“The secret to having a penpal is to avoid getting bogged down with responding to every small comment they make in their letter. If you do, you’ll just spend the whole letter recapping what they sent you”: in Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, Aunt Fritzi reads a letter and replies.
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Friday, November 3, 2023
Epistolary Fritzi
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comments: 3
Great post, Michael, about the importance of not recapping what other people have said--it will just be a repeat of the things they said!
LOL.
I was baffled by the Fritzi quote at first--
surely responding to things people say is the sine qua non of conversation--
but then I read the second panel of the Nancy comment.
Fritzi's response is just like most blog comments I see--a rephrase (or repeat) of the original post.
This commenting style mystified me, but I think the comments are not meant to further conversation, but to serve as echolocation:
"I am here, I see you there".
I see you, Nancy!
P.S. I didn't mean comments on your posts or mine--I meant the stream of comments I regularly see on other Blogger blogs I read, ones that are diaries of daily doings. "I wash my sheets on Mondays too!"
I don't mean to criticize, just to say that seeing Fritzi's reply helped me understand what was going on.
"Reply" is different than "recap".
We’re doing laundry today. : )
The not-repeating is something I, like Fritzi, have to work on in letters — I have the feeling that if I haven’t said something about some point, it’s as if I’ve ignored it. Must. Loosen. Up.
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