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April 10, 2007

Letters and Such

This week I promised myself that I would get into work extra early so that I could complete various tasks that fall by the wayside during times like these (work reports due, term papers, vacation prep, etc.). Thus, I began my week with finishing up most of my Modern Letter Project assignments, the fruit of which the envelope of my April letter is above. While I was working on it three rambling thoughts crossed my mind:

• I somehow managed to incorporate the history of tuberculosis into my April letter. At first I found this troubling, however my sendee this month is an understanding person and I have great hopes that she will find humor in the...um, whimsy. I have developed a fascination with the early 20th century industry- mainly the marketing of spittoons and various accouterments for sleeping out of doors at all times of year. Spittoons are funny, especially if the advertisements use a handlebar mustached model.
• This Friday I discovered Google Books. Okay, I know I am late bloomer on this but my brain works more slowly that most. I'd had a meeting regarding the Google Empire that day and figured, "Hey, if I am going to talk about the services, perhaps I should actually use them first." Google Books is awesome. I plugged in my usual search terms related to my long-term research and wound up finding documents- many of which were in the public domain and fully downloadable- that I had been unable to find and generally unaware of for the past two years of academic and archival searching. Of those not totally accessible, I was able to find them pretty quickly in various libraries throughout the country. In that sense, I really liked Google Books because it didn't just put information at my fingertips. It helped clue me in to what was there and then I acquired most of it through conventional old school library ways. Neat.
• Back to the Modern Letter Project...and as I type this post I am reading my words and starting to feel really old. Or at least interweb-prude. A funny thing about the MLP- when Youngna and I launched it, it did not even occur to me that people would Google or MySpace or Facebook search their sendees. I was taken aback at first and then felt pretty foolish. It has been really interesting to read about people's thoughts and reactions as they move through the project- and even more interesting to realize that without the above technologies (insert blogging in there, too), I wouldn't know what was going on at all.

  That was a very long lead-in to my last thought. I have been thinking about the concept of the MLP mixed with retirement homes (older people, senior citizens, whatever...however you want to refer to that). A lot of intergenerational work has been done that focuses on grade school populations and senior citizens, however I am really curious about developing relationships between them and early adults (Generations X and Y, maybe?). I think a lot could be learned on both sides through true letter writing. I need to get on that idea...anyone work with senior populations?

Wow. This was a long post. Summary: tuberculosis, Google Books, intergenerational letters. Now it's time to get back to the real world. Be back in a few.

Posted by callalillie at April 10, 2007 2:22 AM | Fun Projects , Modern Letter Project , Random

COMMENTS

Posted by: craige at April 10, 2007 1:04 PM

Posted by: corie at April 10, 2007 1:10 PM

Posted by: Kelly at April 10, 2007 2:01 PM

Posted by: Chookooloonks at April 10, 2007 3:00 PM