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I AM AN INCREDIBLY busy man, and I have no time for you people, dammit. Plus, it's so hot in the tri-state area, right now, pigs, that I've been seeing a number of mirages in my daily life, shimmering on the edges of my vision. Beer fountains dancing on the horizon...a mirage. Free hot dog pavilions just over the next hill...a mirage. Me in an emergency room with an IV push pumping fluids into my badly dehydrated body after spending a day chasing mirages...all too real. Determining what's real and what's not takes all of my time, so I have no time for you. What I do have time for, always, is used books. GET TO THE POINT, SOMERS. I can hear the thunderous sound of a million mouse-clicks as people surf away from yet another tediously self-indulgent essay here at innerswine.com. Damn you. I love to browse used books, and I buy almost all of my books used. Nothing wrong with new books, and heck, I'm trying to sell a few of those myself, but lordy, they're expensive items. The wonder of books is that their value remains almost constant no matter how old they are, assuming a modicum of care has been taken in their handling, so the benefits of buying a new book as opposed to an old one are few and far-between. But this isn't really an essay about used books, now is it? Hello? Anyone still there? Blast; I've scared them all away again. I could fill the rest of the screen with nonsense and no one would be the wiser. Anyway, I was browsing used books today, and several "collected letters' volumes caught my eye. These are book which collect the correspondence of famous or significant people, usually stultifyingly boring and of limited interest. But it got me thinking, because I plan to be outrageously famous before I'm done with you all, and when I toddle off to the great Happy Hour in the Sky, what will they have to collect in a dusty, thick tome with a dour black-and-white photo of my on the cover? Not letters, that's for sure, because I write about one a year, and those are generally concerned with awkward demands for money or awkward demands that legal action cease immediately—not exactly a legacy worth publishing. We just don't write letters any more, do we? I sure don't, and it's a shame, really, because getting a letter is still one of the great things in life. E-mail is largely to blame for this, I guess; these days it's just too easy to tap out a few cryptic lines and hit SEND (or, in my case, a burst of nonsense because my head has hit the keyboard again and hit the SEND button), and feel like we've communicated. Technically, we have, but one glance at these 'collected letters' books and I realize that it just isn't the same, and we as a society are losing out because of it. Where once people wrote long, beautiful and complex missives that later showed real insight into their lives and the time and place they lived in, nowadays we're leaving behind a lot of emoticons and misspellings, if my own terse e-mails are any guide. E-mail also seems like a likely candidate for blame here because used to write letters when I was a younger man—before I had a computer, and an e-mail account. Of course, I used to do a lot of things when I was a younger man, most of which are better left unexplored. Since I also don't receive any letters these days, maybe it isn't just e-mail, maybe a lack of letter-writing is a result of an overall culture of instant communication. Only a century ago, after all, written communication was really the only cheap and readily available mode most people had. Even thirty years ago a long-distance call was kind of troublesome to manage, and expensive. Nowadays, we have cell phones and a host of other gadgets, and everyone can reach everyone else instantly, no matter where they happen to be. Since we're all pretty much in contact with each other all the time, there's little need for a long letter repeating all the news we've spoken about already. Or maybe I don't get any letters because all my friends are assholes. Maybe. It's under consideration. What we're looking at is a future where no one knows anything about us because we're not leaving anything behind for future historians to work with. It's this fucking Now Culture we live in, too, you know; we live in a world where only the new, the now, the current matters. Walk into any chain book store and try to find a book published more than ten years ago. Aside from a handful of classics, you'll be hard pressed, because value is now perceived as something that evaporates over time. Only the just-came-out is really celebrated, and this is why Hollywood has gotten into the habit of taking perfectly fine movies from previous eras (like, say, Psycho or xxx) and re-making them, because today's audiences eschew anything not produced in their lifetime as old, used up, irrelevant. In such a culture the advantages of a letter, which takes time to write, time to send, and time to read, is lost. Everything is instant these days, from instant messaging to high-speed Internet connections. There's no waiting period, no time in which to organize your thoughts and contemplate the wisdom of your words. No time even to spell, since today's messages often look like this: I guess in the future they'll be able to publish books of people's text messages as those miniature novelty books you find at cash registers in book stores all the time. Mine will probably be titled The Collected Collection Agency Correspondence of Jeff Somers. Oh well. The world is changing and we may not always like where it ends up, but the process is, of course, a never-ending one. Only increasingly-old farts like me get disturbed about it. If you'd like to tell me how old and fartish I am, you know where to find me. Until next time, I remain Jeff |
July 18, 2003