you know spend a lot of time
studying or practicing something? Ask her or him to explain it to us.
4.
Write your own letter and send it to whomever
you please (including Becca and me so we
have a copy of all that goes out). Also make and send a copy of the credo and the explanation at the
bottom of the letters we sent you (feel free to handwrite or paint or print the
credo and explanation however you please). Since some of you said that you did
not know to whom to send your letters, you will find a morphing and up-dated list of addresses here on this blog. People will be able to add their addresses
and also take them off the list when and if they do not want to be included in
further mailings. (If you do not want your address on this semi-public forum,
please let us know and we will remove it.)
5.
Submit a letter to our Dollar Scholars fellowship. Since the cost of copying and mailing
each letter comes to approximately .97 cents, we are initiating the Dollar
Scholar fellowship. To be considered, please send Becca and me each a copy of a
letter on the topic of letters by
April 1st 2013. Two fellowships will be awarded covering the cost of
postage and copying and including administrative handling (folding, stamping,
mailing) of 50 letters from each recipient.
6.
Donate money, stamps, envelopes, copying
facilities, ink, stationary to the cause. Please make checks payable to Fools’
Gold Artists’ Fund.
Thank You for Your Patience and Creative
Collaboration! Most Sincerely,
Rebecca Mack & Genese Grill
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