We received a warm e-mail today from our friend Tim Green, editor of a magazine called “Rattle”. Tim addresses us right off the bat as Jesse, and in farmiliar tones invites us to download his magazine, stop by when he’s workshopping through New York state, etc., as if we were good friends, albeit separated tragically by time and distance. The e-mail is newsy, but it lacks one thing: there is no real invitation for us to similarly share our good news with our fellow editor Tim. In fact, Tim goes on as if he and “Rattle” were the only game in town. Then Tim ends our tete-a-tete with this disclaimer: PS. You find yourself on this email list because you have an entry in our database — mostly [sic] likely you’ve submitted work in the past, which we feel implies an interest in the magazine. At RATTLE, we believe in privacy, and are very aware of the ethics of unsolicited advertising. We will never buy, sell, or exchange any contact information, for any reason, nor will we use this list more than four times per year. However, if you’d like to remove yourself from this list at any time, don’t reply to me, simply send an email to unsubscribe@rattle.com and your email address will be stripped from our database.

Indeed, I suppose we’re really not supposed to reply to Tim. We did, however, informing him of all the good things happening at Ahadada Books and to the people involved and inviting him to find out about us.

I believe that If Tim wants to tell us about his enterprise in so fond and informal a manner, let him write a personal note to me–a REAL NOTE–and not insult us–and presumably others–with spam pre-programmed to ape the sounds of real human caring. Quite frankly, we don’t recall sending a thing Tim’s way, but if we did we heard nary a peep from Mr. Green or Rattle about it. Another sign, we guess, that Tim really cares about his good friend Jesse.