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behind blown eyes: dead letter orifice
by john shirley
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.