Fetish

I have a weird fascination with letterhead.

I received Scripps letterhead in the mail today, so I may send out official business as an affiliate. I remember when I was considering applying elsewhere for my PhD and wanted to apply to Yale and Columbia just so I could receive rejection letters from an Ivy League school. Somehow, the thought that my name would be imprinted on their letterhead ensnared me. My name would be in their system. Their sacred institution would be indelibly marked by my simple, silly name.

And now Scripps.

For totally different reasons, I was thrilled when the chair of the department informed me that he would send me letterhead so I could send letters out as a faculty member. I can also get business cards printed up, if I choose. And so my textual fetish moves into a different dimension, one where the contact point between my name and their paperstock provides a locus for my academic desire. Perhaps it is because of what the letterhead represents: I have officially been accepted into something. Or, perhaps it is because I have a completely masochistic relationship to insitutions (and I mean this in the Deleuzian sense of masochism) and so my possession of their letterhead provides a double fetish: textual and institutional (as if the two are ever really far apart).

Cream paper. Black and green lettering. Lovely.
Though I have to say that cream paper with sepia lettering and linen weave would have been extraordinary.