RIVER CITY JOURNAL: THOSE DEMONS THAT SPIRIT THE MAIL: PART II

Run, Updike, run -- from

the monster in the mail

trapped in a padded

and openless envelope.

It has been a solid two weeks since I notified the Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale that its hermetically sealed package was awaiting explicit opening instructions. No reply.

If you will recall, what appears to be -- based on touch alone -- a slender, hard-backed book arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I have had to assume it is a book, because the padded envelope in which it arrived is impenetrable. Oh, sure, I could take a pair of scissors and cut into the envelope's padding, but I'm quite certain I would be festooned with shredded newspaper as a result. Seeing as how Lent has begun, festooning hardly seems appropriate. Neither is it appropriate to subject innocent colleagues in the newsroom to the utterances that occur whenever I open padded envelopes with scissors. There is no safety in numbers when it comes to an angry editor armed with pointed objects.

The lack of response by the SIU folks -- I earnestly requested operating instructions for opening the padded envelope -- can be interpreted any number of ways. For example, it may take a long time for my request to reach the appropriate university official who is empowered to respond to correspondence that comes under the heading of "Angry Editors Who Buy Ink by the Barrel." Let's see, would that be the assistant vice president of media relations-print (out-of-state division)?

Perhaps my plight has indeed come to the attention of the higher-ups at SIU, but they simply misunderstood my previous rantings to be an amusing tirade whose only aim was to entertain readers who, if that were correct, must be awfully easily funny-boned while munching their breakfast cereal.

Or could it be that the SIU powers-that-be have chosen to ignore the ravings of a lunatic editor whose complaints are a lonely, distant cry in the wilderness of media assaults?

Aha! The SIU bigwigs need to know that other writer-types have joined forces with my campaign to battle padded envelopes and similar miscreants of the container industry. None other than author John Updike has weighed in on my side.

In a piece in the Feb. 19 New Yorker magazine titled "Paranoid packaging," Updike lets loose with a few well-chosen mots of his own. He has some experience in the decent use of words, as surely even the literary gleaners at SIU must know.

Updike's plaint, in part: "Sometime under Bush, with everybody distracted by televised bulletins from the Gulf War, the self-sealing book envelope was promulgated. Now there was no hope of a tidy opening and a thrifty reuse; nothing less than a hatchet or a machete would free the contents, in a cloud of fast-spreading gray stuff."

See? Mailers of items entombed in padded envelopes must come to grips with what recipients of said mail have to endure.

Don't take my word for it, SIU Press. You would drool like Pavlovian dogs trapped in a church belfry on Easter morn if you thought John Updike would let you publish one of his books. I certainly hope you didn't by some gross misfortune mail him a copy of the mysterious book that sits unopened on my desk, sheathed in its self-sealing envelope.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.