Airline Reading
En route to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies for a work retreat, he pursues enRoute, the in-flight magazine of Air Canada out of curiosity, and is surprised to see it filled with literary writing. This is what he copies into the note book he carries around in his pocket, starting with this very relevant gem:
"Spa V at Hotel Victoria offers a blackberry reflexology massage for the Blackberry addict"
Shyam Selvadurai attends the Annual Festival de la Correspondence in Grignan, France, and muses on what we might be losing as our epistolary habits shift from ink and paper to email:
“But apart from what is lost in historical value, what do we lose personally by not writing letters anymore? In this turret, as the cello concert gets underway, the answer comes to me. From rereading my own correspondence, I have met a self almost forgotten.”
Todd Swift is the world's only poetry impresario, who brings his impresario's touch that includes bands drinks performance artists and sword swallowers to your regular poetry reading. The idea is to turn poetry reading into a mass spectacle. The only question is his mind is if poetry turns to spectacle where would Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop fit?
Digital story telling may meet our need to “resocalize” somewhat but nothing will ever beat huddling up to a wrinkled grandmother with her hand caressing your back as she tells you another story - an old memory turned into a tale or a some tale from the rich storehouse of mythology, such the one on why the moon waxes and vanes - told in the dark
Travel Notes
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Blue
www.prettybluesalwar.blogspot.com
Rereading email
But what Selvadurai forgets is that once we write a pen-and-paper letter to someone, it is theirs (unless we make carbons of each letter a la Marge Piercy, with the idea that they'll all be needed for a memoir someday). If the pen-and-paper letter is gone, it can't be reread.
Email, on the other hand, can be perpetually reread, as copies keep in both our own boxes and in the box of the recipient. Can we not find our old former selves through email as well?
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In theory, yes
Blue, we can re-read the email we send and receive. But just going by my personal experience, I have had at least four or so email accounts so far, and none of those emails in them have survived. Perhaps such vanishing is all good, given that some of those sets of correspondence had to do with painful life experiences.
To me, email as an epistolary artifact tends to not make grade as an old fashioned letter. It lacks the tactile sense - in a poem, I think, I have used in some fashion, the fact that our fingerprints do touch those that the other's left on a paper - of a pen & paper letter. Also given the speed of email, it tends to be brief vs. associative and meandering as good letters tend to be.
And if these arguments doesn't convince you, email me (sashi dot dandamudi at gmail dot com your post box no etc, and I will write you a regular letter. ;)
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Consider it done
I've sent the information you've requested. Now I'm deliciously delighted to think of what you might send in return.
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elizabeth
reading old journals these last several days, I (like selvadurai) am distracted the encounter with past selves....
I am as fond as ever as old-fashioned letterwriting, but I am also bad at it, save when traveling. What I love about email is both the density of the correspondence that can build by rapid reply back-and-forth, and be saved, and the preservation of both sides of a dialogue. Once I was promised a sheaf of print-outs, a preserved conversation, as a gift (some of them having gone missing when I was forced to switch accounts, and stayed up all one night transferring the precious cargo of three years' time). Thank heaven for Gmail and its capacious archives.
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Digital Emphera
can it be trusted, Elizabeth? Perhaps not. But then I have a Luddite/ "conservative" streak embedded in me.
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