Philip, you have touched on an issue that is near and dear to me, the death of letter writing. For scholars, especially historians, letters are an invaluable source of information and documentation. In my study of the Beat Generation, these cats communicated a lot by writing letters. There is Neal Cassady’s famous twenty-five page letter, that unfortunately lost, to Jack Kerouac detailing his adventures and a source of inspiration to Kerouac for his spontaneous style of writing in On The Road. The primary members of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs left behind volumes of collect letters. What will future scholars have to work with? Emails, voicemails, and text messages that have probably evaporated into the ether. In the past many men and women of letters spend parts of their day writing letters. Letter writing is a good place to work on one’s style and to sound out ideas. Something one cannot do with an email or a text message. There are good things about today’s technology but the one bad thing is that it is creating a memory hole. To borrow some lyrics for Bob Seger, "Call me old fashion, call me over the hill, give me that old time literature.