Thursday, January 13, 2011

thoughts of tristero

A couple of hours after posting the paprika card below, I came across this image of a post box, from my last trip to Budapest. The box was in the sprawling railway park in the city. Each time I see one of these European 'post horns' I am reminded of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I used to reread obsessively while living in Japan. The plot veers from comic to cryptic to sinister, as the questing heroine, Oedipa Maas, is drawn deeper and deeper into the machinations, real or imaginary, of a shadowy postal system called Tristero.