New York City
January 2, 2001

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Brian Dunn, in Brooklyn. It’s about an accident, but more than that, too: it’s about escape, and starting over, and staying put for too long. It’s part of our special weekof open letters on endings and beginnings, and like many of this week’s letters, Brian’s is about both.

Brian has worked for the phone company for the past twelve years. I like the idea that he is part of the long tradition of clerk-authors – insurance-clerk Franz Kafka, post-office-clerk Charles Bukowski, hospital-file-clerk Harvey Pekar. But I’m not sure if my literary fantasy is entirely accurate where Brian is concerned: I sent him an email asking him to describe his job, and he wrote back to say that he sets up “trunks” and “T-1 lines,” and then it got complicated. So for all I know, he’s the CEO of Verizon.

I announced in yesterday’s editor’s letter that this is the last week of Open Letters, in its current incarnation at least. But I didn’t offer much in the way of a coherent explanation for the news – which is perhaps why a reader named Victoria Golden wrote yesterday to say,

This feels like a great love affair that ends with a Sunday morning phone call. “Hello, darling. You are the most wonderful person in the world to me and because it’s going so well, because we are everything to each other that either of us could ever want, I think we should see other people for a while.”

Which I thought was a pretty nice way to look at it, and probably better than any explanation I’ll be able to come up with. But still, I said yesterday that I’d try, so I’ll try. And as I usually do when trying to explain things, I’ll start off by quoting from some letters: On Sunday morning, I got this email from Rick Moody, author of the birdfeeder letter:

Heard a rumor you were closing down the operation at OPEN LETTERS. I’m guessing this is premature, but if not, I’m curious about your burdens.

I wrote back to say,

No, it’s true. Next week is our last, for this incarnation, anyway. Perhaps we’ll find a way to continue, or revive, but I’ve decided to call it a conclusion, rather than a hiatus.

My burdens: that’s a tough question. There are financial ones, of course; those have been around since day one, but they’re coming to a head now. But there are some editorial ones, as well: I don’t think I’m thinking as adventurously as I was a few months ago.

Mostly, though, it’s money. We’ve managed to run things on the cheap so far, but I think we just hit the limits of cheapness.

I’m hopeful that with some time off, I’ll be able to come up with a way to revive the magazine in a way that would be self-supporting. But I don’t know yet what that would be.

And then sometimes I think it’s best to just think of it as a six-month interactive performance-art project. Like encasing myself in a block of ice, but warmer.

To which Rick replied,

I used to feel very close to the perception of John “Rotten” Lydon, back when Public Image Limited was a going concern: “Our cause will be lost, but that won’t be so bad, will it?” I used to think that this was the correct model, the Young Marble Giants model. Make a brilliant record, call it quits.

Now I really admire the survival model. DeLillo, publishing one book after another, no matter what you think about it. There’s another title coming along soon enough, like the ephemeral New England weather. It’s grueling and frequently painful, this approach, but things really start to get interesting over the course of years and years. People develop, they individuate, then the real issues in a creative endeavor begin to surface, the idiosyncrasies.

So this is to argue for thinking more about what you’re doing on your hiatus and perhaps soldiering on. The money issue, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

Ah, the money issue.

None of us who work on Open Letters entered into the project hoping to get rich. We did, however, have some hopes of not getting too poor. Some of those hopes were based on the pie-in-the-sky Internet economics of the spring of 2000, in which it seemed that money would follow good content – or lousy content, for that matter – wherever it wanted to go. Some of them were based on Tibor Kalman‘sbelief that there are “a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future.” And, really, it just seemed like a worthwhile and exciting thing to do, even if its destiny was to be short-lived.

But here’s the thing: I think one of the highest (and most fun) responsibilities of an editor is to keep surprising his or her readers, to keep things from getting too stable, to keep readers from knowing what to expect when they turn the page (or click the link). And beginning a couple of months ago, I began to feel that I was running out of surprises, and worse, that the only surprises I could think of would cost money that we didn’t have. The money part is a horrible admission for me to have to make – I mean, Nirvana recorded Bleach for $606.15; the cheapest ideas are always the best ones; Emily White wrote me to say “I think the energy you need to continue OL is probably a punk rock energy,” and I knew she was right – but for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling that without a sizable budget, I was going to hit the wall.

Oh, where’s a drawing of the universe when you need one?

Here’s why this letter isn’t that much fun to write: because a lot of other people have given a great deal to Open Letters: their stories; writing they could have sold for more money elsewhere; time; sleep; attention; enthusiasm. It’s to even those scales somewhat that I’m turning to you now, cap in hand, like the younger brother of the neo-breakdancing teenagers in the Times Square subway station, and asking you for some of your money.

Ian Brown once wrote that “OL’s entire business plan consists of four words scrawled on a styrofoam take-out lid dotted with traces of Bi Bim Bop,” and that’s mostly true; but those words always included “maybe” and “they’ll” and “pay.” For complicated reasons, which a non-disclosure agreement I signed a few months ago with a big corporation prevents me from going into (no, seriously), we never managed to figure out a technology graceful enough to allow us to ask readers, inobtrusively, for regular contributions.

So instead we’re doing it all at once, for one week only, using a less-than-ideal technology called PayPal.

Here’s the deal: When you click on the button below, you’ll be transported to a page where, if all goes well, you can send Open Letters some money: any amount over a dollar, charged to a Visa or Mastercard. Each and every dollar we receive will be distributed to our 72 authors, on a per-letter basis; none will go to overhead, none will go to our editors, none will go to creditors, none will go to stamps. (PayPal will take a small cut, but that can’t be helped.) This won’t be tax-deductible or anything; but we’ll consider it a charitable donation nonetheless: in the spirit of Tibor Kalman’s lunatic entrepreneurs, but on a smaller scale.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with PayPal – someday someone will come up with a better technology for this – but they do seem to be reliable, security-wise. If you give them your credit-card number, they won’t do anything weird with it. (They also don’t give the numbers to us; they just tell us that you donated.)

A few tips on negotiating the next couple of screens, if you do choose to make a donation:

1. Leave “Quantity” set at 1; fill in whatever donation you want to make under “Item Price.”

2. They only take Visa and Mastercard.

3. When they ask for your “card verification number,” they mean the three-digit number at the end of your card number, on the back, in the white strip with your signature.

4. When you get to “shipping information,” click the button that says nothing needs to be shipped.

5. You have various options for bailing out along the way if anything seems fishy.

To take a ride on this crazy roller coaster, click here (and please come back when you’re done):

Thank you for your support. And if you found the above explanation lacking, well, I’ve got three more editor’s letters to try to get it right.

A few more notes:

1. If you’re just returning to Open Letters today after a couple of weeks away, be sure to check out last week’s letters; they were so good.

2. As if this editor’s letter isn’t enough to read: we have a brand-new, jumbo-sized links page to distract you: books to buy; work by our contributors elsewhere on the Internet to read; Open Letters press to examine; clowns, balloons, talking dogs.

3. Comments, suggestions, rich uncles? Send us a note, ateditor@openletters.net.

Tomorrow, Endings Week continues, with a letter from a novice dot-com CEO, on the imminent death of his start-up. In case you thought we had problems.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough