A Postcard from Venice

This is a postcard, dear reader.

A shy, dog-eared square of paper you’ve just fished out of your mailbox or found lying on your doormat, deeply surprised, and have turned around in your hand to check who even writes postcards anymore in this day and age.

There are a few frivolous scribblings in a barely legible hand on its back, greetings mainly, a few tiny sketches, caricatures perhaps and misshapen smileys. Also ink and coffee stains all over. And a crooked stamp from Poste Italiane.

Shall we pretend that – this being a missive from tvmicroscope – it is a very respectable, carefully selected card with some serious Canaletto painting on it, perhaps? A handsome view of the harbour, the campanile and the Doge’s Palace – a postcard, in short, for the more discerning eye, as sold by some of the quieter and more artsy shops in town? Something like this pretty and serene veduta from the 1750s, for example (the original is housed at the Uffizi Gallery, I believe):

(Source: Wikimedia Commons; image is in the public domain.)

Or shall we admit that – this being a message from tvmicroscope, who is most likely having a laugh at your expense here – it is one of those horrible, cheesy ones with a photograph of a rowing gondolier in a stripey shirt on it, singing the regionally inappropriate ‘O sole mio’ into a garish yellow cartoon sun printed in a corner of the paper square? (Why the cartoon sun is also vomiting little pink hearts all over the gondolier’s straw boater hat is anyone’s guess, my friends. Perhaps the celestial body got seasick in the wonky gondola – as you do – and is now trying to divest itself of some of its internal organs. I’ll spare your poor, unprepared eyes the horrific sight, dear reader. Rest assured that this postcard is one of those ‘car crash’ types of images that you simply cannot tear your shocked eyes away from in sheer, utter horror, now that you’re holding it in your hand. This postcard is an insult to the concept of human taste. It is offensive. It is an assault on your optic nerve.)

Now, if you’ve managed to get over the convulsive hiccough this mental image caused in you, dear reader, then I’ll quickly tell you what the text on the back of this postcard is actually all about today: You see, a lovely reader had mentioned Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ in the comments section of the last post on this little blog here, and acting on impulse, I had thereupon thrown my old paperback edition of this famous novella into my suitcase with the perhaps somewhat naïve, but certainly unwaveringly enthusiastic intention of revisiting it once I’d arrived at the ‘scene of the crime’, as it were. ‘Here’s a book I haven’t read in a long while; so how about I do so in Venice,’ I had thought to myself.

The text below the cut, i.e. on the back of the ‘postcard of horrors’ you’re holding in your hand, dear reader, is…

…no, not about ‘Death in Venice’, I’m afraid.

It is instead my long-winded explanation as to why I still haven’t managed to reread it.

It’s a text about distractions and disturbances, about my exploits in this strangest and most morbid of places, containing all manner of sometimes wet and sometimes dryly humorous adventures (or so I hope) in the Serenissima.

If you’ve just followed this little blog for its discussion of films and TV series, this text is probably not for you. But no harm done, right? You can just come back for the next installment after this one here and read that one; it will be about a movie, I can promise you that. (I had promised you another three proper posts – of which the one below is decidedly not one! – before we wrap up this whole thing here; so you will definitely get all three of them, one way or another. Also, I might, just might keep the blog up and running anyway…if everything works out.) So, if you’re a cinéaste, who’s come here to enjoy all things silver screen, don’t worry: You can ignore this postcard and throw it out without hesitation. We will get back to that favourite hobby of yours in due course.

If however you like to read the occasional strange travelogue (of sorts), if you enjoy reading about far-off places and odd happenings, if you love yourself something absurd and bizarre to cackle about over your morning coffee, something with a few cultural references strewn in for good measure, and can forgive the occasional sentimental memory dragged up from the bottom of the dark sea that is this blogger’s brain, then this postcard is definitely for you, dear reader.

This is your postcard filled with stories and music and beauty, tinged with sadness and lined with absurdity.

This is my Venetian postcard for you.