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Love Letters?Anne Applebaum takes readers' questions about written correspondence in the digital age.


Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2007, at 1:16 PM ET

Slate columnist Anne Applebuam was online at Washingtonpost.com on Friday, Aug. 3, to discuss Hillary Clinton's college correspondence and the lost art of letter writing. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

(Continued from page 2)

Phoenix: I often am frustrated by the implication that electronic communication must be, by nature of the medium, terse and devoid of emotion. The medium is just that—a medium—and doesn't have to dictate content. For example, a good friend (who lives several states away) and I have taken up an intense letter-writing campaign—on Facebook. Since May, we've exchanged more than 80,000 words, and these "letters" are the very foundation of our very close friendship. We discuss music and politics and teen angst and mixtapes—and the fact that the format is electronic does not take away from the importance of the words that we share. I just wanted to let you know that it's possible. Thanks.

Anne Applebaum: Yes, I'm sure that's true. But the medium does affect how one writes, or at least that's what I find. Which has always been true: Surely the change from laboriously copied, hand-written, illuminated manuscripts to the printing press changed the kinds of books that people wrote and read too.

_______________________

Maryland: I still have "love letters" from high school and college beaus in the pre-Internet days, but the love of my life and I never "mailed" letters. No one prints out an e-mail to treasure forever after.

Anne Applebaum: No. But they're probably all in a Google storage tank somewhere, so be careful...

_______________________

Raleigh, N.C.: Anne, I have seen so many wonderful stationery stores pop up—around here and in other cities (there's a great one in Georgetown)—how do these stay afloat? Or maybe they don't? Or maybe people love to buy stationery (and the idea and nostalgia of letter-writing) and then maybe it just sits, never to be used?

Anne Applebaum: I love buying stationery and then it sits, never to be used...

_______________________

Washington: This reminds me of a friend who is a sculptor. He used to send postcards that he had made by cutting the text into thin steel with a gas torch, or some other material and method. For him, I think, it was as much about testing the Post Office—but now you could see it as a statement about how easy and impermanent e-mail is.

Anne Applebaum: Yes—though how far away can we be from email art? If it's not already being done, that is.

_______________________

Anne Applebaum: Goodbye all—and thanks for taking a few minutes to focus on the ancient, arcane, and definitely not twenty-first century subject of letter-writing. AA

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Applebaum is a weekly foreign affairs columnist for Slate and Washington Post. She was previously political editor for the Evening Standard and deputy editor for the Spectator magazine, both in London and was Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Gulag: A History.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I agreed with these folks regarding the NOTION of letter-writing...the good old days, as we'd say: trying out a new fancy pen, the pretty stationary, the long pauses over how to word something just right....

But if you offered me email or letter-writing today, it'd be a slam-dunk choice. Emailing is all about touching base immediately - no fussing over stamps and mailing and trying to summarize a month's activity in one page! - and that's time and time is worth a thousand carefully-placed words on paper. My mother and I "converse" in brief but fun or sad or glad or mad email almost every single day now, and when letter-writing was all we had she was lucky to get a weekly phone call from me and vice versa. And there are off-the-cuff things you'd tell someone in an email that you wouldn't have shared in a letter. Spontaneity is so sweet!

The good old days of trying to figure out what to write in a letter are gone, and I say to all that: Fare Thee Well!!

--Dana

(To reply, click here.)

Speaking as a mother of teenagers, I can absolutely tell you that letter writing is becoming obsolete. Take my oldest who was at Basic Training in Ft Jackson, SC. The only communication they were allowed for 11 weeks was a telephone call MAYBE once a week (for all of 1 minute) and letters. Being one of those crazy mothers that insist on hand written thank-you notes, he was already primed for this....I even got a "thanks, mom, for making me do that when I was a kid" from him. Ha!

He could not beleive the number of guys who came to him who had no idea how to address an envelope. The same thing happened when he went to college. As a plebe, cell phones were confiscated and the only communication was letters for the first 9 weeks. Guys went to his room to ask him how to address envelopes or to make sure they did it right. He even described some of the "fomats" these guys used....incredible.

I remember learning how to write letters, personal and business, in grade school. I find it sad that the personal touch has, or is becoming eliminated. Are we really in that much of a hurry?

--acesm

(To reply, click here.)

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