Sep 27, 2010
The snail mail rail trail
My lovely little sister Anna spent much of September circumnavigating the lower United States by train. Being the brilliant, webby, writery person she is, she conceived an intriguing participatory project to help while away the miles as well as atomising the memories, jotting moments onto a hundred and fifty custom-made and decorated postcards which were flung around the world to friends and strangers who had signed up to be on the receiving end.
You can read more about the snailr project, here and the original idea, here.
I received my postcard last week, but entirely failed to capture it digitally until today. But it’s fun seeing the other postcards find their way onto the web – from mental, to analogue, to digital memories – so I finally got my act together and here it is…
Front:
It reads: This is the snailr project, crossing the border n.b. please to customise this card. and i love you.
Back:
It reads: #63 I remember our mum loving reading The Night Train to us as children. As a poem, it had precisely the same tempered metre of a slow, careful train. And she sounded it out just like that, coming down heavily on enough syllables to suggest clacking tracks. I now wonder what it would have been like if she’d had access to an American version of the same poem, reflecting the Amtrak policy of blowing the horn, constantly, all through the night. I like to think she would have brought a hawk to bedtime stories. Or a stuck pig.
She’s right – our mum did read Auden’s The Night Mail to us at bedtime. A wonderful, evocative out-loud poem – and one which becomes even more vivid at the thought of a train whistle piercing the rhythmic clacking, all night long.
My sister’s ace.
Yay! Thank you!