Right As Usual

I was going to send this to all my friends. Got into the Compose mood, carefully checked all the contacts who might find it worthwhile, carefully placed the contact into the bcc: field, so they wouldn't be spammed. Then, meaning to close another window, I closed the mail program. As Homer says, "D'oh!" So, I'm posting the link here, thus re-affirming the main point of the post - we don't communicate directly with friends anymore. My old friend Ake (’awke’) Larsson was in St. Petersberg when he received my letter this week, as usual tinged with news about the curious desperation and isolation of Life in America. He wrote about the boozy St. Petersberg tables where they were celebrating some colleague’s PhD, and it sounded like something out of Milan Kundera–just that, the idea of people at a table, the same table, for a long night in which an event is consecrated and celebrated, between people, friends, who went out of their way, in this case traveled from Swe...