Milford, Connecticut
November 13, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is the third in an ongoing series of letters by Paul Maliszewski about moving from point A to point B, point A in this case being Syracuse, New York, and point B being Durham, North Carolina.

I have to confess, shame-facedly, that it’s only recently that I’ve come to grasp the full charms of Paul’s letters. Though I certainly enjoyed his first letter, on the pre-move yard sale, and his second letter, on driving a gigantic moving truck, it’s only now, having readpart three, that I’ve really begun to understand how Paul sees the world, and how he writes. He is, I think, an unusually gifted chronicler of the small detail – the stalled car, the stolen watch, the stray cat – moments which Paul is able to appreciate for what they are, but also to understand as emblematic of a deeper story.

Paul’s letter might also be hitting home because of my own move, two weeks ago, from California to Connecticut, by way of Independence, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. My recent open letter about the search for the perfect joke, I realized as I moved, wasn’t really about jokes at all: it was an attempt to describe that same unsettledness, that lightness of being, that Paul relates in today’s letter.

Another thing I can tell you about Paul is that two of his short stories appear in The Pushcart Prize XXV, just published by Norton. I hope he gets settled soon, and that he’ll keep forwarding his mail to Open Letters.

On a different topic: When subscribers to Open Letters cancel their subscriptions, whether to the daily reminder or the weekly PDF magazine, our email program automatically sends them a message asking them, politely, why they’re leaving – a brief exit interview, in other words. Most often the reason is a change in reading habits: readers are switching from the daily to the weekly, or vice versa. But occasionally this automatic query turns up surprisingly rich answers, of lost jobs and dead computers, long trips and lifestyle changes.

Here are a couple of those responses from the last month that I liked, though for different reasons. Mike, from somewhere in Great Britain, wrote,

I unsubscribed for a not-so-good-sounding reason. I use a somewhat decrepit email reader (Emacs Gnus) which does not handle MIME attachments. A while back, I had written a base-64 decoder so that I could manually de-mung attachments, but it seems that there is a bug in it somewhere: I was not able to decode the attachment on the first mail that I received from my subscription. Since then I’ve just never bothered to do anything about getting a base-64 decoder that worked and today I finally decided that I’d get off the list. I assure you that my decision to unsubscribe is in no way related to my feelings about your content.

I have no idea what it means to “manually de-mung” something, but I like the sound of it.

Second: a reader named Daisy Rosenblum (who seems to know something of unsettledness herself) explained her unsubscription thus:

I’ve been reading since the first day and among other things, I’ve been wanting to thank you for returning Jessica Willis to me, whose magnificent and caustic manifesto on neo-feminists from a 1997 New York Press I’ve got saved somewhere, yellowing and mildewing in storage in Bay Ridge along with the first publication of David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries (also New York Press). Maybe she’ll send you a copy if you ask nicely. It’s really good.

Anyway: I unsubscribed because for the moment I am living in a very small village in the Yucatan, where pigs graze on in front of the church and the only phone is on the town square, in a dusty general store run by a crazy old man who barely speaks Spanish. Internet is not an option. But whenever I return to the city, reading Open Letters is one of the first things I do.

And when I’ve finally learned to speak Maya and gotten back to life with internet, I’ll be sure to subscribe again.

Open Letters will welcome both Mike and Daisy back, when the de-munging has occurred and the Maya has been learned. And a reminder: if you’d like to subscribe to the weekly, just send a blank email to weekly@openletters.net; and if you’d like to read our little essay explaining why we think our PDF subscription is cool, please see this page.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough