Friday, March 12, 2010

Back where we started

Starting, well, now, this blog has a new old name - Hakkarainen Clipping Service.
In the 1950s, my mother would send newspaper and magazine clippings, books and other items of interest to friends, family, and chance strangers. She nicknamed this practice Hakkarainen Clipping Service with the tag line "No obligation to read, acknowledge, or return."
She continued the service through decades of growth, change, hard times and good, divorce, remarriage and name change, in sickness and in health, until her death in 2000.
The service was driven by a spirit of entanglement, knowing that an idea was important to someone else and it was her job to get news of that idea to that person. The ideas could be about history or politics or Jungian analysis or religion or music or economics or medicine or technology or any and all in between.
In reclaiming this name, I get to take a fresh look at the ways in which I learned how to think and write, at my mother's knee, the smell of mimeograph ink filling the room.

2 comments:

eba said...

I like the name - sounds like it could be the title of Alexander McCall Smith's next novel. Congratulations on this new chapter; I look forward to the continuing adventures!

Karl Hakkarainen said...

Thanks, Liz.
I have a few more items along these lines. My mother had some stationery printed with the logo on it. I have a sample somewhere in our office. There's also a similar item with Hilary Price (Rhymes with Orange) that I'll add in a bit.

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