Friday, December 28, 2001
Resolutions and Writing
Typically, I don’t do well in the drear December holidays, and this year, the double whammy of a seasonal cold and an avalanche of extra work - due, ironically, to an epidemic of plagiarism in the introductory ethics class I teach - left me with neither time nor much inclination for merriness and goodwill to persons.
Now Christmas is behind us and my mood is improving, sedated by the last scrapings of cranberry sauce. Our tree has started to cast fragrant drifts of needles, and it’s time to catch up on belated festive greetings and to draft those New Year’s resolutions.
I used to keep my resolutions to myself, just as I never voiced the wishes made on blowing out my birthday cake candles. However, willings and wishings work differently, and the magic of secrecy hasn’t helped me stick to my goals thus far. So I now publicly admit to my principal - and perennial - resolution. This year, as every year of my adult life, the New Year’s resolution at the top of my list is to be a better correspondent with family and friends.
Overwhelmed by the long list of letters owed, I’m tempted to write one of those generic, year-end report letters, that start: “Dear , It’s been a busy year for the Collins household...” Such letters combine the American virtues of practicality and lack of pretension with a democratic optimism that all readers will be equally interested in one’s private doings. This hybrid prose of generic narrative and personalised addenda was given a boost by the spread of PCs, and the power of cut and paste. But sadly, the technique has been appropriated by direct marketers, and homemade generic greetings now ring a little false, to my ears.
I love getting real mail, sneeringly dubbed “snail mail” by fans of e-mail. Old-fashioned mail carries the touch of its author, proof in the slope of the writing, the colour of ink, the way a packet is wrapped. In my childhood, my paternal grandfather would always send Christmas gifts in a crackling and impregnable carapace of scotch tape, while my maternal grandmother sent floppy, brown-paper parcels of hand-knitted bed-socks and flannel nightgowns. A letter from my Dad is instantly recognisable: his script is large and looping and illegible to the uninitiated. A glimpse of the envelope and I can picture him in his dressing-gown at the dining room table with a steaming mug of tea, writing in the dawn quiet.
As an immigrant, I cherish letters from home even more than phone calls, perhaps because letters physically retrace my transatlantic journey and seem material evidence of a reversible path from here to there. When my Mum sends me clippings from the English newspapers, I read the backs, too, and it’s like reading over her shoulder.
For me, the romance of paper mail is missing from e-mail. E-mails are hip, funny, terse, à propos. Many people skip the formalities of salutation, capitalisation and grammar in e-mails. But this appealing immediacy has a cost. E-mail connects you instantly with far away others, but suppresses the sense of distance traversed. While a foreign stamp betokens a journey made to bring you news, “.uk” in the address line of an e-mail suggests, well, connecting the dots on a flattened globe. It’s a medium that relates us as if we were disembodied thinkers, writing from no place in particular, and stripped of our corporeal attributes like handwriting, accent, or location.
Maybe my resistance to e-mail is just mild technophobia. Yet my most enthusiastic e-mail correspondents sprinkle their messages with emoticons - little faces turned sideways to the sentence, composed of punctuation marks. These cartoon faces express the speaker’s tone - the wink of a semicolon gives irony, the curve of a right parenthesis, a smile. To me, these marks indicate a desire for clues to the body language of a real author typing at keyboard someplace.
Which brings me back to those New Year’s resolutions. Right after, “Be a better correspondent,” comes, “Avoid procrastinating,” so I’d better get back to those belated holiday greetings. With best wishes for the New Year to [Your name here], for Michiana Chronicles, this is Louise Collins.
A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe
Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather
David James -- More essays by David
Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Louise Collins -- Resolutions and Writing / More essays by Louise
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, Ken Smith, Heather Curlee Novak, David James, and Elizabeth Van Jacob.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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