San Francisco, California
August 10, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Nick Davis, a filmmaker and writer who lives in New York City. His is the fourth letter in our weeklong series of open letters about parents and children, and the first that concerns both a parent (in this case, his mother) and a child (his daughter).

I don’t know Nick Davis, apart from what I’ve read in his letter; his editor at Open Letters is Stacy Abramson, a radio producer at Sound Portraits Productions. I do know, thanks to Stacy, that Nick is the writer and director of 1999, a movie that stars Amanda Peet and Buck Henry and is described on Amazon as “the ultimate party movie of the millennium”; he is also the author of a novel, Boone.

You’ll notice that the date at the top of Nick’s letter is today’s date, August 10; but that in his first paragraph he says that he’s writing it “today – on July 25th.” For the record, it’s the latter date that is the accurate one: Nick actually wrote his letter on July 25, the twenty-sixth anniversary of his mother’s death, and sent it to Stacy that afternoon.

The dates at the top of our open letters are, I confess, a small fiction, but one I like. I tried to convince Nick, via Stacy, to take out the reference to July 25 in the first paragraph, in order to make the fiction proceed a little more smoothly. He wrote Stacy, politely but firmly, that July 25 had to stay. As he put it,

For me, July 25th is like a kind of reverse December 25th, or July 4th or something. I feel pretty strongly that my life is divided in half at July 25, 1974.

Stacy and I found that quite convincing. And so we struck the compromise you see at the top of today’s letter.

Tomorrow will bring the last letter before our three-week hiatus, during which time we will let our fields lie fallow, so that the crops they bring forth in the fall will be more robust and tasty. I spent much of yesterday feuding electronically with a Toronto newspaper called the Globe and Mail, which published a mean-spirited and error-riddled little squib yesterday about our upcoming hiatus. (Here, I’ll give you thelink, in the spirit of Glasnost, but really, don’t click on it; you’ll just encourage them.)

The Globe’s anonymous gossip columnist, a woman named Simona Chiose, went out of her way to misinterpret my editor’s letter about our upcoming hiatus, for reasons known only to her and her editors. I don’t think anyone without an axe to grind could possibly misunderstand the meaning of this three-week break. It is, after all, August. But in case any readers, other than Simona, are at all uncertain: it’s no big deal.

My experience editing Open Letters has been that I can really only concentrate on one thing at a time: either finding and assigning and editing letters, and working with my fellow editors on doing the same; or working on the many other priorities that loom in front of us here at the magazine: answering email from readers, upgrading our technology, attempting to promote the magazine, contemplating a redesign of the PDF, contemplating a redesign of the web site. Recently, my focus has been the letters, to the detriment of those other tasks. Being that it is the end of August, and in North America that means Six Flags, stump speeches, and Survivor parties (rather than web browsing), it seemed that these next three weeks would be a good time to focus on those non-letter-posting priorities.

Hence the hiatus.

Not too confusing, right?

I’ve been very grateful for the warm response to my request on Monday for contributions of technical assistance; many frighteningly well-qualified readers came forward to offer their services, using terms like “perl” and “XML.” It is inspiring, and very helpful, and will lead, I hope, to a much more reader-friendly web site in the weeks ahead.

Though over the next three weeks I won’t be posting any new letters from correspondents (after tomorrow’s letter from X., that is), I will post occasional notes to readers, keeping you apprised of our progress. The site will be fully up and running, the archive fully accessible, for browsing; the discussion board we’ve been talking about will launch somewhere in there. So stop by if you can, from time to time, say if you happen to pass your computer on your way in from the wading pool to the fridge.

And if you’ll allow me one last paragraph (I know I’m running on): if you haven’t, this really would be a good time tosubscribe, to the daily reminder or the weekly magazine or both. I may use those mailing lists (sparingly, I promise) to keep readers apprised of our progress during the dog days. And I’ll certainly use them to call you back to Open Letters when summer’s over, as if I were ringing the bell on top of an old schoolhouse.

Thank you for reading. Please come back tomorrow.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough