sorry about my blogsilence — i live in a dead-old-lady apartment in vienna which doesn’t have access to internet, plus i’m new to this whole blogging thing and i keep forgetting to check it. combination = ouch.

okay so, thanks for the comments! i’m also enjoying these postcards rolling in from etherspace it seems. i wish it could keep going but alas i sent my last out today & good things come to an end, as fitzgerald said (or at least i’m going to ascribe it to fitzgerald, i heard someone make a reference to him the other day and i thought i would try, also).

one thing: i haven’t received the last postcard — from eleanor? i’ll also email her separately to see what’s happening. usually i get them pretty quick-like so the fact that it hasn’t arrived is making me a little edgy. in the meantime, i’ll send the other two off to tom. bureaucracies.

the p/c from zurich did throw me, yes. i happen to have family there and for a second i thought — maybe? but then i thought — none of those ppl write well enough in english to be able to pull it off. the p/c in some odd way reminded me of the last page of ulysses. i’m not sure why, i haven’t looked at that page forever, but there may be some transmissions going on there, look into it. james’s postcard was very sebald-esque, a wistful fragment of something written on a paper bag, a shred of a napkin, a found object rather than a sent object, but i’m reading austerlitz now and my perception may be influenced. wow, how many more white male writer names can i drop in this post? somebody stop me now.

i promise i will have more intelligent things to say when i see y’all in london. lately i’ve watched one too many episodes of ‘i love new york’ to dig anything up. lawd. life is surreal.

speaking of london, if any of you know of any londonites that would like to have a house guest for a few days during the festival, let me know? i’m nice. and my mom says i have a great smile.

Alles Liebe

sandra

A few observations, if I may.

The postcard is a ‘typical’ tourist affair - the photograph is a long view down a busy street towards a large, green-domed building. A gentle Googling reveals it to be the medieval Peterskirche (St Peter’s). It’s very much an idealised vision, with shoppers wandering happily under a blue sky. My eyes are drawn to the middle foreground, where a smartly-dressed man walks hand-in-hand with a pretty woman in a yellow top. He carries a large shopping bag emblazoned with the word CUM. My puerile sense of humour enjoys this juxtaposition.

Turning over, two things strike me immediately. Firstly, the handwriting is neat, lyrical, slightly italicised even. Secondly, the layout of the (relatively short) message reminds me of a love note. It ends ‘Wien, Vienne, Vienna / waits for you’ and is initialled ‘S.H.’ I feel strangely drawn in to a very private world.

Perhaps echoing the CUM bag on the front, a few elements seem to deliberately ‘spoil’ the conventional postcard etiquette. Firstly, a large white printed Austrian postage stamp has obscured a few words. OK, this isn’t deliberate as such, but one of the risks of writing using this format. The process is a collaborative one – with several European postal services and lady luck! I can almost make out some of the words and resist the temptation to rip the stamp off. Secondly, the message includes a list, lettered d to f. Where are a to c? Were they in a previous postcard? As I have only received one, I have no way of knowing. Thirdly, a line has been written and struck out. The black line is very neat; it seems like a deliberate tactic.

I love the line ‘Hapsburg is my homeboy’.

That’s it for now. Big thanks for your postcard, Sandra.

See you all at the Festival launch on 20th February.

 Hi Sandra. Did you rub out a little piece of the sky and the face of a bystander on the picture side of your postcard? Or did it get roughed up in transit? If deliberate, the erasure reminds me of a project by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige called Wonder Beirut, as part of which they published postcards printed from burned and bubbled negatives of popular pre-civil war tourist views. There’s a lot more about it on their website, under the ‘Installation’ section. Any thoughts?

So, postcards. My interest in using postcards for poems goes back to a series I made which used Daniel Defoe’s 

Tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain as a source. This travel book is constructed as a series of letters, the words of which I cut up and used to make 8 postcards from various places around the country. I printed these by hand and posted them out to subscribers, and in the process became interested in what exactly a postcard does.

Why send a postcard when a letter is less constrained by length, an email more reliable, a telephone call more personal? One interesting aspect is the image, the picture, which turns the postcard into a kind of witnessing, a way of saying ‘I saw this’. In extremis, this becomes like one of Goya’s postcard-sized etchings, the caption reading ‘Yo lo vi’ – I saw it.

Maybe it seems ridiculous to compare an imaginative representation of extreme suffering with the postcard image of a famous city landmark – but floods, earthquakes, colliery disasters and train crashes were all popular subjects for early postcards. They were the ancestors of a journalistic tradition which has now forgotten them, and moved to newspapers, magazines and screens. So one possibility I’m thinking about is to try to recover that tradition, to find in a tourist snapshot a buried witness, and to exhume it through words.

Because the postcard image isn’t read in isolation – it works in tension with the words on its reverse. But maybe that’s for another post.

Do any of you have specific plans for this project, concepts you’d like to explore or itineraries you’d like to take?

James

This Blog is a space for James, Eleanor, Ben and Sandra to share their thoughts about the project, their work and the writing process. So stay tuned.

For more information see About Permanent Tourist.

This project is produced by London Word Festival.