{"id":390,"date":"2010-02-25T22:02:10","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T03:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/?p=390"},"modified":"2010-04-10T22:27:29","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T03:27:29","slug":"letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/?p=390","title":{"rendered":"Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Janeletter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.”
\nJane Austen, from a letter to her sister, Oct. 17, 1815<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about letters, based on a recent discussion about Jane Austen’s letters, some of which are now on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York<\/a>. (A number of them are also available, via electronic text, at the University of Virginia<\/a>, Penn,<\/a> and other university libraries. And of course there are books<\/a>.) Written in a beautiful, slanted, wispy hand, I find Austen’s original letters, though perfect for their time, hard to decipher, items that need to be studied rather than read. But I trust she would not be able to decipher my grubby scrawl, which is nowhere near perfect, either. She would be able to read my e-mails, though, were any of the thousands of them permanently saved or properly archived and put into context.<\/p>\n

“Woo-hoo<\/em>!” I wrote in an e-mail to my friend Wendy Shang,<\/a> just after midnight. “I think Mary and I just finished a first draft of our novel<\/em>.” Then I added a P.S.: Jane Austen would never have said “woo-hoo.”<\/p>\n

No, Wendy agreed, in her e-mail reply dated 25th of February. “I believe Jane Austen preferred a fist pump followed by ‘Booyaaaah<\/em>!'”<\/p>\n

These, of course, would be included in an exhibition of The Madelyn-Wendy E-mails, in the section titled “Re: In praise of sumo wrestlers.” \u00a0There would likely be a number of e-mail exchanges with my other writing friends as well, some status updates from my Facebook page, and, if we want a true, proper reflection of my in-box, I suppose there will be one of my many e-mails from Viagra, with a sad aside from the exhibit’s curator that I apparently never replied.<\/p>\n

The exhibit would contain a few of my paper letters, too, reflecting how I lived my day-to-day life and how I became the person I am today. There would be a\u00a0few notes I wrote in college, along with the one note in my possession from high school that reads “I hate Chris.” On your right, you will notice a pissed-off missive to my insurance company, a permission slip allowing my son to go to the planetarium, and my letter demanding that KISS<\/a> be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Are they camp? Sure. Sleazy? They revel in it. But they’re also rock and roll and they belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m asking that you put them there soon, especially as members of the band age or battle illness. This is an honor they should be able to accept together, now, not just when Gene Simmons is the sole survivor with an oxygen tank and a wheel chair with flames painted on the sides.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

It’s hard to know what to save and what to dump when you’re going through memorabilia. The paper plate with glued-on pumpkin seeds my daughter brought home from pre-school?\u00a0The crayoned note that says I’m the worst Mommy ever? The one that says I’m the best? I have a hard enough time going through the tactile tangibles. But those e-mails? Early drafts of my stories? Ugh. It’s overwhelming!<\/p>\n

On a recent bus ride, the man sitting next to me mentioned Thomas Jefferson’s writings, with the cross-outs. “Now you never see the cross outs,” he said. “Everything’s deleted.”<\/p>\n

I save early drafts of my stories, but in a sense what he’s saying is true. There’s so much more out there now, and so much is deleted. (Hmm. Maybe that should be a T-shirt, along the lines of “My other car is a tractor.” My best writing has been deleted.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

What do you save? What do you dump?\u00a0I don’t have answers, just questions.<\/p>\n

Whether you’re a writer or not, you probably have questions, too. If you have answers, leave a note in comments, for crying out loud!<\/p>\n

Oh, and if you want to write to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame committee regarding KISS, the address is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.” Jane Austen, from a letter to her sister, Oct. 17, 1815 I’ve been thinking about letters, based on a recent discussion about Jane Austen’s letters, some of which are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,26,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archiving","category-jane-austen","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}