One recent evening whilst googling myself, I came across an 801a post from days past simply entitled “Ask Teen Works: I’m a Flirt” written by a jovial, slightly younger Andy Pressman. Sometimes, much like the author of my favorite blog, I wistfully look to the past — the heyday of the 801a blog, perhaps — and wonder what happened. Three (?) blogs later, am I really grown up? No more R. Kelly references? No more overly personal angsty anonymous over-sharing sessions? Just an internet to one day finally print out and graphic design to think about?

It seems like just yesterday (though it was over a year ago) I found a special new home in 801a. We’ve laughed, quizzed, Bjorked, learned, loved. We’ve dealt with economic crises big and small. We’ve bought iPhones (except me!), foolishly antagonized strangers (who have also bought iPhones). We’ve learned about the internet, reported on celebrity comings and goings in Dumbo, raved.

The question that really plagues me is, of course, bigger than our little office. To get back to Lindsay Lohan’s original unexplored topic, is it even possible to feel grown up, an “outsider” perhaps (preferably in a Ponyboy-esque ‘nothing gold can can stay’ type way rather than a special private DJ booth setup at a Samantha Ronson event L. Lo way), and to still feel the same thrill that, say, the ‘Tusk’ documentary once brought? How can we mature without losing all the effusive excitement of youth?

I am putting on the Tusk documentary now. I have some thinking to do.

–

This morning as I commuted via G train to fair Dumbo, I perused Sunday’s bargain basement impulse buy, issue #4/5 of a 1982 zine called Re/Search that featured William S. Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle.

A month or two ago for some reason—Health was opening up for Trent Reznor maybe, intriguing?—I decided to listen to Nine Inch Nails, which led me to think of a boy I used to hang out with in high school and some of college, admittedly my only real experience with this music. We’d drive around rural Pennsylvania in his fixed-up Audis and Saabs listening to Throbbing Gristle and KMFDM and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. He was calm-verging-on-boring, with Aryan features so cool and delicate they still inspire some romantic regret, but he loved Industrial music.

An excerpt from this interview with Throbbing Gristle on page 66 from 1981:

GEN: We just have a very simple philosophy, which is that we always think what we want to do next… We look at our record collection, or whatever’s going on, and we decide what we personally would like to have or possess as a record, or a magazine, and then, if nobody else is doing it, then we’ll do it. And with the records that we do, usually we tend to—if we’re not sure—contradict whatever we did last time, and it seems to work quite well.

Most of us are quite good at predicting what people will expect, and then the four of us, between us, can usually confuse that expectation, with a little discussion. We do a lot of talking first.

COSEY: Besides that, there’s no point in repeating yourself either. If you’ve got one thing on record, there’s no point in recording the same kind of thing again!

As I transferred to the A train, I felt overcome by a feeling of nostalgia for a time when I perhaps aspired to this sentiment. I obviously wasn’t making music — it had more to do with certain ideas about communication via media / art / design that we hope to explore more on our Rumors blog in the near future. Maybe happy maturity involves being all grown up and staying an outsider—outside even yourself—for most nights? How can we stop repeating ourselves and make the fantasy objects we actually wish existed? How do we continue attempting to articulate our own idealized worlds?

Innovative individuals are doing some creative problem solving by re-thinking things we take for granted. Noah Horowitz, an NRDC engineer, took a look at the energy hogging vending machine.

There is now one soda machine for every 100 Americans! Some 3 million machines are humming away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using 10 times more energy than the average refrigerator (the biggest energy user in your home). Noah started looking at solutions like more efficient compressors, fans and lighting. He also rethought some of the simplest things like not having outdoor machines running all night in the middle of winter. The result is new machines that use half the energy of old ones. And when Coke and Pepsi finish phasing in the new designs, the savings will be 5 billion kilowatt hours per year!

This morning brought the winds of lively national conversation through the open window of 801a. With today (finally) bringing our nation its first primary, the rules of polite company were broken as we shared our opinions on this exciting race.

Rhetoric was kept mostly at the level of observation, rather than attempts at persuasion. Democrats all, Andy reminded us that any of our major contenders would likely make an excellent president. As Geoff would say, we were clearly in a “safe space.”

It turns out Renda [last name withheld] is registered to vote in two different states. Where would her vote count most? And who would she cast it for? The wheels were visibly turning. Her flirtation with NYC’s own RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH PARTY led Andy to discover that they endorse McCain, shortly before Renda learned that they were also openly anti-semitic. A shame, as their website is among the best I’ve seen.

Holly and I did a little assenting — and Andy did a little dissenting — with Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed in the Times today. She postulates that Obama’s “appeal to the heart” strategy combined with his thin résumé would almost certainly lead to electoral failure if he were a woman. Perhaps aware that the decidedly feminist presidential moment widely thought inevitable was likely derailed, we spent some moments reminiscing about our mothers’ politics. Thinking about the unlikelihood of a gay presidential candidate being taken seriously, I noted the continued need for feminist roll models; to me it seems that the continued renovation of our assumptions about what strength looks like would benefit my community too.

It was noted that despite his good position on gay marriage, Kucinich claims to have seen UFOs, and some research on his wife was performed.

I divulged that I voted for Sharpton in 2004.

The conversation ended after about thirty minutes, as we shifted to puzzling over the phenomenon of vegans who eat bacon.

Andy,
We’ve talked about creating a podcast that addressed the problem of email prose. I think email would be a more appropriate venue to debate and discuss the varying approaches to email prose. What’s your approach to the art of the email?
Thanks,
Holly


from Andy Pressman
to Holly Gressley
date Oct 18, 2007 1:57 PM
subject Re: email prose

Holly

OK, our emails will speak to the benefits and drawbacks of their own nature.

I spend a lot of time writing emails. Probably we all spend a lot of time writing emails, but I mean to imply that writing proper emails takes me an awfully long time. The function of the word processor (obviously the model upon which all email clients are built) can be a bit of a curse, because it fuels the editorial mindset as much if not more than it does the act of creation. For instance, I rewrote that last sentence five or six times as I typed it. Certain words stuck out, the pacing seemed off, I saw that my grammar was clumsy – and these edits were made as I wrote the sentence, instinctively and immediately, and not upon rereading or reflecting. I probably actually type eight or nine or fifteen times the words that I actually send out in each email.

I think of this as the specific mental space in which emails are composed.

Sometimes this becomes an annoyingly self-aware process. Sometimes it can feel very natural, a spirit of writing-changing-writing that feels fluid and good, and works with the way that my mind works.

Maybe this is too broadly about writing on a computer, and not specific enough to email. Does the above apply to you? Does it maybe just apply to everybody?

Write back!
AP

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 2, 2007 6:20 PM
subject Re: email prose

Hi Andy,
It’s been so long. I had half of this email written two weeks ago. It’s now sitting in the drafts folder in my Apple Mail application on my laptop. That’s the funny/annoying thing about webmail vs. the type of email you download to an application (i think this is called POP?). If you save a draft in your Apple Mail drafts, it won’t be instantly transmitted to the drafts folder in your Gmail, and then you have to start all over again when you’re working on another computer and killing time and decide that responding to emails is a more productive activity than constantly refreshing your RSS feed.

So where were we?

Ah, writing on the computer vs. writing an email vs. speaking vs. writing by hand. So much communication, so many processes. The differences between speaking, writing, and computing are all pretty major. In my Apple Mail draft, I started to explore these differences. I will let those thoughts lie dormant until our next round of emails. I think that the differences between word-processing and emailing are pretty minor, with the exception of one major difference: the instant send.

The instant send is a problem that affects both the function and form of the email. Being able to communicate instantly via writing – and in Blackberry land, it really is instant – changes the editing process into an insta-editing process like you described above (aka writing-changing-writing). Hence, much quality control is lost. The universality of this insta-editing process subsequently changes the form of the email itself. An email is expected to be brief, replied to promptly, and clear if dry. Emails generally lack the niceties of proper English grammar (for example, the use of the slash: see par. 1), and condensed and careless language only add to the vague nature of most emails. It can be difficult to be specific in a medium where nuance isn’t easy to convey.

The email is fundamentally different from a non-electronic letter because it is dependent upon a dialogue: send, reply. The more one writes, the less the recipient is inclined to write. An excessively long email is annoying (to me at least) because it breaks the expected form. I have to slow down; I have to read. Email is meant for scanning, and is best used as a form of documentation, the internet equivalent to a text message, or as alternative to the often-easier phone call.

I also find that when I write an email in a web browser like I am now, I find it less enjoyable than in a proper email client such as Entourage or Apple Mail. Something about going on the internet to write the email makes me want to click out of it as quickly as possible.

Any thoughts on any of this?
Holly

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 16, 2007 1:04 AM
subject email and guilt

Hi Andy,
I have been realizing something SEVERE tonight: the email reply is tempered with guilt. With each day that passes between email replies, guilt builds. Email guilt is a problem, and it is very real. You haven’t emailed me for 13 days; for 13 days I have been waiting patiently for a response to all of these big problems I have posed to you. I wait in vain.

Email guilt is a serious problem. Perhaps you are afflicted by it?
H

from Andy Pressman
to Holly Gressley
date Nov 16, 2007 2:26 PM
subject Re: email and guilt

It’s true, that weird and heightened guilt of email. Email threads operate along their own weird timeline; they allow us to postpone our responses, but there’s still an invisible threshold of time, of appropriate delay. It varies from conversation to conversation, of course. Sometimes I’m not certain whether postponing this or that email for another day will be a day too long, but I postpone it anyway; suddenly I look up two days later and realize I’ve delayed too long. The time for that reply is no longer now.

At that point it’s a heightened guilt, a real weight around my typing fingers. To sit down and write that reply seems like twice the chore. Not only do I have to write a reasonably witty and thoughtful reply to your email, but now it has to be something special, something that justifies the thirteen (I guess now fourteen? Fifteen?) day delay. So please forgive me if I write an email of no greater quality than usual. In fact, I think it’s my obligation to those of us who want to break free from these anxieties. You know how long your grandfather had to wait for letters back from his high school sweetheart (almost certainly your grandmother, as those were simpler days)? Okay, probably less than fifteen days. Folks got letters, they took time out in the mornings or evenings to respond to those letters, then they settled into their reading chairs for a bit of Proust and some brandy.

I want to just briefly touch on your note about excessively long emails – enormity is clearly in the eyes of the beholder, but I sure know what you mean. Not because I also get irritated by long emails, but because I’m on the other side of the coin. If I had my way, correspondence via email would take on two forms: Pragmatic and to-the-point, or Discursive and informal. All our other avenues of dialogue – chats and SMS and facebook wall space etc – seem to encourage an off-the-cuffness in communication. Who said she did what when with wow!

This actually gets back to your preference of the mail client over the webmail client, and I completely agree. I hate restrained text boxes. I feel pinched just reading my own words – I feel like the interface is trying to discourage my train of thought, my looking back and thinking ahead. It prescribes boundaries on my interior space, and on the words in my head. Too much junk on the screen, too many buttons and colors and design elements. Sometimes, when I’m in a certain mindset, I’m really overwhelmed by how our communication is now taking place within the confines of design. The design decisions that exist and surround this email (which, incidentally, I’m writing in gmail) are never exactly dominant on the screen, but nor do they recede into the background. They flatten everything out – my letter and the SEND button and the blue border at the bottom of the page, all heightened by the fact that this text box takes up barely 2/5 the height of the screen.

Is this how we’re going to have to write our letters from now on? Within decorated interfaces? Where is my mental freedom, the limitlessness of my words-as-thought?

To return to the earlier point: I can’t really mourn the death of the handwritten letter. For one, I never really wrote them. I came of age with the email, and typing my thoughts feels as natural, if not more so, than forming the letter-shapes with a pen on paper. Probably more fluid, actually, considering how thoroughly I’ve internalized the use of a QWERTY keyboard. The tragedy, anyway, would be if we stopped sharing our thoughts as words sent out into the world, lengthy and darting and occasionally dumb. But I don’t feel an impending sense of doom – I think fluidness of writing will win out over the (temporarily) heavy-handed graphic user interfaces of the world, and over our culture’s need-for-speed as well. The letter will do just fine.

Anyway, sorry this was so late!
AP

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 17, 2007 4:45 PM
subject Re: email and guilt

it seems, andy, we’ve said everything we have to say – for now at least.