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Common Knowledge 8.3 (2002) 550



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Review

Relays:
Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System


Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 325 pp.

Here is a book about communication. Alas: Herr Siegert is bad at communicating, so the reviewer found it impossible to know what was being communicated. Nor does he (the reviewer, that is) believe in the end of this and the beginning of that. Can the postal system really have taken the place of love? If Miss Emma Nutt, the world's first woman telephone operator in 1878 and the first of many (men being duds at operating a switchboard), had been told such a thing, would she not have pulled the plug on the author? If women were married either to machines or to men, how come those machines were virgins, which is what Herr Siegert calls them? Is it not men who are to be heard daily exclaiming, Fuck this machine? One wonders whether, since its invention in 1840, the postage stamp has not been a substitute for sex. It is hard to tell. The mobile phone certainly appears (on the evidence collected by the reviewer) to have become a substitute for using one's brain. Is, therefore, our e-mail society a loveless, sexless, and brainless culture? Send your answer on a postcard, please.

 



—Colin Richmond

Colin Richmond, professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Keele, is the author of, among other books, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, John Hopton: A Fifteenth-Century Suffolk Gentleman, and The Penket Papers (a volume of short stories).

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