15 Comments

1. Barry 0351:

I recall snail mail while in the Marines where a letter sent to me while afloat could take fifteen days to reach me and my letter response fifteen days to go back I cannot imagine the ease of being 14,000 miles apart and communicating instantly via email or IM.

Jun 23, 2009 - 9:04 am 2. RWE:

Any of y’all ever hear of BankAir?

It’s an “airline” that does nothing but carry cancelled checks for the banks.

Or it did, anyway. Was active in the 70’s but I doubt it is still around. Surely they must have a better way of doing that now. Fedex if nothing else. Electronic transfer, preferably.

Right now at work I am working on trying to get some technical data from a number of companies for a NASA project. After calling and e-mailing for a couple of weeks I concluded that we are going to have to send formal letters, signed out by NASA to elict a response.

Electronic communication has become so easy that people don’t use it for anything serious any more.

For chatting with your friends on the way home or e-mailing the latest Nancy Pelosi joke electrons and radio waves are fine, but people don’t sit up and take notice unless it’s on the paper. Print is dead. Long live Print.

Jun 23, 2009 - 9:36 am 3. Lifeofthemind:

RWE,
You are on to something. While efficiency is an overriding concern in business, except where government is concerned, in social relations the appreciation of the medium as well as the message may be more pronounced. However in the corporate world an executive may deliberately relegate electronic communications to the staff and prefer proper documentation. Tradition and inefficiency indicate formality which represents power. That is why the boss sits at a big desk with nothing on it but a button to call in the secretary.

In private life getting someone’s attention is the content so while there is a role for texting and tweets there could also be a return to old fashioned pen and ink. I would expect that as times get harder there will be a tendency to discriminate in favor of luxury goods at retail and a renewed effort to display a consciously Retro-old fashioned lifestyle among the upper middle class. Printed calling cards may come back along with hand written notes. Young women may start again to be picked up for a date, as opposed to going out to meet an acquaintance for a hook up.

Jun 23, 2009 - 10:10 am 4. NahnCee:

When Lincoln was assassinated it took months for the news to get to the West Coast. And yet the nation survived. Sometimes I think speed of information transmittal is highly over-rated.

Jun 23, 2009 - 10:30 am 5. PA Cat:

When Lincoln was assassinated it took months for the news to get to the West Coast.

Not quite– the telegraph was a critical communication medium during the Civil War. The New York Herald carried an account of Lincoln’s assassination in its early morning edition of April 15, 1865 (within hours after the event) thanks to the telegraph.

Jun 23, 2009 - 10:40 am 6. Mark:

Part of the fun of Belmont Club is asking yourself, ‘What is Richard up to in this post?’

I suspect “Night Mail” is a BBC popularization of “Night Flight” by St-Exupery (1931). It’s a memorable book. Some human beings will sacrifice their lives to keep open the lines of communication.

In Iran and many other countries, governments will sacrifice lives if people try to use the means of communication.

Here’s an Amazon review by reader Jerald Lovell of ‘Night Flight’:

“This is an epic narrative of a single evening in the Argentine night mail service. The chief character is the air manager, with peripheral characters being pilots, pilots’ wives, and other personnel. Without spoiling the plot, an unexpected crisis occurs in the way of a trans-Andean storm, and the pace quickens to unforgettable climax. But read the book. It’s short, and not so much as a phrase is excess weight. A spine-tingling thriller about men in crisis, and the women who wait alone. You may grimace at the manager’s resolve, but you will never forget him or the pilot coming from far southern Argentina. A masterful insight into the days when character was a desirable thing and profit wasn’t the only motive for excellence.”

Jun 23, 2009 - 10:54 am 7. Herb:

Poem Here:

Jun 23, 2009 - 11:02 am 8. PA Cat:

7 Herb

Thank you for the link– wonderful photo of the train, too.

Jun 23, 2009 - 11:05 am 9. RWE:

Barry #1: I can top that. Letter mailed from NASA HQ to the Pentagon: 2 weeks. Letter mailed from the Pentagon back to NASA HQ: 2 weeks. It’s a 5 min walk to the metro and a 5 min metro ride to go between the two places.

Lifeofmind #3: Junk mail used to be a problem. I routinely either deliver most of my mail directly into the trash can or let it accumulate before trashing it a few months later.

Now, junk e-mail and phone calls have made those mediums worse than junk mail. I have found that calling a company on the phone is nearly impossible any more. You get sent to voice mail and often never hear from them. Using e-mail for someone you don’t regularly communicate with is equally challenging. It usually takes at both a phone call and an e-mail, in which in one you agree to receive the other.

By the way for some junk mail I have adopted the following practice: When it comes in an envelope that does not have a clear return address and is often marked Extremely Urgent! I take the envelope, write on it “You wasted my time by sending this to me with insufficent markings and now I am wasting yours”, put it in the prepaid envelope they include and mail it back to them.

Jun 23, 2009 - 11:12 am 10. Lifeofthemind:

RWE,
Spam is a cancer. I would support a penny tax on ouitgoing email. That would go a long way to ending the problem.

Jun 23, 2009 - 2:28 pm 11. njartist:

Dial up has its advantages: it keeps the line busy so spammers cannot get through. Those who really want me can call on my cell phone.

Jun 23, 2009 - 3:29 pm 12. Bill:

This was neat! My kids really enjoyed it too. 1936 was around the time their grandparents were born. “Wow, life was really like that!” Thank you.

Jun 23, 2009 - 4:15 pm 13. Charles:

I was in Abeline Kansas over the past weekend for a family reunion. The place is caulk full of technology museums. There was a telephone museum, greyhound bus museum,saddle museum, a museum of old Abeline. Wild bill hickock was sheriff of abeline for the five years it tolerated cattle drives up the chisolm trail to the rail head. In 1873, the town decided the cowboys, the cows and the tick fever were too much. The town stopped allowing the drives to come to town. That year the last of the great buffalo herds were slaughtered just west of town. The twenty year killing of the buffalo came to an end. Buffalo Bill was asked to close the brothels and the bars. Then he was fired. (He charged 200@month. the town rehired someone else for 50@month.)The next year some of my ancestors arrived. they sold farm land in Pennsylvania for 140@acre and bought land in Kansas for 14@acre. Hickok went on to run a rodeo show.

There’s a kind of nightmare scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie North By Northwest where Cary Grant is at a crossroads in the midwest somewhere. Wheatfields and cornfields range as far as the eye can see. A small biplane flies overhead. It turns lazy circles around him like a fly. But one of the circles stops halfway and the plane turns straight toward him. Cary Grant notices this. And then he notices the plane is closing the distance between them fast. He turns to run away. You see this fly turn into a huge malignant machine that Grant is running desperately away from. Grant falls to the ground as the biplane practically flies into the theatre.

I was reminded of North by Northwest because for the first two nights I was in Abeline I had strange dreams. On one night I was running away from a super volcano. On the next I was stepping up from an enormous geologic fault that was sub ducting in real time. I attributed the dreams to the classic rock station I listened to on the car radio driving out from Kansas City. Classic Rock has a deep streak of self pity. After church on Sunday–Sunday night my dreams turned sweet.

The midwest is much more relaxed than the coasts. The hotel I stayed at had free high speed access. It was much better than my Verizon wireless. I loved talking about how my gps made it easy as pie driving out from Kansas city and then getting around to all the points of interests in Abeline. One of my distant relatives said he liked gps too. But he used it to mark the underwater topography of a nearby two mile wide lake. He used the GPS to mark the coordinates of his favorite fishing spots. He could get to them by night or day and get back without a second thought.

Typically, farmers like rain. But Abeline has been getting too much rain lately –like much of the rest of the country. Its slowing down the harvest of winter wheat. The big combines need a couple days of blast furnace hot weather to dry the fields. They might get it this week.

Jun 23, 2009 - 4:46 pm 14. Batman:

Brilliant post, as usual. So what is he trying to say? That civilian infrastructure keeps us civilized? That the pre-industrial communication methods of Afghanistan, Sub-saharan Africa, and isolated sections of the Muslim world contribute to a sense of tribalism and/or alienation?

Or perhaps, that the impersonal tweet and IM, despite their usefulness in disseminating information rapidly, cannot compare to the handwritten letter’s personal touch and sense of cohesion? One can hardly tell the difference between a personal and a computer generated email but one can certainly recognize (or used to) the distinctive handwriting of a loved one.

Time saving devices do have the paradoxical effect of imprisoning us with the tyranny of expecting immediacy and the inability to get away, even for a moment.

No, I’m not a Luddite; but sometimes a slightly slower pace in which one is a little harder to reach sounds very attractive.

Jun 23, 2009 - 9:46 pm 15. Sylvia:

I’m just starting to be able to write by hand again. The cancer and radiation damage in my eyes made it impossible for a handful of years. My father-in-law set me up with a special computer screen, but I dearly missed the feel of a fountain pen, the flow of ink onto paper, the texture of good cotton rag stationery… My daughter says her thoughts arrange themselves better when she writes with pen and paper; composition on a computer feels unnatural to her. Her homework tonight for her summer school class is to write pages of very complex kanji. She’s radiantly happy.

When I was in college (early 80’s), my mom and dad each wrote to me every week, my grandparents not quite so often. I would read the letters aloud in the post office, then put them on my dorm room door for everyone to read. Treasures from home. I still have reams of letters and when life nips at my heels, I sit down for a good cry and a read.

Jun 23, 2009 - 10:14 pm

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.