Strangely Enough, Actual Letters in the Mail
The mailbox – the personal, home-based receptacle for paper correspondence - is quickly becoming a quaint relic from an earlier version of our modern life. Like a coal bin or an old Bakelite rotary phone, the mailbox is comprehensible but effectively useless. If not for a few magazines, I’d probably go weeks without checking mine. I might store a compact umbrella there. This is part of the well-documented decline of hard copy correspondence in favor of ceaseless chatter of email, tweets, etc et al. But come on, we’d all like to get an actual letter one of these days, right?
For those hungry for their own en masse Herzog-in-reverse, the eclectic, brilliant literary website The Rumpus <http://therumpus.net/2012/01/announcing-letters-in-the-mail/ > , recently announced just the thing. “Letters in the Mail,” is a subscription service for which readers can pay $5 a month in exchange for a weekly letter from a famous – or at least published - author. As Stephen Elliott, founder and editor of The Rumpus, told Today < http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45943604/ns/today-books/#.Tw2qBU_y5N3 > , “I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters, and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it.”
According to The Rumpus, “letter writers will include Dave Eggers, Marc Maron, Janet Fitch, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Cheryl Strayed, Wendy MacNaughton, Emily Gould, Tao Lin, and Jonathan Ames.”
A bit of exclusivity will add value to this nostalgic stroll down epistolary lane: the letters, which will be about whatever strikes each author’s whimsy, will not be available online.
-- Michael Washburn, who’s on Twitter as @Whalelines, writes about books frequently for the Globe. He can be reached at http://mwashburn.wordpress.com but he’d really love to get a letter.
