Re: JD

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 23 Dec 1999 20:56:26 -0500 

At 2:10 PM -0800 on 12/23/1999, you wrote:

> I have a question, have any of you ever written JD? I
> know, I know, he doesn't like the public but does he
> have an address? Just wondering. Or has anyone written
> Vonnegut and gotten a reply? I don't know. This whole
> email thing is good but I really like the idea of
> being able to touch the paper where the letter is
> written.

It's very ... strange ... to hold in your hand a letter from someone 
you admire and to figure out how it got to you.  I swapped several 
letters with Kurt Vonnegut a couple of years back, and had one reply 
from Salinger on a matter completely unrelated to Vonnegut, something 
I treasure and cherish and all that, and wouldn't sell if I were down 
to my last pair of shoes.  (And no, I didn't make my Salinger 
envelope look as if it had been written by an 18-year-old girl, so 
get that look out of your eye, you in the corner!  8-)  I'm not an 
autograph collector; I just write a lot of letters, some of which are 
between me and other writers or people in the creative business.

> And also are all of you people like neighbours or
> something, you all seem to know each other quite
> intimately ...I mean the few people who actually write
> on this list seem that way.

A couple of us live in New York City and surrounding areas, but we 
have active members from all over the world; the archives would show 
better than I could tell.  It turns in a community of sorts, but one 
can see how fragile that "community" is when something goes wrong and 
people get into a spat.

The funny part about it is that only a small core of the list writes 
messages, but among the rest (population a little less than 300), 
many, many people join with AOL screen names or with supplied names 
that are variations on one or another Salinger character.  I gave up 
counting a long time ago how many Zooey-variations we had!

We talked about a group of us meeting in NYC during the holiday 
season, but we never really got it off the ground.  If you want to do 
it, send me mail with this in the subject line: [MEETFISH] and I'll 
make a little mailing list so that we can figure out something that 
works for everyone.  Or if someone else feels the great urge to do 
this, feel free to volunteer....

--tim