Second Assignment - Postcards From Here

"A big bundle of postcards. The curdled elastic around them breaks. I gather them together on the floor.
         Some people wrote with pale-blue ink, and some with brown, and some with black, but mostly blue. The stamps have been torn off many of them. Some are plain, or photographs, but some have lines of metallic crystals on them – how beautiful! – silver, gold, red, and green, or all four mixed together, crumbling off, sticking in the lines on my palms. All the cards like this I spread on the floor to study. The crystals outline the buildings on the cards in a way buildings never are outlined but should be – if there were a way of making the crystals stick. But probably not; they would fall to the ground, never to be seen again. Some cards, instead of lines around the buildings, have words written in their skies with the same stuff, crumbling, dazzling and crumbling, raining down a little on the people who sometimes stand about blow: pictures of Pentecost? What are the messages? I cannot tell, but they are falling on those specks of hands, on the hats, on the toes of their shoes, in their paths – wherever it is they are.
          Postcards come from another world, the world of the grandparents who send things, the world of sad brown perfumes, and morning. (The gray postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating that they scarcely count. After all, one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full-size, and in color.)"
          Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Village," The Collected Prose, FSG, page 255.

Assignment: Using a "found" postcard as a starting point, write a postcard story of a maximum of 250 words. You don't have to write the story on the postcard. The postcard must represent (or strongly resemble) a local place. The postcard story must refer to the image and place on the postcard, however tangentially, must tell us something about the place that the image does not, and must use one sentence from another student's zine.

For next week:

• post your postcard story to the blog
• include an image of the found postcard in the post
• tag the post with "postcards" and any other labels you think appropriate
  
• bring the postcard and a print copy of the story to class
• find and follow each other on Twitter
• rewrite your zine sentences as 140 character tweets
• READING: http://www.geist.com/opinion/geist%E2%80%99s-literary-precursors 
  

"Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when if fact I did nothing by write to her and think of her during those months - despite my many betrayals."
          Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory