David Allen's column today is about an insurance agent named David Grossberg that Allen read about in a recent Andy Rooney column.
Grossberg has been sending out letters - typed ones - to writers, entertainers, and various deep thinkers asking them for their thoughts on handwritten, personal correspondences. According to Allen, Grossberg is conducting research for a magazine article he's working on:
A Cal State Fullerton communications graduate, Grossberg is researching an article for Autograph, a magazine for autograph collectors like himself.
He's sold them several pieces, including, in 2005, a real page-turner about quill pens.
In the 19th century, Grossberg told me, Americans fretted that the typewriter and telegraph were changing how people communicated.
He thinks something has been lost with e-mail too: the touch of pen to paper, the chance to sleep on a rash letter before mailing it and the emotional pull of, say, decades-old letters from a parent.
Are computers changing the way we think and write? Allen also wrote a blog post about Grossberg's project. He included some choice responses to Greenberg's queries that weren't in Allen's column, including this one from the writer P. J. O'Rourke:
* P.J. O'Rourke: "Rudeness and sloth in the guise of 'informality' exert their perennial appeal ... When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. With the quill came William Shakespeare. The fountain pen produced Henry James. The typewriter, Jack Kerouac. And all we have to show for the computer is the blog."
Much as we hate to admit it, O'Rourke does have a point about blogging, one that applies equally to email, though we're not convinced that there's been a gradual diminution of gravitas in writing with each new technology. We tend to see that as a more recent phenomenon, and we'd agree that the immediacy of digital age has led to a good deal of muddled thinking.
We look at blogs, email, and the other accouterments of life in the computer age as nothing more than more tools for the writer, like a quill or a fountain pen or a typewriter. If you subscribe to this line of thinking, you might just as well blame power tools on a poor construction job rather than blaming the contractor. Maybe we should just be looking at the fingers behind the keyboard.
No, if there's any blame to be placed for poor thinking and poor writing, we'd look to the fall off in reading habits, something we've remarked on before. It's awful hard to develop a voice if you don't first develop an ear, and the only way to do that is through reading. If you want clear writing, it just takes lots of reading, and lots of explication of the thing being read.
If you think about it, it really does make sense. Fine writing, fine art, depends on good craftmanship, and the only way to understand the craft is to take it apart the way professional comedians and comedy writers will study a great joke to understand all of the elements that make it work.
There's simply no way around it, folks. As wonderful as the Interwebs are, at some point you just have to unplug, tune out, and sit down on a Sunday afternoon with a good book if you want to exercise that gray matter between your ears.
Here endeth the sermon.
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