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Dear Online
Reader:
One of
the branches of literature is dying. Chewed away by the Dead Letter
Orifice, perhaps. Killed by email.
Hang out
in a bookstore enough, you notice a small but persisting branch
of literature--the Letters of great men and women; the letters
of poets to poets, artists to artists, writers to family and friends
and editors, statesmen to statesmen, journalists to whoever will
listen. It’s epistolary literature, and it’s a fascination. It’s
a look inside the head of these artists and doers of great deeds;
it offers personal time with Scott Fitzgerald and Philip K Dick.
Sometimes--as with the Phil Dick letters--the insight can be a
bit chilling. Some of Dick’s letters were to the FBI, clueing
them in to the conspiracies against him. Sometimes the letters
are uplifting; sometimes they’re good literature in themselves.
The letters of poet and playwright WB Yeats are both. The letters
of Groucho Marx are, as you might expect, often hilarious--but
they’re also very well written.
Groucho
corresponded with TS Eliot, among others, because Groucho loved
Eliot’s work--Groucho loved literature. Intelligent people of
his age respected literature--and Letter writing was respected
as an art in itself. It was the intimate art, perhaps. It was
understood as something to be cherished. Someone took a slice
of their valuable time and they gave it to you, gave you their
undivided attention as they wrote that letter. I have letters
from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Michael Moorcock, RA Macavoy,
and others, which were sometimes quite lengthy, were always interesting,
well crafted--were literature, if minor literature, in themselves.
One wonders
how often those writers write letters anymore. Surely they use
email instead.
Email
sometimes contains witticisms. It can be literary, if the writer
is so inclined. I know that. But email is rarely saved for long.
It’s rare to print out an email and keep it--for most people.
So supposing you get an inspiring, literary email--you may forward
it to others, give it a little extra life in one sense, but chances
are it will sink into the online pond with but a transitory ripple.
And we don’t always know whose letter is going to be significant
when we receive it…
Comment
to be made in the year 2030:
"You
know I got some good emails from that guy long before he ran for
President…but, you know, who prints out every email…I mean, they
were good but--I didn’t save them. If only I’d known!"
A whole
spectra of literature is going dark--because it’s going email.
A great
deal of what we know about the great men and women of earlier
times--and also the ordinary men and women, like the pioneers--comes
from our perusal of surviving mail. Their letters. We could be
entering a kind of historical dark age as far as epistolary research
is concerned.
Yes there
are people who still write letters as literature, but it’s getting
rarer. (So is, I assume, a subset of modern art called "correspondence
art" which thrived in the 70s and early 80s--involving collages,
unusual materials sent by letter, artful envelopes and so forth).
The email
form, for one thing, doesn’t encourage coherent literary expression.
There’s a whole state of mind that goes with being online--and
for most people, it’s quite hasty and superficial. Especially
when writing emails. Something about email--perhaps an unconscious
understanding of email’s ephemeral nature--leads us to just whip
the things out thoughtlessly. I do it myself all the time. They
are more or less in form like the notes passed by grade school
kids in class. They are superficial, they are sloppy, they are
telegraphic--they are…hasty.
In a recent
column in the San Francisco Examiner, "You’ve got e-maul
;-)", free-lancer Eileen Mitchell wrote (quoted by permission):
hi
everyone!
Recently
I read an associated press article about e-mail that was rather
interesting. the premise was that email is changing the very foundation
of acceptable writing standars as we know it! statistics indicate
that most business correspondence now takes place threw e-mail,
and experts say people who usethis form of communication are becoming
increasingly informal and sloppy.
the
artacal noted that spell check isn’t being used, grammetical errors
are rampant, and people are using various shortcuts like writing
in all lower case, or worse yet, maybe their writing there messages
in all upper case which, as everyone knows, is the online version
of shouting.
im
not sure I agree with the e-mail reprimand, I respond to approximately
50
e-mails
a day and I maintain my professionalism in EACH AND EVERYONE ONE!!!
no less than if I was writing a hardcopy letter : - )
…no
longer must the employee of the 21st century abide
by yesterday’s puritanical rules of grammer and coorrespondance.
Those have gone the way of carbon paper and rotary phones, my
friend…
There
was a lot more of this clever piece--I quoted it piecemeal. And
how did I get permission to quote it? By e-mail! The medium is
perniciously expedient.
Recently
I found a copy of a letter I wrote to a movie actor friend--an
actual printed letter sent through the mail--from Spring 1993.
The actor has since become a much more prestigious person--a minor
movie star. And in due course, we lost touch. But here’s a bit
of my letter to him, contrasting with how it might’ve been in
email:
April
14 93
Dear----------
It was
a rhapsodic fuzzbox-textured squeal of feedback segueing into
a sardonic tune, seeing you at C-- and R--'s dinner party. I trust
you are not worried about forthcoming events in L.A. Simply take
the basic precautions: the usual shotgun boobytraps at your backdoor,
an electrically-charged exterior to your car, an array of customized
weapons woven into your clothing, a specially trained dog who
can detect the testosterone imprint of an enraged LAPD officer;
another canine who knows the pheromone exudation of the Crips;
and a box full of rapidly proliferating weasels. The bare necessity
should do. I advise against bodyguards. They're tacky.
Of course
it could happen that looters may decide, as we discussed on the
phone, to loot Beverly Hills and Bel Air et al, and maybe they'll
loot celebrities as well as their goods. "What'd you loot?" "I
got a gold rolex and Vanna White." "You got Vanna White? Damn.
All I could find was Tony Bennett. But my cousin, he looted Arsenio
Hall, he's got him at home washing his car."
I'm joking
now, but by the time you receive this I suppose it may no longer
be a joking matter. Well, either as a matter of timing or intent,
I've often been the exclusive distributor for a special brand
of bad taste.
[some discussion
about books, then:]
I enjoyed
hanging with you both enormously; B--- you must know you have
done very well to marry so charming and intelligent a person as
L--. I look forward to further palaver and interrogatory ratiocination.
Also a chat.
Yours
sincerely,
SAME LETTER
IN EMAIL:
hi - cool
to see you--watch out with the maybe-riots, could get ugly, but
then so am I--good meeting you guys--your misses is tres cool,
bright lady. Stay in touch bro.
##
That unfortunately
is the way I tend to write in email. Was the former ‘better’?
I don’t know--but I know it was a conscious attempt to write an
amusing, whimsically literate letter. In email--I just don’t bother.
So that’s
my Internet anxiety for the month, my friends. If you’ve skimmed
this far, then I can only conclude by saying to you…
Yours sincerely,
John Shirley
Copyright
© 2000 John Shirly Rights Reserved
John shirley
is the author of seminal cyberpunk novels CITY COME A WALKIN and
ECLIPSE (Babbage Press) and co-screenwriter of THE CROW.
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