What is this maud-l listserv?
According to Peni Griffin,
The Maudeleines are a mailbox-stuffing bunch. Recent topics
include:
racism in Gone With The Wind,
hotdish recipes, the awful things little girls do to Barbie and why
grown women applaud them, what to ask Walter Mosley, using novels as
historical research material, a recipe for fake snot, what current
books
will be classics taught in the classrooms of the future, how to spend
Valentine's Day, member pregnancies, proms, and grandchildren,
whether Tony
would have nominated Joe for class president if he'd known how Joe
felt
about Betsy, Cubism, why art is not discussed in the Betsy-Tacy books
the
way music and literature are, who liked/hated high school and why,
books for
sale cheap, what Sharyn November is wearing, and onion sandwiches.
Theoretically, members can reduce their mail load by selecting topics,
such
as KIDLIT, LIT, B-T, SALE, and GENERAL -- but in practice almost all
the
subject lines include the word GENERAL and you really don't want to
lose
those posts because that's where all the juicy stuff is. So no, don't
get
on -- you don't want to have this much fun.
According to Katie Watts,
The amount of mail can be amazing; we generally recommend
you either give up sleeping or cooking meals and cleaning
the kitchen -- your choice.
We ask that if you have something to say to just one or two people,
you
e-mail them privately because of the amount of mail traffic going on.
Even us old timers [on the listserv] were new once.
Most of us seemed to feel most comfortable lurking for
several weeks or months, though there were
postings that intrigued us. Many lurk still.
It is remarkable how alike, yet how dissimilar we are.
Most seem to have careers that involve words -- writers,
grad students, librarians, publishing houses, editors.
Bios of many of us are kept organized by KC.
Dawn keeps a birthday list so we can send birthday greetings.
And Wendy maintains a most-wanted books list that we all carry
around to book sales.
According to Sharyn November,
The Maudlist is one of the best listservs I've seen
-- more like a kaffeeklatsch than anything else.
Yes, we talk about the books, but we also
exchange life stories and recipes and jokes and
mutual support. In fact, I even stayed with Carla
Kozak when I went on vacation -- and no, I had
never met her before. Maudvibes are sent when
people are worried and blue, and they work! Trust
me.
According to Beverly Jones,
Does it strike some of you as ironic that we share our love for BT
through the internet? I did't get online until February when I had to
for a school project, as I had seen it as an evil
anti-book-and-human-contact social destructor. In one of my English
courses I read a short story about how people lived in isolated cells
under the earth, eating food pills to save time and devoting all of
their
life and time to "ideas" which they shared via computer. I thought
this
was a prophecy of internet, but now that I am on, I love it. I
thought
it was wonderful last week when one of us was embarassed to admit that
she plans to name a future daughter "Betsy." Our love of BT is a very
rare interest, but with our community it has become common. This
isn't
meant to be a deep thought, but one of my friends was teasing me for
my
about-face from hate to love of e-mail.
According to Julie Chuba,
I really enjoy all the little pieces of people's
lives--little anecdotes, memories, traditions,
different things people notice about books or
stories I've read, etc. It's so much fun to hear
about them, even though it may not have much to do
with Maud Hart Lovelace or Betsy-Tacy. Becky's
yummy-sounding meals, Katie's 4th of July, learning
about Alice Austen from Diane, Poe's songs of the day,
strange names (Dick Trickle finished me), Marsha Q.'s
valiant attempts to keep on us on Betsy track, finding
out about new books and movies and music--it's just
a day brightener for me! I feel as though I a know a
bit about a lot of you. Even though we probably have
very dissimilar tastes and opinions and lifestyles, it's
kind of fun to "get together" this way.