{"id":17825,"date":"2019-09-06T02:04:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T02:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=17825"},"modified":"2019-09-07T08:03:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-07T08:03:30","slug":"17825-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/17825-2\/","title":{"rendered":"I wrote a book about email \u2013 and found myself pining for the days of letter-writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randy Malamud<\/a>, Georgia State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Email has become so prevalent in our lives that I felt compelled to write about it<\/a> for a Bloomsbury series called \u201cObject Lessons\u201d that examines \u201cthe hidden lives of ordinary things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps I chose this topic because I wanted to be surprised by what I would learn. Email had always evoked the image of my energy, attention and intelligence being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather, bland formalities and corporate groupthink. But I hoped my literary training<\/a> could help me unearth some diamonds in the rough, some redeeming rhetorical force.<\/p>\n

It turns out my chief discovery was how much richer old-fashioned letters are. An email is like a letter shorn of almost everything people liked about letters: the feel and smell of stationery, the confident authority of letterhead, the art of penmanship, the closing signature in the writer\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

On paper, lives were lived, trysts arranged, manifestos mailed and wars waged; the shift from \u201ccommunication\u201d to \u201c.com\u201d has stripped away all of this historical and social value.<\/p>\n

The satisfaction of a letter \u2018done and signed\u2019<\/h2>\n

Literacy rates jumped globally<\/a> in tandem with the invention and expansion of mail service. People composed their letters with effort and pride, perhaps understanding that well-written correspondence wouldn\u2019t be thrown in the trash.<\/p>\n

The song \u201cLetters<\/a>,\u201d from Dave Malloy\u2019s 2012 musical \u201cNatasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,\u201d extols the joy and satisfaction of letter-writing: \u201cWe put down in writing what is happening in our minds.\u201d Once it\u2019s on the paper \u201cwe feel better \u2013 it\u2019s like some kind of clarity when the letter\u2019s done and signed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email is certainly convenient. But will there ever be an electronic equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s \u201cLetter from Birmingham Jail<\/a>,\u201d the literary correspondence<\/a> of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell or the epistolary passion<\/a> between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\u2018J\u2019Accuse!\u2019 was a siren that reverberated around the world.<\/span>
\nMus\u00e9e d’Art et d’Histoire du Juda\u00efsme<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00c9mile Zola\u2019s \u201cJ\u2019Accuse!\u201d was a letter \u2013 an open letter \u2013 to the French president, castigating the army for unlawfully jailing a Jewish officer. The letter traveled the world, inspiring others who sought to challenge those in power.<\/p>\n

Is there such a genre as an \u201copen email\u201d? The only thing that comes to mind is accidentally hitting reply-all.<\/p>\n

Letters changed storytelling: In Samuel Richardson\u2019s 1740 epistolary adventure, \u201cPamela; or, Virture Rewarded<\/a>,\u201d a 16-year-old servant named Pamela Andrews details her boss\u2019s sexual harassment in letters to her parents. Today it\u2019s considered the first novel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Letters spread the Gospel, with St. Paul\u2019s Epistles<\/a> disseminating early Christian teachings to the Corinthians, Romans and Thessalonians; in letters to Penthouse<\/a>, they channeled erotic desire.<\/p>\n

The value letters possess is perhaps reflected in their price.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis boat is giant in size and fitted up like a palatial hotel,\u201d a man named Alexander Holverson wrote from the Titanic the day before it sank. \u201cIf all goes well we will arrive in New York Wednesday AM.\u201d His letter sold for six figures<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n

And after President Abraham Lincoln received a petition from children asking him to free the slaves, he responded with a letter: \u201cPlease tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy.\u201d It brought in US$3.4 million<\/a> at a 2008 auction.<\/p>\n

Empty, ephemeral email<\/h2>\n

\u201cThere is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing, as there used to be in our time,\u201d grumbled a woman<\/a> at the turn of the 20th century. \u201cIt is a sort of go-as-you-please development, and the result is atrocious.\u201d<\/p>\n

This complaint<\/a> was prompted not by email but by the growing fad of sending postcards, which were popularized at Chicago\u2019s 1893 Columbian Exposition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Short, informal and comprised of dubiously grammatical prose, postcards, some feared, imperiled epistolary eloquence.<\/p>\n

Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Still, email seems particularly reductive. Nearly 300 billion are sent each day<\/a>, but I wonder if there will ever be a truly valuable email, a famous email or a celebrated email.<\/p>\n

Even when a presidential election turned on a collection of home-brew email \u2013 tens of thousands from Hillary Clinton\u2019s ignominious private server and another leaked batch from her campaign chair John Podesta \u2013 what information did they contain?<\/p>\n

In one, senior Clinton Foundation official Peter Huffman writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cQuestion: why do I use a \u00bc or \u00bd cup of stock at a time? Why can\u2019t you just add 1 or 2 cups of stock at a time b\/c the arborio rice will eventually absorb it anyway, right?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Podesta responds (with no time to edit, possibly because he is so busy losing an election):<\/p>\n

\u201cYes it with absorb the liquid, but no that\u2019s not what you want to do. The slower add process and stirring causes the rice to give up it\u2019s starch which gives the risotto it\u2019s creamy consistency.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Email is ultimately a paltry and often disappointing piece of text \u2013 grammatically challenged, disheveled and ephemeral. Often ignored or deleted, it ricochets through cyberspace in search of validation. Dealing with a cluttered inbox is a chore; emails that require a response loom.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s surprising how banal email is, given how intricately interwoven it is with our existence. Or maybe it\u2019s not surprising at all. Maybe it\u2019s just the mirror held up to life, and we are precisely as trite as our email suggests.\"The<\/p>\n

Randy Malamud<\/a>, Regents’ Professor of English, Georgia State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randy Malamud, Georgia State University Email has become so prevalent in our lives that I felt compelled to write about it for a Bloomsbury series called \u201cObject Lessons\u201d that examines \u201cthe hidden lives of ordinary things.\u201d Perhaps I chose this topic because I wanted to be surprised by what I would learn. Email had always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":17822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[147,1521,477,4310,3505,4309,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17825"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17829,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17825\/revisions\/17829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}