Put the pen to the paper, press the envelope with my scent
Can't you see in my handwriting the curve of my g?
Who is left that writes these days?
You and me, we'll be different
Take the cap off your pen
Wet the envelope--lick and lick it
It turns me on to imagine
Your blue eyes on my words
Your beautiful pen-- take the cap off
Give me a sign and I'd come running
Sometimes I open letters from my friends and I weep for the English language. Well, not really, but when the entire email is three or four sentences long, without any capitalization or proper punctuation, it gets on my nerves. I can tolerate it from a few people: my Russian, with whom I stayed when I was working on the Chemical Weapons plant in Shchuch’ye, for example. (I worked on the gallery and artwork in the foyer and didn't actually work with any hazardous waste.) He didn't speak any English at the time, or rather he only knew a few key sentences, like most people know Spanish. He's taking classes in school, and writes to me sometimes to practice his English, which is better than my Russian.
The sad thing is that his letters are usually more grammatically correct than most of the emails sent to me by my American friends. I assume that he spends more time on his letters, and sometimes a few sentences sound as if they were copied out of an English phrasebook, but he's trying. It's always in stark contrast to other letters that I receive from friends, fragments of phrases without time or thought put into them. Misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, prepositions ending the sentence, those I can accept, but some letters that in my Inbox make me want to rethink my friendships. I wish there were some technology that would limit the amount of exclamation points allowed in a single email; 21 exclamation points for 9 sentences (which includes the greeting and signature) is just wasteful--doesn't he know that there are children starving for punctuation in Rwanda?
I read a lot, and it makes me so sad to read correspondence from earlier generations. The letters between John and Abigail Adams are gorgeous, full of romance and intellect, friendship and affection. Going through some old emails from my ex, I don't get the same feeling; at best I get "I miss you" and then a few lines on his day, and occasionally a short story of something amusing that one of friends said. None of them are anything like Napoleon's letter to Josephine, Zelda's letter to F. Scott, or Robert Browning's letter to Elizabeth. I know that these were written by some of the greatest minds of their generation, by people who made their living off of their words, so I shouldn't expect much, but comparing these letters to 1KB, paragraph-long emails makes me realize the deteriorization of the English language. I know I'm an English/Creative Writing major who was dating a chemistry major and my expectations are high, but some sort of effort on his part would have been nice.
To be fair, I know that I'm no master of English--in older blogs I didn't capitalize, and I rarely capitalize in IM conversations, I use too many qualifiers in speech (quite, very, really, et all), my sentences can be somewhat Faulknerian. But when I write letters, there are usually paragraphs involved, with thought given to the flow, rhythm, and aesthetics.
Sometimes I think I'm a sapiosexual, attracted to intelligence, or that I suffer from Ruben's Syndrome, emotionally aroused by great works of art. Like the t-shirt says, "Good writing is sexy."
Turn me on.
