text + elit = pretty colors
Appropriately, this week a friend from undergrad sent me a link to this website. The website is published by a woman who has taken on this pretty bizarre project. In order to better understand love and how to love, she started writing letters to specific people in her life and sending them to strangers. That’s the text part of her project. But she creates a sort of elit by color-coding each type of letter she writes (for example, purple is to her crushes and blue is to her family), and then each person gets a different hue of the color category that they belong to (she has written over 300 of these letters). So, a list of her letters looks kind of like this:
Pretty weird, right? Here is a link to her site: http://www.sleeptrip.com/300loveletters/2.html Some of the blocks of colors are linked to copies of her letters, so click around.
That’s pretty wild. Just thinking of the textuality of them individuality and collectively. Very interesting…..
For sure. I forgot to mention, she taped all the letters to the outside of the envelopes so that the letters could be read by anyone who came in contact with the envelopes (i.e. the mail employees?).
Also, I realized that I had been referring to the author of this site as a woman. This was partially an assumption. Their name is “Asia,” and I’ve never heard Asia as a man’s name, but I guess it’s possible. I just realized that this may have been a false assumption on my part. Just FYI.
I think this project actually seems extremely cathartic! I want to start a book where I write letters to people so I can get it off my chest… but I’d never have the testicular fortitude to show them to anyone…
I completely agree that the writing process can be an emotional release. I am curious as to why she chose to code them with colors…. off to the website I go.
I liked this. It made me think about when we were talking about art last week, and questioning if some were art and what made it art. This is my book would be art. Anything that takes me to another place is art, and those colors definitely did that.
I am still thinking about that art/literature question. I tend to be rather formalistic as far as the literary analysis goes. I percept literature more in terms of tropes and textual elements. One can definitely talk about metaphors and, possibly, allusions that some piece of art creates, but it seems to be impossible to describe it from the point of view of its narratological elements one can trace in interactive games and cut-ups, which in spite of their occasional resistence to traditional textual coherence with its linear syntax can be still referred to as a narrative, and thus as a literature.