Debating ‘The Lost Art of Postcard Writing’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.03.11 | 2:16 PM ET
Charles Simic laments the dwindling number of postcards arriving in his mailbox this summer.
Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived. The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South, and even a funeral parlor touting the professional excellence that their customers have come to expect over a hundred years. Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card. In my experience, people in the habit of sending cards could be divided into those who go for the conventional images of famous places and those who delight in sending images whose bad taste guarantees a shock or a laugh.
He ends his New York Review of Books piece with something World Hum contributor, Mad Libs-style postcard-template maker and campaigner to make handwritten postcards and letters cool again Doug Mack finds off-putting.
That generalization that people who write postcards are, in some nebulous-but-important sense Older—well, it’s probably correct. Almost certainly. And yet there’s also something so reductive about that artfully-drawn scene and its insistence on corralling the postcard-writers into some dusty museum display of a bygone era, as though to write a postcard is to put down one’s shuffleboard stick and scribble some comments about how Truman sure was a good president, gee whiz, before pushing the walker down the hall to the activity room for the 2pm ragtime sing-along.
Come on. Don’t consign the very act of postcard-writing to the nursing home for lost-cause, nearly-dead communication, along with Morse code and the Pony Express. Don’t take pity on postcard writers. To ask for pity, to claim that this is the domain of only the “problem”-ridden “older people”—this isn’t going to do much to make anyone else want to write postcards, either. Lament the decline, sure, but spare me the elegies.
Zach Everson 08.03.11 | 5:09 PM ET
goPostal is a great iPhone app for sending snail mail postcards with your own photo on them:
http://www.printyourlife.com/
I’ve been much better at sending them since I downloaded it.
Phil 08.05.11 | 9:48 PM ET
Since we moved to America, I started sending postcards to my friends across the world. I love the feeling of sending it out and they love receiving it. Also, my handwriting is definitely improving :) OO
Davis 08.09.11 | 1:52 PM ET
The postcard can be a first draft of your travel journal, or vice-versa, just as your longer letters can be. (You do still write letters, don’t you? If you are going to be a writer you must write at every opportunity.)
A consideration having nothing to do with writing or maintaining contact with people back home is that sending postcards requires you to go to the post office and ask the rate and buy stamps and get to know the clerk who, in a small town, will usually know everyone and everything and is a very worthwhile person to make a good impression on.
Mention to her that you are writing to your sweetheart or sainted mother or priest. In no time at all everyone in the village will know what a fine person you are, someone who ought be looked after and kept safe from harm. When you are the only foreigner in a small village, that is a very good thing.
Davis 08.10.11 | 7:30 AM ET
One other thing: ask the clerk to put the village postmark on your journal page. You’ll be showing that you want to remember their town and you’ll have something special in your journal.