"It might have been designed to illustrate her love for the gaudy and unsettling."

January 23, 2012 9:55 AM

A Portrait in Postcards. Twenty years after her death, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, Susannah Clapp, remembers Carter through the cards she sent, "These cards make a paper trail, a zigzag path through the 80s. They are casually dispatched – some messages are barely more than a signature – but are often the more telling for that: they catch Angela on the wing, shooting her mouth off. She would have hated the idea of a soundbite, but she had a gift for a capsule phrase, for a story in a word. " The postcard gallery.
posted by gladly (4 comments total)

Given the setup of the article, I was expecting to see the backs of the cards in the gallery, not just the front... but I guess that's why I'm supposed to buy the book.
posted by mykescipark at 10:15 AM on January 23

Ah, number 15 is quite sad. Good ol' Angela Carter! A weird dark genius taken from us too soon.
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:41 AM on January 23

When I die, I'll be lucky if my electronic pixel tracings are still machine readable by ever evolving technology.

Thank you for that gallery of postcards.
posted by infini at 10:49 AM on January 23

Sadly not many of the captions for these postcards include what Carter said on them. But one exception, which I loved, was this one:

This geisha card was posted in London in the late 80s. Carter lived in Japan for two years after winning the 1969 Somerset Maugham prize: ‘I used the money to run away from my husband,' she said. 'I’m sure Somerset Maugham would have been very pleased’
posted by bearwife at 1:30 PM on January 23