Skip to main content

A Day for Postcards

I love postcards. Inexpensive souveneirs, colorful, evocative, artistic, kitsch, memorable. You can send them. You can hoard them. You can find them by the box in antique shops and garage sales and bookstores and airports and museum gift shops. Finding postcards with messages written on the back is much like discovering inscriptions in old books; there is a sense of connectedness, of intimacy with strangers. There is dried ink, a real address, a real stamp, a real sliver of history.

I found this one in the Pioneer Square subterranean antique mall last week. The caption is "The King and Queen on their way to St. Paul's Cathedral for the Royal Silver Jubilee Service." (The date indicates King George V and his wife Mary of Teck, grand-parents of the current monarch Elizabeth II. This was the year before the King's death; he does look rather haggard. Apparently George V preferred to stay at home with his stamp collection rather than tour his Empire. In this postcard I just see him thinking to himself - "By Jove, I'd rather I was at home in front of the fire with a cup of tea and some lovely Ceylon stamps.")



It is postmarked June 20 1935, sent to St. Louis, MO, and says:

Hello there
England is a grand place - should I say country - next stop Leningrad.
Regards to the girls - J Laycob & Son."

(May be wrong about the name - handwriting is ambiguous.)



And I found this merry Moomin postcard in my mailbox yesterday from a co-worker and friend, Erin. Moomins and postcards - what could be better?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...