It was, I believe, during Pimm’s presentation about Online Diaries that someone brought up how email correspondence sometimes becomes diaristic in nature. This leads me to a somewhat embarrassing confession: I am engaged in just such a correspondence. In and of itself, that revelation may not seem all that embarrassing, but embarrassment is all in the details.

The correspondence originated earlier this semester, shortly after a point in late September when I decided to quit AIM like a smoking habit I could no longer afford.

This morning, I check my inbox, and there's an email with the title "FW: your bum!" and i had a really bad knee-jerk reaction. Part of this may have been I'd just been to my lj friends page, where rampant discussion was going on about females and objectification and sexism prompted in part by an op-ed piece in the NYTimes, thus much fur was flying and people being rubbed the wrong way as a very diverse group of men and women weighed in and got into a very ugly, highly charged mess on objectification.

But, kneejerk reaction i did have to Jemma's latest email. It took me a moment to register that it was from planet Jemma, not just some bit of (rather British) spam for hott sexxx with girlnextdoorsbum. com opps delete the space before com :) (or, i suppose, since it was *my* bum in question, friendlyanalsexxxwithproperbrits. com) which, with its "hello!" & "Re: your question" and "Wrgkwekg" subject lines, really doesn't bother me. What got to me about Jemma, about the whole way emails from her website and the "people" affiliated with it were-- i had to go through and read all the emails that i thought were spam, because it *might* be something for class from someone I've never heard of, about some subject I don't know about because I didn't know Jamie was "Desperately seeking attractive intelligent women to appear in my TV pilot." It felt a lot more intrusive and irritating than the emails from Caroline and her ilk, because those had the sender as the email address, so I could see "Ah, it's related to that website I'm working with for class."

It occurs to me that email might lend itself to a different kind of story telling than written letters. Many traditional epistolary novels and non-fiction collections of letters contain only one side of a correspondance: they include letters that are written by one person, without including any of the other person's (or people's) letters. Email might be well suited to the opposite. If a story were based around a more realistic inbox than the one depicted in "Some Kind of Blue", it might be possible to tell a story solely through letters written to a given character. You would then might e