The price is part of the card

When I first started collecting, I used to rub out the prices dealers wrote on cards. I don't any more.

I guess I had wanted to restore the cards to how they'd originally looked.

Now, the price mark is part of what I'm buying. It signifies the card's present - that it has a value today. And also that it has passed through many hands since it was first sent.

Walt's coded love

Postman CCTV

I know most of you have already worked this out but I can officially confirm...  there are only so many hours in the day.

How have I come across this insight? Well, I've just started a masters degree and  - as my absence from blogland suggested - have been struggling to get everything done.

On the upside, neglecting Postcardese has allowed me to achieve all the essentials of student life; a handsome amount of stationery has been procured, my face is suitably unshaven and - while not yet perfect - my I-was-just-about-to-say-that nod is coming along well in classes.

The course is art and politics. And over the coming year, I'm going to try to think through how some of the concepts I'm picking up relate to postcard messages. The end goal? Well the main reason for doing the course is to enjoy having a think about stuff, but on top of that some postcard-related art is going to emerge.

It would be great if people could fire up their imaginations on what this might look like. Or if there's some event, artist, thinker that is relevant, send me a link to postcardese@gmail.com.

First up is an idea which has come up a couple of times in class  - Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.

Bentham designed this theoretical prison as a way to demonstrate the power of surveillance. He wanted to explore how isolating and watching prisoners might change their behaviour.

In the Panopticon, inmates were to be kept in cells around the edge of a circular prison - they'd be visible at all times to a guard in the centre of the building. Cells were to be backlit and the guard's hut would have no light, meaning he could see prisoners at all times but the prisoners did not know when the guard was there. Prisoners would, Bentham thought, be conditioned by surveillance into changing their behaviour. Or as he put it, surveillance would "grind rogues honest."

The Panopticon never got built in England but you only have to think of today's CCTV cameras to appreciate how the power of surveillance has become a very real mechanism of power in modern society.

Panopticon postman?

The open nature of postcards means the sender accepts their message may be read by others besides the addressee. There is a parallel between the prison guard sometimes being in their hut and the postman sometimes passing the time by thumbing through cards as he/she delivers them.

The question we are left with is how this surveillance changed the behaviour of our Edwardian postcarders. Worth pondering.

If you have any ideas or comments please put them up on the boards.

Finally, rather than just giving you still images this week, I've uploaded a video which discusses a message affected by the prospect of snooping postmen. Ignore any camera wobble - it's deliberate ;).

Enjoying the confusion

I went to see Life Game at the Lyric Theatre in London this week - a show where a group of actors recreate defining moments in a person's life. The twist being that the actors only meet the person for the first time at the beginning of the show. The whole night is improvised.

As the show went on, we got to see replays of the guest's first kiss, when his dad first came home wearing a wig and all manner of family arguments. It was great fun.

In fact, the night flew by. Partly I'm sure due to an almighty tension in the theatre from no-one (including the actors) knowing how the night would pan out.

That delight in knowing something unexpected is going to happen reminded me of the feeling of reading a new card. You can feel your eyes widen, your mind cogs stir and an enjoyable sense of confusion play with your head. 

And so, this week I'm not going to introduce the new card at all. No tips or clues. None of my own thoughts to cloud what you think lies behind it. 

You are free to enjoy the confusion in full ...

Noon. Please. Will meet you.

No time to waste this week. Written as spoken, our sender's in a rush. His (?) words spill out in a garbled order: Time, courtesy, direction. Stamped at an angle. Signed off with initials.

Or maybe not.

Is in fact the delivery deliberately slow and enigmatic? Are the pauses merely for effect, to give the impression of being in complete control. And standing back, the card does seem perfectly balanced - was it even the first attempt at the message?

Interpreters of fate to the rescue?

What's been great about starting Postcardese has been coming across people with similar passions. Like Reminiscene's blog or the PostSecret project.

Before then, collecting postcard messages had felt somewhat lonely.

In fact, it had been pretty hard to find any allies. One source of solace though was the German philosopher Walter Benjamin - no really, he was. His essay 'Unpacking My Library' is superb - go with me on this.

The essay neatly draws out the emotions involved in collecting physical objects which have mysterious histories - in his case old books.

For Benjamin, unanswered questions surrounding an object's journey over time create a kind of 'magic encyclopedia', waiting to be explored. This makes the collector, first and foremost, an 'interpreter of fate' - not quite a superhero I know, but it's as close as we're going to get. Anyway here's a link to the essay in full.

Enjoy interpreting this week's card! Looking forward to reading your comments.