Post and pocket-watch porn

My last post was all making eyes at one of the most instant and truncated forms of communication out there, so here's one about how post is still the best form, bar face-to-face talking. And about how awesome thedinglestarry is, because I promised her a public thanking and had better follow through on that.

Earlier this week I got a ginormous parcel containing letters and cards and wonderful things that apparently thedinglestarry wrote/gathered at different points over the last year (as in September to now; I still think in academic years). My poor sister had to put up with me gasping and squeeing and chortling my way through it all and now I shall inflict it on my flist too! But see how cool! There was: a purple envelope covered in quotes about writing containing a NaNoWriMo card and bunch of prompts and stickers; a christmas package including among other treasures a stocking made of shiny green card and cotton wool with packets of stickers and buttons and baking cups stapled to the back; a Valentine's letter and mix CD; postcard from Dublin; a big collage-covered envelope full of postcards and poetry and socialist book catalogues and other things from London, including 'The British Museum Little Book of Erotica' (I love how other titles in that series are thins like 'Cats' and 'Mummies'). It's so amazing.

I want to share this joy (some of it. most of it am hoarding. MY JOY MINE.) so here are some of the things written in curling silver script on the beautifully purple envelope of my NaNo card:

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." - Walter Wellesley Smith

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." - Charles Peguy

"There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In a good play, everyone is in the right." - Fredrich Hebbel

I love how these vary from the somewhat terrifyingly inspiring -
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself." - Camus

- to the reassuringly self-deprecating: "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." - James Michener

The timing couldn't have been better. I wasn't writing very much at all, and was feeling meh about my writing in general. Then there was this, and what I think is the germ of a new story in something from the Little Book of Erotica:

POCKET WATCH WITH EROTIC SCENE
SWISS, EARLY 19th CENTURY

When closed, the applied low-relief decoration in brass below the small dial of this watch depicts a woodland scene with a huntsman and a stag, improbably flanking a pair of enamelled doors. Behind the doors we find a minuscule pair of enamelled figures, the woman leaning against a tree and the man behind her. The male is articulated and moves rhythmically, if somewhat frantically, driven by the watch mechanism (his left arm is now lost).

So that's fun.

I love postal post. Because it can contain pretty much anything. And is magic. Time's sort of going crazy-fast this year, but there've been slow patches, stretches of almost unbearable loneliness, and this felt a bit like someone had decided to rewrite those stretches with sparklyness and mad jokes and beautiful things. Koel I am being this twee in public because I love you that much. Thank you.