Are tweets our new correspondence?
I feel like every time I post, what I actually want to say is overshadowed by me apologizing to myself for never posting. So I'm not going to do that.
Since I last posted, some things have changed. One, I've been teaching bilingual kindergarten since the end of October. I have learned that kids are much better people than the rest of us are. Two, I had my short story Gloves published in a Chicago-based journal and was paid $800 for it (also in October - must have been a good month for me). Three, I've been failing at revising a new short story for probably three months and as a result, feel terrible about my abilities to write anything that isn't fanfiction.
Anyway, what I really wanted to post about is this:
I've been reading Possession by A.S. Byatt and it has made me think about letter writing. Correspondence. How with the advent of technology, during my own lifetime, personal letters have become a thing of the past. When future critics study authors of our era, will they look back at the spam emails they didn't erase? The thousands of emailed ads from stores they shopped at online? Their tweets? Blog postings? It's strange because most people who are not teenage girls do not write personal blogs. They probably don't keep diaries, though they might have Tumblrs and Facebook pages, and maybe blogs. But, at least for me, it's been years since I've written anything in which I thought about myself, the kind of person I am or want to be, in any detail. Maybe people wouldn't write lengthy letters to people they could easily text or call. But having written a few letters and post cards during my time abroad, I found the experience of writing - on paper, pen in hand - to be completely different from texting, from talking on the phone, from posting on someone's Facebook wall. It's less immediate, more personal, more honest. It makes you think about yourself, and because it isn't immediate, you have time to reread, to revise, to explore a topic more in depth. I think we're missing that now. At least, I am. Maybe I should get a penpal.
This post made possible by: a glass and a half of wine (I'm easy), the novel Possession by A.S. Byatt, the song Wait for it by Arcade Fire, lots of coffee shop conversations in which I proclaimed "The internet is ruining everything" and then checked my Tumblr page for new postings.
Since I last posted, some things have changed. One, I've been teaching bilingual kindergarten since the end of October. I have learned that kids are much better people than the rest of us are. Two, I had my short story Gloves published in a Chicago-based journal and was paid $800 for it (also in October - must have been a good month for me). Three, I've been failing at revising a new short story for probably three months and as a result, feel terrible about my abilities to write anything that isn't fanfiction.
Anyway, what I really wanted to post about is this:
I've been reading Possession by A.S. Byatt and it has made me think about letter writing. Correspondence. How with the advent of technology, during my own lifetime, personal letters have become a thing of the past. When future critics study authors of our era, will they look back at the spam emails they didn't erase? The thousands of emailed ads from stores they shopped at online? Their tweets? Blog postings? It's strange because most people who are not teenage girls do not write personal blogs. They probably don't keep diaries, though they might have Tumblrs and Facebook pages, and maybe blogs. But, at least for me, it's been years since I've written anything in which I thought about myself, the kind of person I am or want to be, in any detail. Maybe people wouldn't write lengthy letters to people they could easily text or call. But having written a few letters and post cards during my time abroad, I found the experience of writing - on paper, pen in hand - to be completely different from texting, from talking on the phone, from posting on someone's Facebook wall. It's less immediate, more personal, more honest. It makes you think about yourself, and because it isn't immediate, you have time to reread, to revise, to explore a topic more in depth. I think we're missing that now. At least, I am. Maybe I should get a penpal.
This post made possible by: a glass and a half of wine (I'm easy), the novel Possession by A.S. Byatt, the song Wait for it by Arcade Fire, lots of coffee shop conversations in which I proclaimed "The internet is ruining everything" and then checked my Tumblr page for new postings.