Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

McPartland’s joke lands because it’s a refusal disguised as a sigh. In one tidy line she treats “e-mail” not as progress but as an accelerant for a problem she already has: attention. The punch is the mild, almost courtly understatement of “bad enough,” a phrase that carries the weary elegance of someone who has spent a lifetime being reachable - by fans, promoters, publicists, and well-meaning strangers who assume access is a compliment.

As a jazz musician and long-running radio host, McPartland lived in the before-and-after of celebrity: the era when correspondence was physical labor (paper, postage, time) and the era when communication becomes frictionless. Her quip isn’t technophobia so much as boundary-setting. She’s pointing at a cultural bait-and-switch: new tools promise connection, but the cost is that connection becomes an expectation. E-mail isn’t simply more mail; it’s more obligation, more triangulation, more “quick question” interruptions that treat creative life like a customer-service desk.

There’s also a sly status signal. Only someone who already receives piles of mail can afford to dread a new channel. It’s a humblebrag in the best sense - not bragging, just acknowledging that public life comes with clutter. The line works because it’s small-scale and domestic, not grandiose: the future arrives as another thing on the pile, another envelope to open, another demand to answer. In a culture that fetishizes access, McPartland makes privacy sound like sanity.