I spent almost all day Saturday at the American Philatelic Society’s Annual  Stamp Show.  Lucky for me, a new stamp collector, the show was just down the 95 in Richmond, VA.  I took a lot of photos, made a lot of exciting purchases, and learned a whole lot– I’m still processing it and reading through some of the literature I picked up.  All week I’ll bring you some snaps and notes on the show.

Believe me when I say there were a ton of exhibits– the displays took up nearly 700 frames!  Just having 1 day at the show was tough, I felt like I could only glance at each display.  Like when I visited the Capitol Stamp Exhibition, there was a lot of glare on the glass.  My apologies for the photographs’ quality.  I assure you I did the best I could.

Today we’ll take a look at my favorite exhibit, and the one I spent the most time looking at, a non-competitive series of mail art items from the Island of Snark (full frame pictured above).  The creator, Gerald M. King, has done a number of other fictional stamp designs including some great ones to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland.  The series takes as its starting point the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark” and assumes that the group who went out in search of the snark stayed on the Island/Isle of Snark for at least 25 years and reported back to the Queen.

The stamps pictured above commemorate the vanishing of the Baker.  Like the Baker himself, the image gets harder and harder to see and the denomination also decreases! [Read more →]

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

“Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” is available online via From the Fishouse and originally appeared in Southern Humanities Review, 35.2, (spring 2001).  It is reprinted from Charon’s Manifest (NC Writers’ Network, 2005).

A lobster roll from the Net Result

A lot of shellfish that Will gathered…

Corn that wasn’t this green in real life…

Potato wedges…

Water and (evidence of) roasted beets.

On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard with dear friends from college…

Buying Wine
Sebastian Matthews

When we were boys, we had a choice: stay in the car or else
follow him into Wine Mart, that cavernous retail barn,

down aisle after aisle — California reds to Australian blends
to French dessert wines — past bins loaded like bat racks

with bottles, each with its own heraldic tag, its licked coat
of arms, trailing after our father as he pushed the ever-filling cart,

bent forward in concentration, one hand in mouth stroking
his unkempt mustache, the other lofting up bottles like fruit

then setting them down, weighing the store of data in his brain
against the cost, the year, the cut of meat he’d select at the butcher’s:

a lamb chop, say, if this Umbrian red had enough body to marry,
to dance on its legs in the bell of the night; or some scallops maybe,

those languid hearts of the sea, a poet’s dozen in a baggy,
and a Pinot Grigio light enough not to disturb their salty murmur.

Often, we’d stay in the car until we’d used up the radio
and our dwindling capacity to believe our father

might actually “Just be back,” then break free, releasing
our seatbelts, drifting to the edges of the parking lot like horses

loosed in a field following the sun’s endgame of shade; sometimes
I’d peer into the front window, breath fogging the sale signs,

catching snippets of my father’s profile appearing and disappearing
behind the tall cardboard stacks. Once I slipped back into the store,

wandering the aisles, master of my own cart, loading it to bursting
for the dream party I was going to throw. But mostly, like now,

as I search for the perfect $12 bottle, I’d shuffle along, dancing bear
behind circus master, and wait for my father to pronounce, tall

in his basketball body, wine bottles like babies in his hands, “Aha!”

Available online via From the Fishouse and first published in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

An anti-Stamp Act image: “O! The fatal stamp”

While visiting the Congressional Stamp Exhibition last week, I overheard someone mentioned that the “US was started because of a stamp.” And that’s true to an extent. The Stamp Act of 1765 was a real thorn in the side of colonists, imposing as it did a tax on all sorts of printed matter and a variety of paper goods. The stamps colonists were required to buy are in a class called revenue stamps and are not really the same thing as postage stamps.  In fact, since the Penny Black wasn’t issued until 1840 the idea of postage stamps probably didn’t even really exist to Colonists.

It wasn’t until 1847 that Congress approved the issuance of stamps to pre-pay postage.  The US issued postage stamps just 7 years after the UK issued the world’s first postage stamp: the famous Penny Black.

Of course, this is a really small thing I’m quibbling about.  After all, stamps of almost all kinds signify that someone has already paid for something, be it a service or a tax.  Philatelists collect revenue stamps much like they collect postage stamps.

I’m hesitant, however, to suggest that the stamps at the center of the Stamp Act are somehow equivalent to postage stamps; they symbolized very different things– governmental authority v. governmental service– and as such occupy very different places in the public’s imagination (or mine, at least).

One of my cousins is getting married!  We’ve sent him and his soon-to-be wife some art for their new home, a letterpress print I made way back in 2006.  It features a this quote from William Saroyan:

Standing at the edge of our city,
a man could feel that we had made
this place of streets and dwellings
in the stillness of the desert, and
that we had done a brave thing.

Or a man could feel that we had
made this city in the desert and
that it was a fake thing and that
our lives were empty lives, and
that we were the contemporaries
of the jack rabbits.

I was worried this might be a bit… drab for a wedding gift.  So I mounted it on some acid free patterned paper and stuck it in a glass frame.  I think that makes it chipper(er) but doesn’t really detract from the print itself.

You, dear readers, can purchase an unframed version of this print in my Etsy shop!  It’s just $20.00 for an unframed print.  I assure you that it’s lovely and looks delightful on walls and desks.

My apologies re: the photography– I’ve really struggled with it.  Since I don’t have a DSLR it’s tough to get close-ups of something as small as text.  I assure you that the print is quite crisp and the paper is French Paper company’s “cement blue”– a tough color for a digital camera to “read.”

Thanks to my friend Dan, I’ve found a suitable answer to my desperate question regarding music not unlike the Deadwood theme: William Elliott Whitmore.  Frankly, Mr. Whitmore, where have you been all my life?!  A bearded, tattooed man described as having “a voice that sounds like the reincarnation of an old gospel preacher from the 1920s and [who has] a fascination with sin, death, and redemption to match?”  Yes, please!

I haven’t been able to stop listening to his records since Dan mentioned him… which means, pretty much, that all 5 of them I downloaded from iTunes have been on constant rotation in our apartment this week.  Thank goodness Jon was out of town, he tends to get annoyed when I listen to the same record for the 15th time in a row.

One of the perks of living in Washington, and I know I’ve mentioned it before, is access to the truly incredible National Postal Museum.  Just last week I took a morning off work to visit the Congressional Stamp Exhibition at the US Capitol, well– very near the Capitol in one of the House office buildings. Several members of congress collect stamps, including U.S. Representatives Joe Pitts (R-PA), Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI).  I’m so glad this is a bi-partisan hobby… though it’s awfully male.  Where are the female stamp collectors?

Perhaps the most unique collection belongs to a fellow Texan, Rep. Silvestre Reyes.  He specializes in anti-US propaganda stamps issued by North Korea!

More images and information after the jump… [Read more →]

Lessons from the Garden
Richard Newman

This morning little mushroom heads,
like rusted dimes on toothpick stalks,
sprang up in our flower box.
An hour later they were dead,

withered in the summer heat.
Each spore stretched out its mortal coil
through dried-up peat and city soil
to die upon a slab of concrete.

With mouthless moths and butterflies,
the male flies free, no need for food,
and mates to spawn a hungry brood
then lives another hour and dies,

unable even to watch its spawn
chew my tomatoes to the ground.
If they had mouths their song would sound
pointless, pointless over the lawn.

Inside, my daughter’s forced to practice.
Her fingers blunder down the keys,
ignoring accidentals. She’s
thirteen, more prickly than a cactus.

Outside the yard is newly mown—
I hear the chirps of brazen birds,
wrong notes accented by swear words,
and realize lately how she’s grown

almost as moody as my ex-wife.
A year ago she loved to play.
She hates it now and pounds away
a stubborn song of loss and life.

Available online via Poetry Daily