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Wednesday, 4 January 2023

Letters to the Postman

A film adaptation by Felix Dembinski of Robert Aickman's Letters to the Postman; set in a timeless rural England, atmospheric, emotionally absorbing and conveying the slightest mysterious hint of the supernatural. Unhurried, observed, observant, observational - steeped in a realistic nostalgia for a time less technologically connected than our own, when the Post Office was what connected people, letters and parcels, and the Royal Mail's formidable infrastructure to ensure delivery of missives into the remotest of communities.


The film deals with themes of erosion and decay, nature moving inexorably to wipe clean traces left by mankind's works. The wind, the tides, the rains - against which are played out the microcosmic dramas of the human heart, the hopes and longings that defy a hard reality. [Click below to watch on YouTube.]

    

A crucial element is the monument to 'the last man who knew everything', polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829), who not only deciphered the Rosetta Stone, but whose double-slit experiment prompted the question of whether light was a wave or a particle, and opened the door to quantum mechanics. "When a subject occupies your mind long enough, it manifests itself in the most unlikely places".  Is light a wave or a particle? 


A quiet, engaging film that deserves a wide audience (and repeated viewings - each time you delve into it, new layers of meaning emerge).
 
This time last year:
Progress at Warsaw West station
[One year on, it's still a bloody mess!]

This time four years ago:
From West London to South Warsaw

This time seven years ago:
Anger and hate have no place in political discourse
[Blimey! How times have changed. Bonk the vatniks!]

This time nine years ago:
Is Conservatism rural or urban in nature?

This time ten years ago:
Poland's roads get slightly less deadly

This time 11 years ago:
It's expensive being rich in Warsaw 

This time 13 years:
Winter commuting in colour and black & white

This time 14 years ago:
Zamienie in winter

This time 15 years ago:
Really cold (-12C at night)
[This evening as I write it's +6C]
at

5 comments:

  1. Jacek Koba8 January 2023 at 20:58

    The concatenation of circumstances that led to this comment (and tip) was thus: I had been swirling a load of grape particles in a glass, mulling on the future of everything with the New Yorker and catching a pleasant wave to take me away from the fraught time of the week that is a Sunday evening – which is in fact now – when, on impulse, I switched to the Jeziorki blog and found this post! The chances of that! You can read about The Future of Everything by Stephen Witt in 19 Dec 2022 New Yorker, or let me know if you have trouble with access.

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  2. Michael Dembinski9 January 2023 at 22:27

    Haha!

    The Cosmos is indeed held together by a web of coincidence. I quoted you in my post of 2 January! Stephen Witt's piece - the one I found (from 12 Dec actually) was a brilliant article about the race for quantum computing. That one?

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  3. Jacek Koba10 January 2023 at 15:56

    1) That is spooky!
    2) The one! It has a different title and date in the print edition.

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  4. Michael Dembinski10 January 2023 at 17:49

    @Jacek Koba

    Yes - I like the ability to listen (a full 38 mins!) to the piece being read - allows me to get on with things like cleaning kitchen and exercising!

    BTW - have you had a go with Chat GPT? Wrote a new post about that just now...

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  5. Jacek Koba10 January 2023 at 21:07

    I can't believe this! Minutes ago I closed an article in The Spectator titled: AI is the end of writing, The computers will soon be able to do it better, penned by Sean Thomas, posted at 5:59am today, read by me 8:40pm today, enthusing over ChatGPT! I opened your blog around 8:45pm.

    Coincidences aside, here is what I think, and I haven't yet checked it out as I've only just read about it. In my life-time experience, when technology catches up with something that was once an unattainable dream, I will have gone off it. It's hard to extrapolate this across the population, but there is a point at which enjoyable, aesthetically pleasing and relatively durable format meets peak demand for reading and peak quality readership, and that point is in the past. When did it happen? I don't know but would hazard a guess it was sometime in the early 2nd half of the 20th c.

    I am no surprised that technology can have people swooning over its potential. The real test for me though will come when they make machines that read for pleasure, of their own will, what other machines have written. In other words, when they build AI readers. And, also, by the way, do you think there will come a time when AI will subconsciously want to do (write?) one thing but do another?

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