What follows are photos and a live writing transcript in response to Letter 7.
So this letter is very much an account of his Sunday.
It's interesting - over the past few letters he's talked about increasing numbers of people.
Today it's that increasing numbers at church - they've outgrown the tent - and at the cinema - you have to get there early to get a space for your chair.
Before I do anything else I need to see if I can find this Benny Goodman song…
Well, that took awhile. Turns out it's not Benny Goodman, it's Al Goodhart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTBXTo82SDQ, recorded here by Barry Wood.
I feel like a byproduct of this project could be a dictionary of 1940s slang. Actually that probably already exists, in several versions. Perhaps I should acquire one.
He talks about seeing two "flickers" - a double feature of Action in Arabia and Pilot #5. "Both of them were war flickers, but I enjoyed them..." There are lots of ... ellipses in this letter.
It's a bit curious, showing war films to people on military deployment. I wonder what the logic is. I think about my own capacity to watch Centre Stage or the original Fame film over and over. If I were fighting a war, though, in which I had enlisted because of geopolitical events, not a desire for a military career per se, I do not think I would particularly enjoy being entertained by war films.
But hey.
Like maybe some Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers stuff.
I stop for a moment to consider the thing-ness of the letters. Again, he's talking about their circulation. That he hopes she'll have one in her mailbox at 2:30 the next day, that he'll receive one where he is. The curious axis of Harrisburg to the Philippines. The physical journey of these letters, that they have actually BEEN to all these places. And then in my mother's garage, on two planes with me, here in Prague, where they live in my living room cabinet.
What attaches to these things? What is the significance of their thing-ness, their materiality?
Their having been held, touched, folded and refolded, passed from hand to hand.
It feels blindingly obvious and a bit pathetically nostalgic to compare that to do the disembodied nature of email. But hey, I'll go there.
There's something about delay and intimacy, v. speed and lack thereof. Like that's another continuum.
What does fast intimacy look like? Tinder?
Back to the shortwave radio. He hasn't talked about this before. They can pick up aJapanese propaganda broadcast in Hong Kong, American music, Australian stations.
I sense I'm veering off course here.
I think about my grandfather, in South East Asia, where I have never been, at the intersections of all these things, while simultaneously in a fully American-ised environment (see the dinner menu as Exhibit A).
But still. It's a hell of a long way from Harrisburg. I don't anticipate that I will ever choose to live in the United States again, unless there is a strong personal motivation for doing so - in the sense of being there for family or similar. There are many reasons for this, but one is that I fear I know longer know how to be from anywhere. I would struggle, I think, to be a person living in the place where they're from.
I wonder if my grandfather experienced this at all, after the opening experience of the war.
Hmm.
Or was it for him more akin to the experience of the Americans I have often met in London, or in Prague. Doing their year out, consuming culture in a way that it doesn't permeate, infect, suggestion actual emigration as a life choice. Because we don't do that.
Keep watching the war films, lads.
Hmmph, as Jack would say.
Or perhaps, tsk! tsk!
That does it for us for this week.
In the meantime…All my love, always - darlin'.